“I’d bring snacks.” She’s dead serious. “This is the nicest thing that has ever happened to me and we haven’t even gotten there yet.”
We get there. The car lets us out at the curb. The doorman of the first place actually opens the door for us, and Crystal grabs my hand.
“Cindy.” She stops dead on the sidewalk in front of the first boutique, a glass box with three dresses in the whole window, no prices on anything, which is how you know. “Cindy, this is the kind of place that calls security on people like us.”
“Not today it isn’t.” I hold up the card. “Today we’re people likethem.”
Her face when the doors open for us, when a woman in a sharp suit greets us by name, offers us champagne we don’t take, walks us back to a private room with its own couch. I’d pay real money to see that face again. Crystal sits down like the couch might eject her. Then a sales associate brings out the first armful of things with no price tags, the kind of place where asking is the same as not affording it, and something in my best friend just lets go.
“Can I?” she whispers, touching a dress like it’s behind museum glass.
“You can have it. You can have ten of it.” I drop onto the couch beside her, reckless, bright, a little drunk on nothing at all. “Sevastian said to buy you whatever you want. His words. So. Want things.”
She wants things. God, she wants things, and watching her want them out loud after years of watching her give away everything she has to people who never pay her back, it does something to me. Crystal tries on a coat the color of butter, spins in the mirror, laughs that loud helpless delighted laugh of hers, and for a second the whole grey shape of my life goes quiet. It’s just my friend, happy, in a soft yellow coat.
The numbers, though. The numbers start doing things I’m not built to stay calm about.
A dress here, shoes there, the coat, a bag for Crystal that has a waitlist apparently, except not for us, and somewhere around the time the associate murmurs a total for one armful that’s more than I make in half a year, my nerve cracks. Seven years ofpoverty does not switch off because a rich man said so. My hands actually sweat. I picture the card declining, security after all, the whole thing turning out to be a test I just failed in front of my friend.
I step into the corner. I call him.
He picks up on the second ring. “Cynthia.”
“Hi. Yeah. So, quick question.” I turn my back to the room, drop my voice. “I think there’s a problem with the card. Or with the amount. I’m looking at a number that’s, well, a lot. I don’t want to blow past some limit and have it bounce in front of everyone. So what’s the actual ceiling here? Because I think I’m close to it. Or past it.”
He laughs.
It stops me dead. I have known this man across three of the worst nights of my life. I’ve watched him kill, threaten, command, go cold, go still. I have never once heard him laugh. The sound of it down the phone is low, warm, genuinely amused, and the sound of it goes through me low and warm.
“There’s no ceiling,” he says, the smile still in his voice. “That’s the point of that card. There’s no number. You won’t find the bottom of it, so stop looking. Spend more.”
“That’s insane.”
“Buy something that scares you. Then buy your friend something that scares her worse.” A pause. The amusement drops into something quieter, something that pulls at me lower than I want it to. “You’ve been telling yourself no for a long time. Stop, for one afternoon. Go crazy.”
He hangs up on me mid-syllable.
I stand there a second with the dead phone in my hand, a brand new dangerous feeling unspooling in me, because spending this man’s money was a chore thirty seconds ago. Now it’s a dare. Here’s the part I’m not proud of and can’t seem to help. I still think he’s a criminal. I’m still a thing he’s decided he owns. But some furious righteous corner of me looks at that bottomless card and thinks, fine. If I’m going to be the kept woman, let’s make the house pay for the privilege. Let’s make it bleed.
I go back to the couch. I stop being careful.
I buy the dress that scares me. I buy three more. I let the woman in the suit bring out the lingerie, the real stuff, scraps of silk that cost what I used to make in a month, made of basically nothing, and I buy that too without letting myself think about who it’s for. I buy shoes I can’t walk in. I buy a coat I’ll never need in a city that’s a hundred degrees most of the year.
Then I find the jewelry case. I see a thing I have no business wanting, fine, cold, glittering, with a price tag steeper than a decent used car. I look at it a long moment. Then I put it on. I watch the associate run the card. I watch it clear without a blink, and I laugh out loud the way I haven’t in years.
“Crystal.” I wave her over to the case, grinning now, gone fully feral. “Pick something.”
“Cindy, no, you already, I can’t.”
“Pick. Something.” I point at a set of earrings under the glass, drops of something brilliant under the little lights. “Those. Try those.”
She tries them. She looks at herself in the little mirror with diamonds in her ears, her hand comes up over her mouth, her eyes go shiny, and she makes a sound that’s half shriek, half sob.I tell the woman in the suit we’ll take them. Crystal grabs my arm so hard it stings.
“That’s a hundred thousand dollars,” she hisses, like saying it quietly makes it less unhinged.
“I know.”
“Cindy.”
