Chapter Text
Fever dream high in the quiet of the night
You know that I caught it
—
For a multi-millionaire partner at a private equity firm, Sébastien Lelivre looks incredibly unsure of himself. That doesn’t bode well for someone who wants to be her sugar daddy.
He doesn’t want to call it that, Nile thinks. He said it was a mutually beneficial companionship. And he wants me to call him Booker.
Despite the tired look on his face, he’s handsome, in a rugged-but-cleans-up-nice kind of way, with dirty blonde hair and well-kept scruff to match. Both are flecked with silver, and there are crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes like he smiles often. That seems completely disparate with the sloping of his broad shoulders and the hesitant look on his face. Or the way they haltingly communicated through the agency’s website, trading stilted small talk, then their backgrounds, then interests, then goals.
She knows, for example, that Sébastien—Booker—was born and raised in Brooklyn but lives in a condo in NoHo that Nile looked up on StreetEasy and nearly puked at the listing price. He graduated from the Wharton School of Business. He has very little time outside of work, no wife or kids, no social life—or, really, any kind of life at all. He gets paid an obscene amount to make rich men richer, the type of fuck you rich that Nile and her friends talk about eating when the revolution comes.
In return, he knows that she’s 24—nearly twenty years younger than him—from Chicago, and she’ll start her MFA in Fashion Design at Parsons this fall. He knows that she wants to have some adventure this summer, but he doesn’t know that she’s fought tooth and nail, clawing and crawling and battling and sacrificing her way to where she is today. After the accident, after having to figure everything out again, after everything, she’s not going to feel guilty for wanting one summer of—of luxury and indulgence and fun after everything she’s been through. Before she dives headfirst into working her ass off to make her dreams come true.
“So, uh—”
“Nile,” she interrupts and then panics because he obviously knows her name, and also she shouldn’t be interrupting him, should she? He’s the one that invited her to dinner at this fancy fucking restaurant, where the maître d’ raised his eyebrows when she said the name on the reservation and looked her up and down before leading her to a tucked-away table. Booker hasn’t ordered drinks yet, or even looked at a menu. Maybe this is the type of restaurant that doesn’t even have menus—
“Nile,” Booker says, the corner of his eyes crinkling a little when the ghost of a smile crosses his face. “Did your parents name you after the river?”
She wants to reply, no, the crocodile, but she doesn’t know if he likes snark. For all they discussed—what they wanted, what they were and weren’t comfortable with—Nile realizes that she actually knows jack shit about the man sitting across from her in a suit that probably costs more than the apartment she grew up in. She doesn’t know if he’ll appreciate sarcasm. Maybe he’ll decide that she’s not to his taste, that this was a waste of time, and then her plan for summer housing will fall through, and she’ll have to get a second job and Nile—
Maybe this was a bad idea. No, this was definitely a bad idea. Nile’s dress isn’t designer; it’s something she made for her senior show, and she doesn’t know what’s appropriate for table manners. When she signed up for the website, the idea of letting someone house her and pamper her in exchange for companionship and sex seemed like an exciting adventure, but now she just feels incredibly, stupidly out of place and unprepared.
God, she hasn’t had sex with a man since her senior year of high school—she hasn’t even dated since Jay—and now—
“Hey,” Booker says softly, catching her gaze. “Are you okay?”
Nile blinks. His eyes are really blue.
“It’s okay if you’re nervous,” he continues. “I mean, I’m kind of freaking out myself.”
Her eyebrows rising, she asks, “You are?”
“Yeah,” he says, his hand rubbing the back of his neck. He looks a little rueful—abashed, maybe. “I mean, you’re—you’re young and cool, and I’m worried that we’ll have nothing to talk about, and you’ll run screaming for the hills.”
“It’s Manhattan,” Nile says. “I’d have to go pretty far uptown to get to a hill.”
He smiles at that, a real, honest-to-God smile that she hasn’t seen yet, and it completely transforms his face. He looks younger, almost boyishly handsome, and the crow’s feet look like they finally belong around his eyes for some other purpose than showing his age.
Nile doesn’t know how to respond to that smile, so she picks up the fancy, untouched glass of water in front of her and takes a sip.
Booker sits back in his chair and looks her up and down. Then, he asks, “Do you want to get out of here?”
She nearly chokes on the water, sputtering all over herself, and he has the audacity to hand her a napkin. She ignores it for the one in her lap—her mother despairs her manners, but she at least knows that—and dabs at the water on her chin. “Isn’t that a little forward?”
There’s a wrinkle in Booker’s brow, and in complete opposition to his smile, it deepens every line on his face, and that tired look and uncertainty returns. “What do you mean?”
