CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
“I’m also thinking...” It pained me to even float the idea. “How would you feel about... selling the apartment. Moving somewhere that doesn’t freak you out so much.”
Her eyes lit up. “Can it be something on the ground?”
I hesitated. “That might be a tall order for New York. But we’ll look into it.” Maybe I could deal with a commute, if it made her happy. “And let’s look for something cheaper than where we’re currently at.”
“Having money trouble?” she asked with a sarcastic tilt of her head.
“No. Crisis of conscience.” I pushed myself up and, with nowhere else to go, paced in front of the gold-and-black marble fireplace.
It had the cleanest hearth I’d ever seen. There was no way this room had ever been used, at least not by Neil, El-Mudad, and Sophie.
Fuck, my kind of people were wasteful, weren’t we?
“If I sell it and buy something cheaper, we can give the money to... I don’t know. Something to do with homelessness?”
She watched me as I paced. I was oddly nervous. This was Charlotte I was talking to. She wasn’t going to make fun of me for wanting to spend money on something that did good.
“You could probably house the entire homeless population in the State of New York with your money,” she said quietly.
“I don’t think the apartment will sell for that much. The building has taken a lot of hits in the press and people are kind of turned off—”
“Not the money from selling the apartment. Your money. In the bank account you don’t even know the actual total for?” She said it in a gently shaming tone that I knew I deserved.
I had been living my entire life believing I was a “good billionaire.” But with all this need all around us...was it even possible to be a good person and a billionaire?
“I’m not saying that you have to,” she went on. “And I’m not saying that I think you’re a bad person. But you have so much money, and there’s so much suffering. Getting rid of the staff isn’t going to be enough to make you ‘normal.’”
“Caring about people and their problems will,” I said, because it was the truth.
“You can pay for your friends’ weddings. You can buy them houses. You can do whatever you want for the people you love, but you still have so much left over...there’s no reason to not do something good with it.” She was almost pleading with me, and the hope in her eyes twisted a knife in my heart.
Charlotte wasn’t with me for money or the lifestyle she could have with me.
She was with me in spite of all that.
“This is embarrassing,” I admitted.
“Why is it embarrassing?” she demanded. “Tell me what’s so embarrassing about a profound realization? Look, I got caught up in all of this, too. I love putting on expensive clothes and going to work at a glamorous job.”
I hadn’t ever thought of working in my office as glamorous.
“But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t looked at the price tag on a dress and thought to myself, wow, this is someone’s grocery bill for a year,” she continued.
“So, what you’re saying is, I should... give all my money away?” That made my throat constrict a little.
“You were ready to give it up for me,” she said softly. “What makes me so different than anyone else out there?”
So much, I wanted to say, but I knew that wasn’t the answer. The difference was that I was willing to give up my entire fortune to be with Charlotte because she made me happy. It was a romantic, poetic action, but selfish; we both knew that.
“And let’s be honest.” She fixed me with a withering expression. “There’s no way you’re going to be able to give away all of your money. In the time it would take to write the checks, you’d have already racked up a fortune in interest.”
“So... what do you suggest I do? What need do you think I can fulfill right now for someone, today? This is a genuine question here. I’m not trying to stump you to prove that I shouldn’t have to do anything philanthropic,” I clarified.
“I would never think that about you.” Her expression turned instantly sympathetic, her gorgeous eyes going all soft and round, her petal-pink lips parting in a moment of what I read as hurt.
“It should be something that matters to you. You’ve been epileptic since you were a kid.
I bet you spent a lot of time going to the doctor and hospitals, getting tests?
What would have happened if your parents couldn’t have afforded that? ”
I’d never considered that before.
“Plus, you had a lot of surgery and hospital time recently.” She gestured to my leg. “If that had happened to me, when I was living in my parents’ guest house? I would have been sunk. It would have been cheaper to buy a chainsaw and—”
I cringed as she mimed cutting off her leg.
“All right. How about this? I’ll call a hospital, ask for their billing department, whip out my credit card and pay every single outstanding, uninsured bill they have.” I grabbed my phone.
Her eyebrows went higher than I’d ever seen them go. “You’re doing it right now?”
“Mmhmm.” I typed hospitals new york into the search bar.
“It might not be as simple as you’re making it sound,” she warned.
