Page 4 of How to Bang a Billionaire

I checked. “Do you get the Arrow?”

“Since I don’t know what that is, it seems safe to assume I don’t.”

“It’s the Book of Making You Feel Bad About Yourself. You know, the St. Seb’s magazine? It’s full of stories about people who are living amazing lives and achieving amazing things while you’re sitting around in your pants playing Tsum Tsum.” I paused. “I guess you don’t do that, what with being a billionaire and everything.”

“I don’t, no.”

“And you don’t have time for the post, so the whole thing’s a bust really.”

I must have sounded a bit woebegone because he said, “There isn’t an e-copy you could sign me up for?” with the same kind of embarrassed gentleness you might show a three-legged kitten if you weren’t all that keen on cats.

“I don’t know. It just turns up in my pidgeon hole. It’s this glossy thing and the cover story is always St. Sebastian’s Graduate Now King of Everything Ever.”

Another soft laugh. “In which case, I shall strongly resist being put on the mailing list.”

“Oh my God,” I wailed. “I’m epically bad at this. I’ve stirred you from apathy to active antipathy. Do you not like St. Sebastian’s?”

“I haven’t thought about it since I left.”

“You don’t have any good memories?”

“It’s not that. It’s simply that I prefer to focus my energy on the present.”

“And you never look back?” I tried again. “Never miss anybody or feel thankful?”

“The past is merely a string of things that have already happened.”.”

I knew I was a dweller by nature, reliving every moment of embarrassment, every harsh word, every little loss, but I wasn’t sure his way was the answer either. “That sounds alienating. Living out of time.”

“I would rather control my future than concern myself something I can’t change.”

Something in the way he said it made the back of my neck prickle. “You can’t control everything.”

“On the contrary, with enough wealth, power, and conviction, one can control anything. Anyone.”

Aaaand that really wasn’t helping with my inappropriate telefeelz. I tried to laugh it off, but it came out way too shaky to be convincing. “You sound like…There’s this line in Ulysses where someone describes history as a nightmare from which he’s trying to awake.”

“I’m already awake. And I haven’t read Ulysses.”

“You want to know a secret? Me neither.”

“But you can quote from it.” He seemed to have warmed up again. Maybe he was even smiling. And I thought, What would a man like this look like when he smiled?

“That’s what an English degree from Oxford teaches you. How to be convincing about a bunch of shit you actually know nothing about.” And there I went. Fucking up again. “But I bet PPE was useful to you, right, and has shaped your career and helped you become the incredibly successful person you are today?”

“Oxford—as a brand—still carries a certain value when effectively leveraged.”

I sat back in my chair, tucking a knee beneath me. I felt oddly sad suddenly. Not exactly for us but because of us. I’d basically squandered the last three years being disorganized and lazy and preoccupied with getting laid, and he’d just used the words brand and leveraged in cold blood. “But a world-class education…that’s a gift, isn’t it? It could make a real difference to someone. I mean, someone who was, y’know, better than we are.”

He was quiet for what felt like far too long. “I think,” he said at last, “when you claimed to be bad at this, you were either lying or sorely underestimating yourself.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, Mr. Hart.” It was hard to tell because we were on the phone but I thought I heard him draw in a sharp breath. Something I said? Or his name, which felt intimate somehow, in my mouth? Even though the formal address should have maintained a sense of distance, rather than the reverse. “It was just a thing I thought.”

“That I should make a donation to my old college? Rather a convenient notion to cross your mind at a fund-raising telethon, don’t you think?”

“Well, yes…I mean no…I mean. Fuck. All I meant was…I couldn’t think of anything more powerful, or more important, than being able change the course of a life. To be able to give someone who truly deserved it an opportunity that money or circumstance or social inequality would otherwise deny them.” That was when the magnitude of what I was suggesting finally sank in. I squeaked. “Or…or you could just buy a plant for the JCR. That would be cool too.”

I was relieved to hear him laugh again. “You are a very dangerous young man.”

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