Not a bad business, but not without risk.
This particular morning, around ten o’clock, she knocked on the door of the upscale hotel room in downtown Cincinnati where I was staying. I handed her a quarter-inch stack of hundreds, and she smiled and said, “You’ve always been way too generous with me.”
Lauren loved her Mimosas with fresh-squeezed orange juice, and she enjoyed several as we caught each other up on our families, our problems, our health, and the books we’d read in the months that had passed since my last visit.
At some point she smiled and asked, “So, you wanna…?”
Instead of answering directly, I told her I had a unique proposition for her: we could spend the next few hours in the traditional manner and afterward go our separate ways happy and richer for the experience, or I could pay her an obscene amount of money to let me beat the shit out of her.
For a split second, Lauren’s smile remained frozen on her face, caught in the moment like a deer in the headlights. Then she made a funny noise and bolted for the door. She fumbled a bit, trying to get it open. When she finally did, she flew out of the room and slammed the door behind her. I watched her do all that, and after a minute or so, I topped off my glass, sipped some more champagne, and moved closer to the phone. A few minutes passed before it rang.
“You didn’t chase me,” she said.
“Why would I do that?”
“I thought maybe you’d snapped or something. No offense.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s just-I don’t know, I guess I’ve always had the feeling you could turn violent on me, though you’ve always been a perfect gentleman in the past. Still, what you said a while ago, well, you sort of threw me for a minute there.”
“And now?”
“Now I feel sort of bad that you paid for an overnight and I bailed.”
“You were scared.”
“I was really scared!” she said.
We were quiet awhile.
“You’ve got a good heart,” I said.
“I’d like to be your friend, Donovan,” she said, “but I might be just a little afraid of you right now.”
“I can’t fault you there.”
“Should I be?”
“What’s that?”
“Afraid of you?”
I paused a moment. “No.”
“Well,” she said, “you didn’t grab me or hit me. You didn’t force me to do anything. When I ran you didn’t chase me. And you’re very generous-the money, the champagne.”
“Does all that add up to let’s try again?”
“I don’t know, Donovan. I’d like to save our relationship…”
“But?”
“But I’d have to feel safe.”
“Well,” I said, “I didn’t chase you.”
