Page 37

Because I can’t avoid it any longer, much as I’d like to, I sit down and look, really look, at exactly how broke I am. The answer is, very. Maybe not as broke as I was before Diablo and CamALot, but I’m still far from being anywhere close to in the clear.

Rent's due in ten days. The second payment I promised Sal is due in twelve. And this week, I have earned ninety dollars, a stress headache, and a pittance from Ardent Capital.

To add to my stress, Sal calls, and this time I pick up. I figure I can only dodge for so long a man I owe money to who also knows my address.

Thanks, Birdie.

"Agnes." His voice is patient but also accusing at the same time, ready to express disappointment before I've said a word. "End of the month, Agnes."

"I know, Sal. There's been a hiccup. My extra work dried up faster than I planned. But it's temporary, I swear, I'm going to⁠—"

"A hiccup." He says it the way you'd say something you scraped off your shoe. "I don't lend money to hiccups, Agnes. I lent it to a woman who told me she would pay me back. So. Was that true when you said it? Or were you telling me a bedtime story?"

"It was true."

"Then go make it true again. By the end of the month, like you promised. Because I like you on the phone." His pause crawls up my spine. "Hell, I like you in person. I don’t want you to meet the version of me that doesn’t like you. It won’t be fun."

The line goes dead. I sit on my bed holding a silent phone and the very loud understanding that I have twelve days to make money from three men who won't share an elevator. It leaves me with the start of a panic attack. Sweat trickles down my temples, I’m having a hard time steadying my breath, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be sick even though I wasn’t able to eat all day.

One week ago, I was a woman who was going to beat this. Now, I'm a woman running out of road, and I know exactly how it happened, which is the part that stings. I got cocky. I got comfortable. I believed my own good luck.

The phone rings again in my hand, and I nearly hurl it across the room. But it's Birdie, so I answer, because I am a masochist.

"Ag! Quick thing. Don't be mad."

Those are words that have never once, in the history of my sister, meant good news.

"Birdie."

"So, Ag, my friend Kayla might have mentioned the thing, your thing, to her roommate. But ONLY her roommate, and the roommate is basically a nun, she doesn't even have social media, and also, she thought it was iconic, so honestly it's a compliment⁠—"

The floor drops out of my stomach and just keeps dropping. "Birdie."

"Don’t worry, Ag, this woman is a VAULT⁠—"

"That's what you said about Kayla."

Silence. Then, in a small voice, "Yeah, I get that, Ag. Yeah, Kayla’s more of a colander than a vault, isn’t she?"

I close my eyes and see my life the way you see a car crash the half second before it happens. It's not the secret getting out that guts me. It's that I handed her the one thing that keeps me alive, and she shared it like a party story. My secret, my one secret, is being passed around, hand to hand, like a crumpled dollar bill. Birdie to Kayla to some roommate is as good as putting my news on a front-page headline.

I make Birdie promise not to tell anyone else. She promises. I hang up and know I am totally fucked.

Then there's the office, which has stopped being a place I work and become a place I dread.

I can't prove it but I am pretty sure Sloane is watching me.

Not cruelly. Not even obviously. She said good for me. She meant it kindly, that she was happy for me. But somewhere since then, the warmth has cooled into curiosity. Now, she looks up when I pass. She lingers a half beat too long at my desk. Twice this week, I've caught her studying me with that little crease between her perfect eyebrows, the one she probably gets across a conference table when she tries to line up what someone is telling her with what they are actually doing.

Like wondering how a broke receptionist got a new spring in her step.

She hasn't said a word. Sloane's too smart to say anything before she's sure. But she has started paying a lot of attention to me, which is weird because there’s nothing to track when it comes to me, as far as she and everyone else at Ardent Capital know. I don't know how to be a woman who's being looked at. I never had to learn it. It was never, ever going to come up because it’s not a possibility for someone like me.

So I go home Friday broke, hunted, and watched, and I do the only thing a woman in my position has left to do.

I put on the red lipstick. I go live. And I pray to God that at least one of my Knights got lonely enough tonight to come home to me.

I go live at ten, earlier than usual in the hope that more time camming might get me more money in my pocket. I hate that I'm waiting and I hate myself for it, because waiting on a man or men to come save me is exactly the woman I swore I would never be. Eventually my little court of five-dollar regulars trickles in. Somebody named BigStu69 asks me to say his name several times until I’ve said it exactly how he wants, so I do. It earns me four dollars and costs me a small piece of my dignity.