Amply Rewarded by Destiny Moon Page A

girlfriend,” I sneered. I could tell he was just the kind of insecure mama’s boy who expected that everyone would cower to his wants. Well, not me. And I knew that calling him on it would anger him.
    “What the hell is that supposed to mean? I’m a paying customer.”
    “For a massage. That was what you wanted. You said so yourself.” I was prepared to stand behind my statement even to Carla. Nothing was worth being talked to like that. I could walk out on this job and find another.
    “That’s a bad attitude.” His response was so predictable, but his actions surprised me. He grabbed my hair and pulled me towards him, not aware yet that one mustn’t take what is not offered. I grabbed his wrist and twisted it.
    “Let go of me.”
    “I could have you fired,” he said. “I’d be doing you a favour. You’re young. You should go to college or something.”
    “And how do you know I’m not?” I asked.
    “Are you?”
    I didn’t want to tell him that I wasn’t so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I decided that I would lose him as a client and I’d be doing him a favour. He couldn’t rely on his parents’ money forever and this was no way to talk to a lady.
    “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to walk out that door and you’re going to go down to Carla and tell her that you had the most incredible experience of your life with me, and then you’re going to pay twice as much as she tells you to. You’re going to insist. And why? Because you learned the most valuable lesson of your life here today. Then you’re going to go home and think about what you’ve learned. You’re going to start being good to people and treating women with the respect that we deserve and then, when you’ve worked it all out, you’re going to come back here and tell me about it and maybe, if I believe you, we’ll go for dinner—on you, of course—and you can have the pleasure of my acquaintance in public, which I know is actually what you really want.”
    I was expecting him to flare into a mad frenzy. Anyone with self-respect would. I had insulted him to the core. But, not surprisingly, he did exactly as I said. He got dressed, thanked me and left.
    Later that afternoon, Carla knocked on my door. “Here’s your first bonus. I don’t know what went down in that room, but he couldn’t stop raving about you,” she said, and smiled. “Nice work. Welcome to your new life.”
    People who grew up with money either learn this lesson late in life—the so-called ‘hard way’—or not at all. Money is not power. Money can’t actually buy anything—it’s an illusion. If used correctly, it can be powerful. But that makes it no different than anything else. If we were playing a game of cards, that jerk’s hand would have been no match for mine, even if he had gone to all the right schools and would eventually become a snooty, high-paid lawyer.
    I told Kelly about him—about what a pasty, puffy-lipped dork he’d been. That, I thought, would be his worst nightmare—the threat that a pretty girl, be she paid or not, would recount all his insecurities and laugh at them with her friends. It had to be most men’s worst nightmare. It was also to my great advantage, and so I didn’t tell Kelly what I had made him do.
    Instead, I told her I wanted to take her out. I wanted to reciprocate even just a little of the hospitality she had shown me.
     
    * * * *
     
    We walked from our house through Chinatown to Kelly’s favourite restaurant. Sometimes, she said, she got homesick and went to this place that served up the best fried chicken she had managed to find outside Alabama. I didn’t have the same kind of attachment to my home. Her childhood, I speculated, had been laced with these kinds of memories—tastes and smells—and she told me her parents had been sad when she’d decided to leave.
    “What could I do?” she asked. “They didn’t get that Green Hill was a dead end for me. What could I have done