“I thought we were, like, going to have dinner and talk about shit before we jumped headfirst into the whole, you know—” Nile waves her hand. “Sugar part of this.”
“I didn’t mean—” Booker closes his eyes briefly and takes a deep breath like he’s trying to steady himself. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, Nile wonders if he’s watching her as carefully as she’s watching him. “I meant if you wanted to leave the restaurant, get something else for dinner. The food here is way overpriced, and the portions are minuscule.”
“So why did you invite me?”
“I wanted to impress you,” he says with a simple shrug like it costs him nothing to admit that. Nile’s starting to get the sense that this man has absolutely no chill at all, and unexpectedly, she finds she’s into that.
Nile drops her napkin on her plate. “So, where do you want to go instead?”
He doesn’t answer. Or, he does, if standing and offering her a hand is an answer.
She ignores it, but she’s curious about that look on his face and whatever’s going on behind those blue eyes, so she follows him out of the restaurant all the same.
—
Nile thinks that Booker will order a car—or maybe he’s the kind of rich that uses helicopters to avoid traffic—and she can hear the voice in the back of her head (the one that sounds like her mom) warning her about stranger danger. But she’s surprised when they walk to the subway station.
She’s even more surprised when they take the 3 downtown, and then they keep taking the 3 out of Manhattan and into Brooklyn, past Barclays and the Brooklyn Museum, which is as far as she’s ventured into this part of the city, until Booker finally stands up to get off in Crown Heights, at Kingston Ave.
She follows him off the train and up into the mid-May humidity, and she sticks close to him as he navigates through the crowd of Hasidic men swarming the station.
“Sorry it’s crowded,” he says, loud enough to hear over the noise, but seemingly only for her ears. “Shabbat just ended.”
Nile doesn’t know what to say to that. She can barely think as she dodges two boys running past her.
She glances at Booker. He’s smiling, somewhere between that genuine smile from before and that other one, and Nile doesn’t know why she’s already cataloging his expressions.
There’s an ambulance coming down Eastern Parkway and they wait until it passes to cross the street, and she finally asks, “Where are we going?”
“My favorite place,” Booker says. His knuckles brush against hers as they hurry across the street, and then they brush again, and then—
His eyes are the same dark blue as the sky when he looks down at her hand and asks, “May I?”
He sounds like Fitzwilliam fucking Darcy, and Nile—Nile nods and lets him take her hand.
The streets don’t get quieter as they walk down Kingston, but instead of Hebrew, it’s Patois trap. Booker stops in front of a small storefront covered in Haitian flags, and as soon as he opens the door, Nile hears someone cry, “Basti, baby, is that you?”
A small Black woman—she can’t be over five feet tall—comes barrelling out from the back. Booker towers over her, but he stoops down to hug her.
“Hi, Tati,” he says, and when he straightens, he gestures to Nile. “This is my friend Nile. I was wondering if we could get some dinner?”
The woman smacks him with the dishtowel in her hand, and Nile is immediately reminded of her own grandmother. “Of course! God, you don’t come to visit me for what, two weeks? You’re too skinny, what do you want? Légume? Riz? I’ll get you plantains and riz. Sit, sit—”
“Can we get it to go, actually?” Booker asks. “I want to show Nile around the neighborhood.”
The woman purses her lips. “Only if you come tomorrow for dinner.”
Booker gives her that smile—the real one—and nods. “I promise.”
Then, the woman stares directly at Nile. “You know, we’re so proud of our Basti. All he’s accomplished, we’re just so proud.”
And yeah, Nile had gotten the feeling that Booker was from around here, but the look on the woman’s face—that’s the same look her next-door neighbor gives her when she brags about Nile growing up and moving to the big city and getting a full-ride to study fashion. That’s a look of community, of it-takes-a-village. Nile doesn’t know what to do with the information that Booker is close to a little Haitian grandmother or how that fits in with his custom suit and flashy watch on his wrist.
In the hour or so they’ve spent together, Booker has never provided the expected answer to the questions Nile keeps asking herself.
Unexpectedly, Nile finds she likes that, too.
—
Fifteen minutes later, they’re sitting on a bench along Eastern Parkway, and Nile finishes answering Booker’s question about starting her MFA when Booker looks down at the styrofoam tray in her lap.
“Did you eat enough?” He asks with a wrinkle in his brow.
Nile nods. She didn’t eat as much as Booker—he decimated three of the many styrofoam containers the woman piled into his arms. Nile tried a little bit of everything, and she wishes she were hungrier because the food was so fucking good. “Yeah, how did you find that place?”
Booker looks over his shoulder, like he’s looking back to the restaurant, and grins. “I grew up above it.”