“Pff. How complicated could paying a medical bill possibly be?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
(Charlotte)
Matt’s noble plan of calling up a hospital and canceling medical debt was shockingly more complicated than ordering a pizza. He agreed to table the idea until we could get back to the city.
We met back up with our hosts on the patio; Neil sat in an armchair of his own while El-Mudad and Sophie snuggled on a double chaise.
“We were discussing our options for the evening,” Neil said, standing as we approached. “We have some time before dinner and a few thoughts about how to fill it.”
“He’s trying to ask if you want to go see our sex playhouse and fuck around together,” Sophie said with a long-suffering eye roll. Neil shot her a glance and she shrugged. “What? There’s no easing into that.”
“Sex playhouse?” That, I had to see.
“It is stunning ,” Sophie insisted.
“Of course, we could always give you a tour with no strings attached,” Neil added. “No pressure at all.”
“You don’t have to pressure me,” Matt said, and he adorably blushed and looked away.
So, my boyfriend had a little crush on one of my friend’s husbands. Maybe that should have threatened me, but it was very cute.
“Well, shall we, Charlotte?” Neil asked.
Oh fuck, did his voice ever give me little flutters in my stomach. But I looked to Matt. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
Neil and Sophie and El-Mudad had hidden their secret sex house in plain sight. Kind of. It was located on their property, with a paved access road leading right to it. However, a chain-link fence and signs warning about high voltage surrounded the secluded area, and trees hid the building itself.
Once it came into view, however, it was breathtaking.
“This looks like something out of a corset movie,” I breathed, holding onto the canopy post of the golf cart Neil had driven us in. I sat in the middle row with Sophie, while Matt had taken the seat beside Neil. El-Mudad had seemed to very much enjoy riding on the rear-facing back row.
I could understand how their relationship worked so well: Neil was older, wiser, and laid-back. Sophie was fun, but high-strung, and El-Mudad matched that energy with a totally carefree attitude. They all brought out the best in each other.
“It’s meant to be a copy of a building at Versailles,” Neil explained. “It’s a bit larger, though.”
“Big time Francophiles?” Matt asked.
“It was here when we bought the place,” Sophie said. “But it wasn’t used for this purpose until Neil converted it for a wedding present.”
“That’s some wedding present,” Matt commented.
She grinned conspiratorially at me. “Oh, just wait.”
“I don’t know,” El-Mudad began. “It pales in comparison to your island.”
“But it doesn’t require a passport.” Neil winked over his shoulder at me.
“Neither will Ascend Manhattan.” I sounded like a brand ambassador.
We pulled up at the doors to the building and hopped off the cart. Sophie punched a security code into the smart lock pad and ushered us inside.
The place was breathtaking, with marble floors and gilded ornamentation on the walls. There was even a chandelier above our heads, lighting the miniature ballroom we stood in.
And there was a heavy wooden St. Andrews’ cross. And a rack of canes. And a big metal frame for strappado, and…
“Wow,” Matt said, his face pulled into a semi-grimace of admiration. “This is something.”
“It’s still set up from the last time we were out here,” Sophie said apologetically. “All this stuff is normally put away.”
“Who puts it away?” I asked, quickly following it up with, “I was thinking the other day about cleaning services that could take care of stuff like that. I wondered if anyone had beaten me to it.”
“The company that handles this building isn’t strictly sex clean up,” Neil said, the corner of his mouth twitching in a half-smile. “It might be a profitable idea.”
“Talk business later,” Sophie said. “Get down to business now.”
My face flushed, and I wished I could will my complexion back to normal. I’d watched Sophie have sex before. I’d fucked both of her husbands. I didn’t know why I felt so prudish about having sex with her.
It was different, I supposed, than having sex with strangers. Having sex with someone you already knew and were already friendly with felt more intimate.
“Can I just say,” Sophie said, whipping her shirt over her head and muffling her words. “It’s so nice to have sex friends again?”
“Sex friends?” I tried to not stare at her perfect breasts wobbling in her black satin bra.
“Yeah. Friends that you have sex with. But they’re still you’re friends. There’s nothing relationshippy about it, but you can trust them because you know them.”
“I…” My mouth closed of its own volition as I thought about it.
Matt eyed me curiously. “I don’t want to speak for Charlotte, but I’m not sure that’s a concept she’s familiar with.”