“Where’d you go to school?” she asks, before she can help herself.
“England. Then Boston.” He adjusts his sleeve, checking the fit of his cuff links in a habitual movement.
Lili digs her nails into her palm.
“You didn’t answer,” he says. “What do you actually do?”
“Oh. Right. Um, grad school.”
“Studying what?”
“Economics,” she mutters.
Aleksandr grins, like he’s caught her. “And you needed a primer on shorting stocks from second-year analysts? Where are you studying?”
“Columbia.”
“Impressive.”
She instinctively tenses, but it doesn’t sound mocking at all. It sounds like he’s praising her.
Take it, sweetheart—there you go, come on, just like that—
She takes a hot swallow of coffee.
“What do you plan to do after that?” he asks. “You’re friends with Greene’s boy. Investment banking?”
“Hardly,” Lili retorts, bristling at him knowing anything about her, even if it’s just her friendship with James. She wonders what else he might have found out. “I’d like to actually do some good in the world—UNHCR, the Development Program, ECOSOC. Maybe dismantle the hegemony of Western capitalism as a sleeper agent within the World Bank or IMF. Undo some of the damage you’re doing.”
“What a saint.”
Thatismocking. She frowns—about to retort—when her phone buzzes.
“Shit.”Jackie.“I have to go; I’m late for a friend—”
Aleksandr stands as she gets up, elegant where she scrambles.
“Um,” she says, looking up at him. “So, I guess—bye—”
He plucks her phone out of her hand. He taps in a phone number, and then his own phone buzzes in his suit’s breast pocket. He takes it out, and smiles, before handing her phone back.
“Goodbye, Miss Marwan.”
When Lili’s halfway down the street, she looks back over her shoulder. His newspaper is up again, but he’s looking at her over it.
Aleksandr smirks, and she flushes.
2
Supply and Demand
It’s only being friendly, Lili tells herself, after she spies the new cover ofThe Economiston the newsstand when jogging up the subway steps, snorts, and texts a picture to him.
(9:37 a.m.) really?
Her phone buzzes with his response when she’s deep in the Butler library stacks on campus, looking for the Löwith text that Kerr, her adviser, had told her to read.
(10:03 a.m.) I think it turned out rather well.
