Trade Me (Cyclone #1)

But fifteen thousand? That is within my capacity to understand. Fifteen thousand times three months left in the semester means I could quit my job. For good. I wouldn’t have to work at all through graduation. It would mean being able to pay my way if friends invited me out. I can stop deleting those emails advertising prestigious but unpaid summer internships.

Forty-five thousand dollars means no more bitterness when my mom asks for money. I can just give it to her and feel good about it. I could pay off Dad’s medical debt instead of watching it bleed my parents dry, month after month. Hope flutters inside me on breathless anticipation.

I squash it dead.

Because forty-five thousand dollars is just too much money.

“I have a question,” I say. “Just a little one.”

He desultorily throws a bean sprout in his broth. “Go for it.”

“Most people don’t need to pay forty-five thousand dollars in order to work at a crappy job. Or to live in a crappy apartment. Most people do it for free.”

He stops in the midst of fishing out his sprout and puts down his chopsticks. “Yes,” he says, a little more quietly. “I could do that. But I don’t want to explain what I’m doing to my dad. That means I need to keep up with my duties at Cyclone. And that means I need someone smart enough to handle them. Someone who can think independently. Someone I can work with. That’s you.”

I know I’m smart. But Blake? We’ve exchanged a tiny handful of sentences. Out of all the people in the world, he picks me? I don’t believe that.

I consider him. “That fifteen thousand a month is post-tax for you,” I say. “I have to pay taxes on it. I want it adjusted up accordingly.”

He doesn’t blink. “Fair enough.”

“And you’ll earn stock options on the work I do, right? I should get them.”

This has him wrinkling his nose in contemplation. “That’s…a little harder to do as a straight transfer, but I can sign over an equivalent number of shares that I already own outright. But that isn’t all that much right now, though, not with me on partial hiatus. It’s worth maybe another ten or fifteen grand.”

Yep. That just about proves my point. I stand up, take out my wallet, and carefully, painfully, count out nine dollars. I set this next to my bowl.

“This is too much,” I say. “You’re too eager to agree. There’s something else going on here. It’s like those emails where some government official offers an obscene amount of money in exchange for transferring funds from their accounts in Burkina Faso to the United States. I don’t know what your scam is or how you’re running it, but when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I’m out.”

I set the money down and start toward the stairs.

“Tina.” I hear his chair scrape the floor behind me. “Wait. Tina.”

He takes hold of my wrist as I’m leaving, turning me to him.

I snatch my hand away. “Don’t touch me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He looks at me; I look at him. For a second, the casual, smiling façade he usually wears is wiped away. There’s something wild about him, something that scares me more than the offer he just made. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and this time, I feel like he’s apologizing for something else entirely.

“What’s really going on here?”

He runs one hand through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he says for a fourth time. “It’s just… Look. I don’t know how to explain this to you. Maybe that sounded like a lot of money to you. But over the course of this conversation, random stock market fluctuations have changed my net worth by a lot more than sixty thousand dollars. We’re talking about a heartbeat’s amount of money for me. I don’t need money. I gave up—easily—several million dollars in compensation when I went to school. That’s how much I’ve already paid to get away.”

He almost shivers as he speaks, like he’s being blown by a wind I can’t feel.

It’s strange. For the first time since we sat down to lunch together, I believe him. I don’t know why he’s so desperate to get away—but I believe that he is. And that scares me, seduces me, and pisses me off, all at once.

“I understand where you’re coming from,” he says. “This is a little unusual. But my father always says that the person who can walk away from a deal is the one who is in control. That’s where you are. You’re in control. You tell me the terms you need to make this work.”

“All right,” I say slowly. “But that only answers half my question. Why can’t you let me walk away? Why me?”

“I need someone to come up with a script for our newest product launch,” he says. “And—I don’t know if you’ve ever watched Cyclone product launches?”

I shake my head. It’s not like I could afford their products anyway.

“You’ll see, then. They’re…personal. The launches. Whoever it is that I ask to help me will have access to our old scripts, complete with the change logs, and those will let you know a lot about me and my father.”