“I want to walk back to the hotel with you and do all the things we’ve been talking about,” I told her. “I want to do them tonight. But before we can do that, I need you to sign this.”
She was sitting up straighter. “And this would be what, exactly?”
I smiled at her in reassurance. “Nothing to worry about. Just a standard nondisclosure agreement. One signature, and we’re done here.”
She reached a hand out for it, and I let go of the breath I’d been holding.
The seconds ticked by as she read, until she was looking at me again. There wasn’t a bit of softness in her eyes when she pushed the paper back across the table and said, “No.”
“Hope.” I sighed. “It’s very simple. It never has to go beyond this.”
“Then why do it?” There were two spots of color in her cheeks now. “You want me to say that I’ll never talk about you, or what we do? Right. I’d say that, and you wouldn’t even have to threaten to sue me. Because I’d be trusting you in the same way not to talk about me, not to jeopardize my job or my reputation.”
“It’s different for me,” I tried to explain. “I can’t take that risk. It’s…happened. It’s simple self-preservation.”
“And this.” She grabbed the piece of paper back as if I hadn’t spoken. “That nothing you give me constitutes an agreement to continue the relationship, or an obligation on your part, a promise of…support? How about this? How about this for a concept instead?” Her gaze was steady, her voice not quite so. “How about if you don’t give me anything? Then you don’t have to worry that I—or the next woman, or the one after her, because how many women have signed this thing? Then you don’t have to worry that we’re just gold-diggers who want you for your money, that we’re just looking for a way to take you to the cleaners. You could think that I might be with you because I like you. You could see that I didn’t need any of this to like you. The suite, the very best restaurants, the shoes? I didn’t need Paris at all. I needed to go to a museum with you. I needed you to walk with me, and to talk to me. I sure didn’t need to wonder how many of these things your lawyer’s got filed away, or a reminder that this is temporary, and it means nothing, and you don’t know me, or trust me even to be…to be decent.”
She cut herself off, and her hands were shaking, but she didn’t let that stop her. She ripped the paper in two, then turned it and ripped the pieces again and again before she let them fall onto the table. “Well, keep your agreement.”
A quick grab below the table for her purse, and she was standing. “I told myself that if I went out with you again, no matter what happened, I wasn’t running out on you, and I wasn’t slapping you. That I wasn’t going to behave like a child. So I’m not. I’m behaving like a woman. And this is how a woman says no.”