The New Year’s Eve party was already a blur in the back of my mind by the time we had climbed up the steps up to my flat—all I could remember was a girl with electric blue eyes and fiery red hair making eyes at me from across the room, and I had been hooked.
I fumbled in my pockets for my keys and frantically jammed them into the lock, edged on by the feeling of the girl’s hands caressing the lapel of my coat, as if she planned on throwing it on the floor the second we got inside…
…and she did. The girl…Megan? Melanie? Something of that variety…had been looking at me desperately the entire cab ride over, and it was clear to me what she was after. This was one of my favorite things about American girls—they never had any pretenses or politeness about these things. If one of them wanted me (and they usually did) they never tiptoed around the subject, they simply asked. English girls would never give in to any of my charms until they made me work for it.
The red-headed girl had pushed me onto the leather sofa the second we had gotten in through the door and was extremely straightforward about what she wanted. She was a good bit younger than me, maybe in her early twenties, and her energy was truly astounding.
I usually like to take my time with the women I bring home, seducing them slowly until the tension breaks and we finally slip inside my bedroom, gloriously desperate.
When we were finished, instead of collapsing down next to me as women usually do, the girl wraps a cashmere blanket around herself, gets right back up, and begins wandering around my flat, as if she’s already bored and looking for something else to do. Girls tend to do the whole awestruck-at-his-wealth bit right when they walk in the door, but she seemed to be a bit too—otherwise occupied—to have noticed upon first walking in. My flat was on the top floor of a building in the center of Seattle with breathtaking views of the city down below, where you could spend hours watching its residents scurrying to and fro like ants. Next to the large windows overlooking the city was a rarely-used kitchen with marble countertops and an island covered in half-drunk red wine bottles and empty Thai takeaway boxes. My bedroom and my home gym were more towards the back, and the main part of the flat consisted of a dining and a living room area—a large glossy black dining room table for Torver Corporation dinner parties, which I occasionally got pressured into hosting. The living area consisted of sleek black leather couches, a flat-screen television, and some weird modern art I had bought from my cousin’s art show in Blackpool out of sheer pity. There was a fireplace built into the wall, a new, high-tech one that turned on by remote, but I had insisted on installing a mantel for the sake of style. This is where the girl was now, examining the collection of pictures perched there with bright eyes.
“What’s this?” she asks, peering at a one-hundred-year-old photo of a large brick estate surrounded by trees and manicured gardens.
“It’s just a random picture for decoration,” I lie. In reality, the building in question is Mansfield House, my ancestral home and the setting of my childhood, but it’s always been awkward bringing up the whole British aristocracy thing, especially with women who I’m probably never going to see again. It’s a hard thing to explain without sounding and feeling like you’re completely full of yourself…which maybe I am, a bit. Maybe it would be okay if I looked like my pasty, bespectacled cousins, but I really, really didn’t. I was well over six feet and had always been extremely fit, due to rugby tournaments back in England and a strict weight-lifting schedule here in the States. I had inherited my mother’s tousled dark blond hair and my father’s pointed jawline, which was usually covered in a thin layer of five-o’clock shadow. The overall effect was certainly not unpleasing to the eye.
“Hmm…” she says, and looks at me as if she can sense that I’m lying.
At that response, she doesn’t ask about the other pictures, some of which were probably equally intriguing to her. There’s a portrait of my family back in England, dressed in cricket whites, and another one of me and my brother, Henry, attending a polo match. There’s a couple from the vacation I took with my Torver Corporation colleagues to the Bahamas last year, shots of me with Johnathan and Kirk lounging with margaritas on sunny beaches. And finally, strangest of all, there’s an old black and white photograph of Butch Cassidy—the man from whom I get my name. Well, the name I chose for myself. In actuality, I’m named after my grandfather Arnold, with about three pointless middle names stuck in there for aristocratic flair, but Cassidy is the name I picked as my own—for my new life here in America. I had seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid on the telly as a child, and ever since something had pulled me towards America—towards a place that seemed like the Wild West compared to my structured and confined upbringing—and towards freedom.
The girl—who is named Megan, I have confirmed—finally curls up on the couch next to me, twirling the long strands of her russet hair absentmindedly.
“So, what do you do?” I ask, out of polite instinct, and I cringe at how much it sounds like we’re on a first date, even though we just had sex.
Megan rolls her eyes, and I find out she’s a dental hygienist, and hates her job with every fiber of her being.
“And you?”
“I’m the CFO at Torver Corporation.”
Megan sits back, awestruck. “Torver Corporation? Like, as in, mega-billionaire Johnathan Torver’s Torver Corporation?”
“That’s the one.”
She eyes the flat suspiciously. “Aren’t you a little young to be the CFO of a massive company like that?”
“Yes,” I said, leaning back in my chair with a smirk. “Yes I am.”
Well, it’s not like my cushy job at Torver completely came about because of my unparalleled genius or experience or anything—my father was one of Johnathan Torver’s top investors, which made it pretty easy for me to get in his good graces and land a job with him right after my graduation from Oxford five years back. As much as I savored my independence, I still relied on my name and on my wealth for the occasional perk sometimes.
“You have a girlfriend?” Megan asks.
“Nope,” I say with a smile. “I don’t cheat. And, no offense, I’m not interested, but you are a lovely girl.”
“Just curious,” she says, and leans back on the couch. “I suppose you’re not the type? Men with as much money and power as you never really are, I’ve found.”
“No way, but it has nothing to do with that,” I say, laughing. “Relationships are either messy or so boring you can hardly stand it.”
“I get you,” Megan says. “Well, the sex was quite good, for me, at least, so if you ever want to have a casual fuck again, give me a call.” She quickly writes her phone number down on the corner of the New York Times sitting on the table and gets up to put her dress back on.
I look up at the clock on the mantel as I wave to Megan on her way out. Barely an hour. She was here barely an hour. I liked hookups, I liked casual sex, hell, I was a little bit addicted to it, but something about what had just happened with Megan left me feeling strangely empty.
I treated the seduction of women like a high art, and Megan had simply walked in and taken what she had wanted from me, and then walked out. There wasn’t any fun in it—it had been too easy. That was it, probably…right?
It wasn’t like I needed a relationship, or intimacy, or any of that Hallmark Channel crap. Not me.
I think.