Nile opens her mouth. Closes it. Then, “And that woman?”
“She practically raised me,” Booker says. “I grew up—well.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he rolls the balled-up napkin between his hands. “I wasn’t planning on telling you this.”
“Telling me what?”
He glances at her and then stares ahead. “I grew up here.”
“You said that.”
“Yeah, but I—I grew up here. I grew up Hasidic.”
Oh.
That’s—well—
“Oh,” she says softly. “Um—”
“Everyone around here talks about me like I’m a success story,” Booker says. “We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and to apply to an Ivy—that was unheard of for kids that went to Yeshiva. It’s all very—everyone has a ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality.”
Now Nile is confused. “And you don’t?”
“I got a scholarship to go to UPenn, but not enough money to cover everything,” Booker says. “My freshman year, I met this alum from Wharton at an event. I was a server—work-study. We got to talking. He asked to buy me a drink afterward. It was one of the reasons I left, you know? That I liked—”
Booker laughs a little. “Tom liked me. He—he said I made him laugh. He proposed a mutually beneficial companionship. He started paying for my books, then my tuition, and then he got me a summer internship at his firm. He’s the entire reason why I’m in private equity. He’s—”
Something in Booker’s expression softens. “He made me the man I am today.”
Nile shouldn’t, but she still asks, “What happened to him?”
“Heart attack.”
Jesus. “I’m—”
Booker shakes his head. “No, don’t. It’s—I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I guess to say that I understand where you’ve been. I’ve been on that side of things. I know that there’s no such thing as bootstrap success, not really, and I know I owe everything to Tom. I always swore that I would pay that forward. I know I could make a scholarship fund or something, but Tom—Tom gave me so much more than money or a career. He taught me how to live, and since he passed, I’ve—I forgot. All I do is work, and that’s what killed him ten years too soon.”
When Nile got dressed this evening, she expected flirtatious small talk at a too-small table in a dimly-lit restaurant. When she shaved her legs and wore her nicest panties, she expected there to be some overture to sex. She wasn’t expecting this. She wasn’t expecting anything remotely close to this.
She thinks back to her profile on the website, the one Booker clicked on two weeks ago. I want someone to pamper me, she wrote even though she felt like an idiot. But even more, I want adventure. I think I deserve a little adventure.
Booker had that adventure, and now he wants to give her the same.
When she got dressed this evening, Nile didn’t know if Booker could pamper her or give her adventure, but she figured his wallet could. She didn’t know if they would have any sort of chemistry, or if she would be bored by him, or if he was a jackass.
She didn’t know that Booker seems—kind. And generous. It seems like Booker could pamper her and give her an adventure. It seems like Booker could give her all and more.
A million thoughts are racing through her head. A cacophony of pros and cons—he’s rich and attractive and tall as fuck, but you don’t know him, but he seems kind, but you can’t trust a book from its cover, but he hasn’t looked at your scar once—
Her thoughts settle on this: Booker isn’t what she anticipated. He’s far more complex than she wants out of a man she’s using for his wallet. And complex—complex is dangerous.
Unexpectedly, Nile finds she likes complex.
“I need some time to think about this,” she says finally. “About everything. I’ve—I’ve never done this before.”
Booker hesitates, then he meets her eyes, his hand hovering right below the hem of her dress. He’s asking for permission like before, and something twists in her stomach. He shared all of that with her and is still being so…respectful.
Nile nods, and she finds she really likes the way his hand, so big and warm, feels on her thigh and the way that one point of contact makes his face look younger and lighter.
Carefully and without breaking eye contact, he gives her a gentle squeeze. “I understand. Truly, take all the time you need. If you—we—go any further, we’ll need to develop a formal agreement, set boundaries, make sure there are protections in place for you. And if there are any questions I can answer, please, let me know.
When Booker nods, she takes a deep breath. “My lease is up on June 1st, so I can let you know towards the end of the month what I want. What I’ve decided.”
He smiles at her, and she smiles back, and she realizes that it’s the first time she’s smiled all evening.
“I do, uh, have a gift for you,” Booker says as he pulls his hand away from her knee and reaches into his suit jacket’s pocket. “You don’t have to accept it, and it’s not meant in any way to sway your decision. It’s just—”
He places a blue velvet box in her hands, and she thinks, jewelry, but it’s not.
It’s a black AmEx in her name.
“That’s connected to my account,” Booker says. “And—and no pressure, but if you decide that this is what you want, it’s yours to use for anything. Everything. I just—”
Blue eyes meet brown, and he gives another one of those smiles, the genuine one, the one that makes him look so much younger and so handsome. “I think we could have a lot of fun together.”
Unexpectedly, Nile thinks so, too.