"I have…obligations elsewhere, let’s say. I am a man enchained.”
Married then? Sounded like it to her. Married or he had a girlfriend. Well, his other life was his business, not hers.
"How will you pay me? In cash? Check? We take cards at the gallery.” While cash would be ideal, she’d love to see a check to find out who he was and where he lived.
"I’ll pay you in the currency of the gallery. I’ll pay you in art.”
"You will pay me in art? You’re a collector?”
"I am. And my private collection has been hidden away far too long. I can’t think of a better way of bringing it to light again.”
"You’ll have to provide provenance. And considering I don’t even know your last name…”
"I’ll provide provenance at the end of the year. I’ll give you the artwork after each night and you can have it authenticated and insured. When our year together is up, I’ll provide impeccable provenance for all the pieces, which will increase their value and make it very easy for you to sell them.”
"Impeccable, you say?”
"Impeccable and unimpeachable.”
"Where will these assignations take place?”
"Your back room should do nicely for a playroom. The bed is back there, isn’t it? The antique brass bed?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. "You know about the bed in the back?”
"I’ve seen the back room. It’s where your mother kept the best pieces.”
"The erotic pieces, you mean.”
"Like I said, the best pieces.”
"My mother was quite shameless. I’m not surprised you knew her.”
"I am very sorry for the loss of your mother. Ophelia St. James was much beloved in the art community.”
"She was. And this gallery was her life. She told me to do anything to save it.”
"I can be anything,” he said with the slightest smile.
"Yes,” she said. "I imagine you could.”
"Do we have an agreement then?” he asked.
"I have to think about this some more,” she said. She turned in her chair to the side, rested her forehead on her hand and breathed.
"Do you have a lover?” he asked. "I won’t tell you to stop seeing him if you do.”
"We broke up,” she said. "After Mother died.”
"My condolences.”
"No need for that. We were never in love, only lovers. He was a boy.”
"Scandalous.” Malcolm sounded far more pleased than scandalized.
"Not quite. I was twenty-four. He was eighteen. He lived in the apartment across from my mother’s with his parents. In the last months I stayed with her every night, slept in the guest room. It was lonely sleeping there with my mother slowly dying in the next room.” She shouldn’t be telling Malcolm any of this and didn’t know why she was, only that he seemed interested and it had been a very long time since she’d had a conversation this intimate with anyone.
"I certainly would have seduced the nearest available person as well,” Malcolm said. "Even if my mother hadn’t been dying.”
"I can imagine that.”
"You’re welcome to imagine me seducing someone. I recommend it.”
"Sadly, it wasn’t much of a seduction,” she said. "He was young and pretty and, best of all, lived five feet away. We would talk in the hallway when we met there. One night a neighbor came out of their apartment and shushed us for laughing, so I invited him in to finish the conversation. Mother was already asleep. Her pills knocked her out around nine every night. I didn’t intend to go to bed with him, but the bed was the only place in the guest room to sit.” She smiled at the memory of taking Ryan’s virginity on the antique brass bed. She had to hold onto the headboard to keep it from rattling against the wall.
"You had every reason to, every right to,” Malcolm said. "Anyone going through what you were would need the comfort of another body in your bed. Do you miss him?”
She shrugged. "I miss that time. I still had Mother by day and a lover by night. It was a precious few months for me. After she died, I sold the apartment to pay off some of the medical bills. I kept the brass bed. Mother had bought it years ago at an estate sale. Mother said it had once belonged to a courtesan so she couldn’t resist buying it. Mother would buy anything if the origin story were good enough.”
"It’s a lovely bed. I’m certain it misses you. You should spend more time in it, with me preferably.”
She missed the bed as well. Although her affair with Ryan had been brief, only three months, it had been a delicious distraction. They were lovers for the summer and knew the end date of their affair when they started—September, when Ryan would start college. He’d been a virgin, a tabula rasa, and she’d taught him exactly how to please her…and please her he did, two and sometimes three times a night. He’d slip in around ten, joining her in the antique brass bed where she lay waiting for him, already naked. They’d make love for two hours or more before he returned to his apartment down the hall. They spoke of nothing to each other but the sex. It was all they’d had in common. Yet, she missed him, or more accurately missed it—the sex, falling asleep with damp thighs, waking up with tender lips, tender nipples, having a secret reason to smile when no one else was looking. Malcolm offered all that to her, plus the money to save the gallery. How could she refuse? And yet…
"Condoms?” Mona asked. She hadn’t used them with Ryan, but Ryan had been eighteen and a virgin.
"No,” he said simply.
She had guessed as much. No one paid a million dollars to fuck someone and then put a layer of latex between their bodies.
"But you needn’t worry,” he said. "I won’t give you any diseases.”
"That’s a comfort. Only one night every month or two?”
"That’s all,” he said. "But I assure you, they will be very long nights for both of us.”
"Ten nights is a hundred thousand dollars a fuck. You do realize that you’re overpaying me, yes?”
"I know it seems a bit, dear, but I will fuck you more than once a night. You’ll earn it, I promise. If you’re anything like the other Monas I’ve known, I have no doubt I’ll get my money’s worth and then some.”
Twelve months. A handful of nights. Four or five times a night, if not more. And all for one million dollars.
"If any of this art of yours is stolen—”
"I’m a whoremonger, a rake, and a degenerate, my dear, but I am not a thief.”
"Forgive me but I had to ask,” she said. "Art theft is the fourth largest international crime behind guns, drugs, and human trafficking.”
"Only fourth?” He sounded disgusted. He sighed, as if disappointed with the world. "No accounting for taste.”
It was that joke that did it. Until then she’d been sitting on the fence, torn between needing the money and wanting her dignity. But when he gave a little roll of his eyes as if affronted that anyone would consider drugs or guns more worth stealing and selling than art…she fell off the fence and right into Malcolm’s lap.
"One million dollars,” she said. "You have carte blanche for one year. We’ll meet here. Is that the agreement?”