Page 68 of The Bargain

All my life, I’ve been sacrificing my own dignity for the sake of my survival. This wasn’t so different.

Except that she got to witness.

I caught her after a tennis match with her partner, Zaffy. She was gleaming and flushed in the bright silver floodlights of the courts. When she found me crouched next to her equipment bag, she didn’t start or frown or glare. She didn’t even say anything about the fact I’d not spoken to her in weeks.

She simply reached into her bag, pulled out her towel, threw it around her neck, and stood there staring down at me from her great, graceful height, which felt both literal and painfully metaphorical in this moment.

“What is it now?” she asked mildly. “What do you need?”

And those two questions alone held the entire weight of what she didn’t say: I know, now, that you will only ever come to me when you need something from me. I know that you have used me as a stepping stone and that our interactions are only ever going to be in service of your climb.

The contempt in her tone and her eyes was so crushing that it felt a little like cauterising a cut with a red-hot iron. The pain of the cut feels like nothing, swallowed wholly in the red maw of the burning agony.

So it didn’t feel all that hard, in the end, to be the one to beg her.

“There’s this gala my adoptive parents need me to attend. They want you to come.”

She stared at me, and I stared back. I was trying to spot remnants of the girl I’d found crying silently in the courtyard of Benjamin Montgomery’s house, but couldn’t find any. Desdemona, having realised I’d never been worthy of her trust, had hidden that part of her completely away.

“What kind of gala?” she asked.

I rattled off the answer like a well-programmed but hollow piece of machinery: “The Future Fund Gala: Raising Hope for Britain’s Forgotten Children.” I gave her an empty smile. “In support of foster homes, care leavers, and underprivileged youth.”

For a moment, she’d said nothing at all. She reached for the towel around her neck, dabbed at her forehead and cheeks. Even sweaty and flushed with exertion, she was still pristinely beautiful, the strands of hair escaping her long plait glowing like filaments of gold in the floodlights.

“Sounds like the kind of event you’d rather be caught dead than attending.”

“You don’t think I care about underprivileged youth?”

I asked the question mildly, but even I could hear the slight bite in my tone.

Desdemona huffed and half-smiled, and then she folded her interminable legs and crouched down to my level, her gaze diving into mine like a graceful swimmer plunging into a mucky pool.

I caught myself wondering, for the first time, what she saw every time she looked into my face.

I’d never worried before if girls found me nice to look at, if the dark shade of my eyes was dull or uninteresting, if the scar in my cheek was repulsive and off-putting. But the way Desdemona looked at me in that moment made me feel like a gem under the looking glass of a jeweller, and part of me would have given anything to know what she estimated my worth to be.

My entire future was only worth twenty grand to her. My face?

Well, I could probably guess the going rate.

“They’re forcing you to go to this thing?” Desdemona asked, surprisingly direct for a girl who built her entire identity around a pretty lie. “The Pearsons?”

“Let’s just say they’re not offering me the option to refuse.”

She nodded. “And they made you ask me?”

“It’s come to their attention that we’re dating. They asked me to bring my date.”

“But they’re also running for the election. So they want—what?” She shook her head and scoffed. “You don’t have to answer. I know what they want. I’ll talk to Mum and Dad about arranging a donation.”

She stood, gazed down at me. Oddly, the contempt was gone. If it had been replaced by pity, it might have been the thing that pushed me over the edge—after years of hanging by a thread. But there was no pity in her gaze, either, only a sudden clarity, like she’d just solved a riddle.

“Send me the details,” she said. “I’ll wear blue—in case you want to match your accents to my dress.”

I was hit by a pulverising wave of emotion: pain, humiliation, resentment, desire and dread—everything except relief. The one thing I’d hoped to feel.

I slumped back onto my ass on the edge of the court, dropping my head back against the wall, gazing up at her with a smirk that was really a rictus of agony.