Page 58

I shake my head. “I don’t want to take your money. And before you offer, I can’t stay with you. It’s the first place he’d look.”
Erica is thoughtful for a moment. “You could shop at high end places and then I could sell it on eBay and we could start building money that way?”
It’s a solid plan, but the more we discuss it the more it becomes clear that I actually don’t want to go anywhere. And Erica can see it as well. You aren’t best friends from Kindergarten onward without figuring out each other’s tells.
“Maybe he’s changed,” she says.
I mean we know he’s changed. He’s changed from a weird awkward stalker kid to a hot stalker man with power and wealth and an inexplicably appealing snake tattoo on his neck.
“Do you think I’m shallow?”
“One hundred percent!” she says happily. “And don’t you dare ever change. Men are way too much bullshit for us not to demand the absolute highest price for dealing with them.”
“I just… you remember how it was. And even how it was during the wedding planning. It’s not okay for him to do this! And it feels so… weak to just reward this bad behavior by stupidly falling into it. You know that’s his plan. He’s trying to buy me. I’ve never been that girl who gives a guy chance after chance or makes up some imaginary sad childhood story about him that lets me delude myself into thinking his emotional unavailability signals some sort of depth or something I can fix or heal. I expect men to act right from day one!”
“Has he hurt you?”
And I know she’s not asking about anything like hitting. We both know that usually isn’t the very first step. She means… sexually. Has he made me do anything gross or weird or hurt me or made me feel used? Has he forced himself on me? Though honestly, short of something truly gross or weird it would be hard to argue anything he did to me would be force the way my body lights up like a Christmas tree when he touches me.
I shake my head and tell her about what happened on the wedding night, including how I tried to kill him, which honestly… was half-hearted. He’s too pretty to kill. I’d have to be in extremely dire circumstances to be able to slit that man’s throat. And he knew it, too. He was way too confident he was going to survive that altercation, which just pisses me off more.
Erica’s eyes practically bug out of her head as she pumps me for all the gory details.
“Fuck, that’s hot,” she says a little too dreamily after I tell her about how he used the knife handle to get me off. “Did it hurt? The actual sex, I mean.”
Erica is the only person in the world who knows I’m still a virgin. I made it my full time job in high school and college to pretend I’d “done that already, and that it was super lame.”
“We haven’t…”
“What? It was your wedding night. He practically purchased you like some prize cow at the county fair, and then he didn’t take what was his?” She uses air quotes and a fake man voice for that last part.
“I mean… it’s only been two days,” I say, helpfully.
“But still. Oh my god, Maddie. He’s a gentleman. He’s trying to woo you.”
“Yeah, we’ll see how long that lasts.” But I’m not sure I can last long enough to see how long that lasts. If Aidan’s self-control is stronger than mine, I’m not going to get any useful data out of this experiment.
When the check comes, Erica takes out her wallet to pay her half, but I wave her away and hand over the black card.
She whispers, “He gave you his black card?” as the waitress walks away.
“Better,” I say. “He made me an authorized user. That card has my name on it.”
“Keep him. Keep this man,” she hisses at me.
Erica is absolutely no help. She has no survival instinct, and clearly I don’t either. But neither one of us can convince ourselves that Aidan is currently a big enough threat to try to escape this lux life he’s whisked me away to. I just hope the option to run still exists if and when the threat becomes more clear.
Erica and I scrap the shopping plan and instead go to a day spa for a full day of treatments… mani-pedis, hair styling, mud mask wraps, hydrotherapy, facials. It takes the rest of the day. We’re served cucumber sandwiches and Caesar salads along with cucumber lemon water in our fourth hour of treatments.
“It’s exhausting relaxing this hard,” Erica says, and I swear it’s possible one of the spa staff is going to take her out back, shoot her, and neatly dispose of the body.
I tip them extra well to avoid this tragic outcome. When we finally get out of there it’s nearly six-thirty. I invite Erica to sleep over at my house because we haven’t had a slumber party in something close to a million years. I don’t think late nights at the sorority house count.
When we get to the house, I let Claude know we just ate something and we’ll order pizza later tonight when we get hungry.
Claude is horrified by this suggestion and says he’s going to make us some proper pizza and some popcorn balls for our late night movie binge. Well, okay then. I think he likes having someone to take care of, and it’s so refreshing to be able to receive that care again.
I give Erica a full tour of the estate and take her through the hedge maze and show her the Medusa statue and the Jane Austen garden. We spend a good half hour trying to sort out all the questions around that, and I’m reassured to know Erica is as confused as I am. I tell her all about the novels he has from his mom.