To be fair, he started lower. And to be fairer, I had to say no several times (peppered with a few yeses when questions veered to “Are you serious?” and “Are you saying people pay you to just look hot next to them?” and “Are you really going to act like a bitch?”). I wasn’t too scared, because we were on a non-deserted sidewalk. I turned on my heels and ignored him as he yelled, “You’re not even that hot! Your tits are tiny and your makeup is shit!”
The following day I told Francesca, who made a gagging noise on the phone, asked the million-dollar question (“God, Elsie. Why are men?”), and blocked him from the client database. For the following fake dates, I made an effort to do better makeup and use push-up bras. As a people pleaser and a graduate student, I was primed to take all sorts of constructive criticism to heart.
And that was the end of it.
Or just an intermission? Because when Austin looks at me and snorts and says, “No, she’s not,” the temperature around me drops. I look into Austin’s resentful eyes, and my nerves screech. My brain ices over and then shatters into a million tiny razor-sharp fragments that crash noisily into my skull.
I know that I am fucked. Well and truly fucked.
Monica gasps. “For God’s sake, Voight’s about to spill his wineglass on my Fendi chair.” She scurries away, and I cannot breathe.
“What are you doing here?” Austin takes a step closer, and the smell hits: he’s been drinking. I’m going to puke in the cow skull.
“Hi, Austin. How are you?” I sound solid, I think. Self-assured, but he ignores me.
“Honestly, it’s a good move. You kind of sucked as a hooker.”
My shoulder blades make sudden contact with something hard and warm. I must have physically recoiled. And pushed back into—
Jack is behind me. Witnessing all of this. Cross-referencing notes about how terrible I am with Austin. Shit. Shit—“What did you just say?” he asks.
“You ever hire her?” He points at me with his chin.
I can’t see Jack’s face, but I hear the frown in his voice. “Elsie is a physicist.”
Austin laughs. It blends seamlessly with the chatter in the background, because people are still eating. Drinking. Arguing. While my professional life falls apart. “Dude, no way. Elsie here is, like, an escort.”
Anger bleeds into my panic and I stiffen. “This is incorrect,” I hiss. “Not that there would be anything wrong with it, but Faux is a fake-dating app, which you’d know if you read the terms and conditions you agreed to when you signed up. But you’re too busy whacking balls around with a crowbar to learn basic literacy or how to treat your fellow humans with respect. Step away from me, or—”
“At least I’m not some kind of hooker who doesn’t even bother to fuck her clients—”
“Hey.” Jack’s palm closes around my arm and pulls me back into him, like I’m an unruly child who might walk into traffic. His voice is low and menacing, and I feel it reverberate through my own skin. “Austin. You heard her. She asked you to step away.”
Austin lets out an ugly laugh. “This is my house.”
“Then go to your room and play with your Transformers figurines. Leave her alone.”
“Jack, I paid her to go out with me. You don’t understand—”
“I understand what I’m seeing, so listen to me, asshole.” Jack’s tone is chilling. Terrifyingly calm. Austin pales and takes a small step back, and I almost feel sorry for him. “You’re harassing a woman who asked you to get out of her personal space while she’s at a work function. Because she rejected you.”
“But I paid her to—”
“I don’t care. She asked you to leave. Get the fuck out of my sight.”
Austin doesn’t want to leave. It’s clear in his flared nostrils, in his twitching jaw while he stares at the place above my shoulders where Jack has taken up residence. But he doesn’t stand a chance: after a few frustrated seconds he mutters “Fuck this” and finally, finally takes a step back.
My heart starts beating again.
“And one more thing,” Jack adds.
Austin swallows. “What?”
“If you say anything about this, to anyone, including your mother, I’m going to make sure you regret it for a long, long time. Understood?”
Austin presses his lips together and nods once, tight. Then he disappears into the crowd, into another room, and—
I free my arms and turn around, meaning to . . . I don’t know. Thank Jack? Explain myself? Play off what just happened as a fever dream?
Problem is, he’s staring down at me. Watching me with sharp, inflexible eyes that miss nothing, and—
He sees everything. Every molecule I am built of—he could list it, describe it, reproduce it in a lab. He sees the rebar structure in me, and I . . . I see nothing. I understand nothing.
