“I mean—it doesn’t have to be Tuesday,” Caroline said, feeling the chill in the air even if she couldn’t identify its source. “It could be whatever day you wanted.”
A flash of darkness crossed Adrian’s face, condensing in a small, puzzled frown. Thoughts raced through his eyes. Unhappy ones.
“Am I on the clock right now?” Adrian demanded. “Is that what you think?”
Caroline sat up, trying to understand where she’d gone awry. She’d never kept track of his hours, exactly, because they never got close to forty hours a week, and he made a lot more than the minimum wage, however it was allocated. Her face must have been enough of an answer for his question though, because he scoffed and sprang up as though he needed to put feet of distance between them.
He turned away, palm swiping across the back of his neck in agitation. When he looked at her again, his eyes blazed with hurt.
“Christ, you really do think I’m a hooker, don’t you?” he snapped.
“No!” Caroline protested. “No, I don’t think that. I’m sorry I ever said that.” She wished she’d never called him a name, because it was pejorative, mean, and she didn’t think he’d done anything wrong at all. How could she look down on anyone for selling what she was buying?
She knew exactly why he’d created a profile on the sugar-baby site in the first place: it was an economically rational decision. She didn’t judge him for that, even if she was acutely aware that he did.
Adrian gritted his jaw. “But you thought everythingwas going to go on just like it had when we first met, except I was also going to fuck you sometimes?”
Caroline had pulled her knees up to her chest in unconscious defense, fists propped rigidly against the mattress. She still didn’t know what she’d done wrong.
Adrian never swore at her. He never shouted. He had to beveryangry.
“I thought—I thought you were going to tell me what you needed. That if you wanted me to act differently, you’d tell me,” she said, wishing her voice didn’t sound so high and reedy. Her sinuses burned like she’d just taken a tennis ball to the middle of the face. “I don’t know—I didn’t mean—”
Adrian blinked at the tone of her voice, expression softening. The tight muscles of his jaw worked. He exhaled and sat down heavily on the bed, making the mattress bounce beneath her. He put a palm on her bare shin even as he looked away and over to the wall where she’d hung one of his still lifes.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” he said slowly. “This is my fault for assuming I was clear. I wanted—no, Iwantto be in a relationship with you. A real one.”
“What does that mean?” Caroline asked, still confused.
Adrian took a deep breath, apparently still angry despite visible efforts to calm himself down. “It means we don’t have a schedule anymore. It means you’re notpaying mefor this. God, Caroline, you shouldn’t ever pay for this.”
That ignored the practical history of Caroline, in fact,havingto pay for it, as nobody had previously expressed any willingness to be her boyfriend for free. Nevertheless, there was a bigger issue immediately apparent. If she wasn’t paying him, who was?
“Did you sign with a gallery?”
Adrian winced. “No.”
“Then are you going to the thing in Miami? Because my QuickBooks doesn’t balance, which means you still haven’t deposited my check, and even if you go, you don’t really know—”
“No, Caroline, no.” His tone didn’t brook any dispute, but Caroline didn’t see how anything could possibly be settled.
She pressed her lips together. “Are you going to start seeing someone else, then? Because I don’t think I’d be okay with that... like, I know you’d be safe and everything, but...” Her empty stomach was forming a small, dense sphere that weighed her down. Her day had been so long, and she hadn’t eaten since that morning, and hadn’t she cried already? There ought to be a rule that nothing could happen to her more than once a day that would make her cry.
“I wouldn’t expect you to be okay with me seeing someone else.”
Adrian stood up and began to pace. He put a hand on the back of his head, knuckles white as he struggled for words.
“I’m... Here. Listen. I wish I had more of this figured out, but I’m going to find some kind of job. Any job. Probably retail at first, but I’ll keep looking for a gallery that will take me. All right? Can you just bear with me for a while?”
“You’d rather do that than just deposit the check? That doesn’t make any sense! When are you even going to have time to paint?”
Adrian gave her a stern look, as if she were a childprotesting at bedtime. “I can’t keep taking the money your grandmother left you for tuition. You know that’s not what she would have wanted for you.”
Caroline clenched her jaw. “That’s not true. She wanted me to have a big life, to do everything I wanted, even if I didn’t know what I wanted yet. All I needed to move away and go to school was the car.”
If it had just been about school, she could have given the money to her father like he’d demanded.
Adrian came over and dropped a hand on top of hers as though to comfort her, but he didn’t follow her point. Caroline made a difficult effort to look him in the face.
