No One Knows Us Here(11)

A few minutes later, I’d pulled myself together and was sitting at a table in the restaurant waiting for Sebastian St. James to arrive. I had, as far as I could tell, the best seat in the house. From my corner on the upholstered bench, I could see out into the restaurant, watch the servers buzz around, spy on the other patrons.

I turned to look out the window. The sun had sunk down below the buildings, but it wasn’t dark outside, not yet, and a strange light filtered in through the old windows. I could sit here all evening, watching them go by: the young couple with all the tattoos, pushing a baby in his stroller. The Thorns fans wearing crowns of roses, whooping their way to the stadium for a game. The homeless lady trundling her rickety old shopping cart down the sidewalk.

A throat cleared, and then I heard a man’s voice saying my name.

I turned my head slowly toward the voice, a serene Mona Lisa smile on my face. And you must be Sebastian St. James, I had planned to say, raising my hand for him to kiss.

To my credit, my expression didn’t so much as flicker, my Mona Lisa smile didn’t show a whisper of a crack when I set eyes on him.

“Oh, there you are,” I managed to say in a completely normal—perhaps even seductive—voice. Maybe I was going to be good at this. I was acting natural, I thought, under the circumstances.

Sebastian St. James took a seat across from me and extended his hand for me to shake. A strange gesture for greeting an escort in an expensive restaurant, I thought. But what did I know about these things.

He was blabbering about the menu. “Get whatever you want. Do you like oysters? The Caesar salad is good here. Very fresh.” I was grateful for the blabbering. It gave me a chance to reassess the situation.

He wasn’t a handsome man with a head of dignified salt-and-pepper hair. He wasn’t wearing an ascot or war medals, either. I’d imagined him down to the strands of silver in his hair, and, as probably anyone might have guessed, I’d imagined him all wrong.

The man sitting across from me was older, yes. Midforties. But dignified and handsome he was not. This man was not mourning after a consumptive wife. If this man had a wife—no wedding ring, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything—she was named Peggy and she decorated their house with framed LIVE. LAUGH. LOVE. artwork.

Sebastian St. James—the one sitting across from me—was tall and stocky. He’d probably been on the football team in high school. He probably thought being on the team would make girls fall all over him, and it probably hadn’t worked. He had small, eager eyes and a huge smile crowded with teeth.

Talking to this guy was a piece of cake because he filled all the silences with banal observations, and all I had to do was agree.

“It’s unseasonably hot in Portland for October.”

“Oh, I know it.”

“I wasn’t prepared for the weather. Packed nothing but sweaters and hiking boots. I had to do a mall run to buy this shirt.”

“Nice shirt.” (I reached across the table and caressed the material with my fingers, as if it were the finest Egyptian cotton.)

“Oh, it’s okay. A little bold for my taste.”

It was pale-blue plaid. “Bold suits you.”

I watched the tips of his ears turn crimson. I’d made him blush. It occurred to me that I was nailing this. I flipped my hair over my shoulder and leaned in so he could ogle my cleavage.

His Adam’s apple contracted as he took a big gulp of his ice water.

I kept smiling and nodding, smiling and nodding. I kept drinking wine, too, and in that way, I made it through dinner. I made it through a dessert course, too. It was a five-layer vanilla cake with strawberry ganache, served on a large white platter decorated with a dark chocolate zigzag pattern. It looked like a piece of art, but I couldn’t taste it. I might as well have been eating a Hostess cupcake.

Sebastian St. James drank Jack and Cokes. The more he drank, the surer of himself he became. I could tell by the way he threw his arm around the back of his chair, the way he pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows at me, that he thought he was hot stuff. “Damn, you’re gorgeous.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” I said, because I thought that was probably what he wanted to hear.

About halfway through my cake, I put down my fork. Because after dessert—what then? I ordered a coffee. I could stay here all night, signaling the waiter for warm-up after warm-up. He had other plans. “Let’s take this upstairs,” he said.

Up in his room, he lifted a bottle of champagne from the ice bucket sitting on the narrow marble counter beneath a huge flat-screen television set. He poured us each a glass.

The room was elegant but fairly small—the bed took up almost the entire room. The room was warm, almost humid. It smelled the way old hotels do, even after they’ve been renovated and remodeled, like century-old cigarette smoke.

The money. I needed to ask for the money. I should have asked up front. Wasn’t that one of the first rules of the game? Right up there with “don’t give them your real name.”

“I hope this is adequate,” he said, handing me an envelope. “Jasmine’s rates were reasonable—I stuck with that.” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be known for my reasonable rates. I could say I was sure it was fine and tuck the envelope into my purse. Or I could stand there and count it, decide if all of this would be worth my while. I hesitated for a moment before peeking in the envelope. Without taking the bills out, I did a quick tally. Ten $100 bills. It took all my power not to bug my eyes out at it, even though I had been expecting it. The money was the whole point, after all. That would almost cover a deposit on a new place. I kept a straight face and nodded, tucking the envelope in my bag.