I still have no idea what he wants me to be.
“Jack,” I say. A barely there whisper, but he can hear me. He can hear everything. “Jack. I . . . I just . . .” I shake my head. And then I can’t stand to be seen anymore, so I take a step back and weave my way through the room, looking for Monica to make my excuses.
10
INERTIA
In hindsight,” Cece muses while nibbling pensively on a piece of gouda, “we should have seen this coming. Boston’s population is seven hundred thousand. Say half are men, and half of that twenty-one to forty—Faux’s target demo. Now, Faux’s not cheap, and the masses are getting poorer while Jeff Bezos ruthlessly profits off my desperate need for one-day shipping of dill-pickle lip balm. So maybe only a fourth of the dudes can afford to hire us. And of that fourth, half is either in a happily committed relationship or . . . has morals. Now, consider that we’ve been doing this for about four years, fake-girlfriending an average of two clients a month. If we crunch the numbers . . .” She looks at me expectantly. I consider pretending I’m not a human calculator, then give up.
“Ninety-six men.” I sigh. “And their family and friends. In a pool of twenty-one thousand.”
Cece holds a carrot to Hedgie, who takes a delicate nibble. “Which makes the probability of us coming across someone we met through Faux in our private lives . . . ? Time to nerd out, nerd queen.”
“Bayesian probability? Or frequentist?”
Cece’s grin is my favorite of hers, with the tongue sticking out of her teeth. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s possible that in our quixotic quest to make enough money to pay our taxes—something Jeff Dill Pickle Bezos is not asked to do, by the way—we . . .”
“Fucked up?”
“A good assessment.”
I let my forehead slide to the table. It’s cold, and sticky with something that might not be Hedgie’s urine. “What if Austin tells his mother that I’m some kind of con woman who tricks her clients into . . . into . . .”
“Into not fucking her? Did he look like he might want to talk to Monica?”
“I . . .” Once Jack was done with him, he just looked scared. Shitless, one might add. But also angry, and angry people do angry, stupid things. Like climbing on top of a toilet in the men’s restroom with Jack Smith-Turner’s hands pressed into their waist. Or forgetting to monitor their glucose levels. God, what a shit show of an interview. At least the most disgraceful moments happened behind the scenes—yay for semiprivate humiliation. “I don’t know.”
“Either way, as a mother myself,” Cece says with a meaningful glance at Hedgie, “if my douchebag kid came to me whining that the rising star of theoretical physics denied him an eighty—”
“Seventy.”
“—seventy-dollar hand job—the audacity of that bitch—I’d exclusively be angry at my douchebag kid.”
I straighten and sigh again. The gouda’s predictably gone, so I pick up the carrot and take a small bite, avoiding Hedgie’s corner. Though, why, really? How bad could toxoplasmosis be? Not nearly as painful as the way Jack stared at me after everything. Like he could break me down into the smallest diatomic molecules with a look and a handful of words.
Better take my chances with the salmonella.
“I need to talk to Jack. Explain what Austin said.”
Cece scoffs. “You don’t owe him anything.”
“He helped me, though. Without him I—”
“He stood up for you when some shit-faced manboy verbally harassed you—Elsie, it’s the bare minimum. The bar’s so low, you could pick it up and beat him with it.”
Okay. So maybe I don’t need to talk to Jack. I want to, though. I want to explain to him that . . .
That what? Really, what? He must have put together that what I’m doing with Greg is similar to what I did with Austin. And if he hasn’t . . . didn’t I decide two days ago that I don’t care what he thinks of me? That he’s a lost cause anyway? If I don’t get the MIT job, I’m never going to meet Jack again. And if I do . . . we’ll be cordial, distant enemies. He’s still the nutsack who turned seventeen and decided to declare war on an entire discipline—my discipline. So he’s the one guy I can’t read, the one person who can’t be APE’d. All the more reason to never voluntarily interact with him again.
I just don’t know why it’s scorched into my stupid brain, that last glance he gave me as I stepped out of Monica’s home. And the earlier one, when he grabbed my chin and studied me like I’m something unique. My own Cartesian coordinates.