What Do You Really Want?

I lowered the hands that had been covering my face and muttered under my breath.

"There's a limit to how much of a fool you can take someone for."

Even if money were rotting in piles, no one in their right mind would hand that kind of cash to a physical therapist with nothing special on her résumé.

I knew better. The rich ones were always the greediest.

"What do you really want?"

The ones who played generous were the ones who sucked you dry to the marrow.

At my words, Harold's face—which had been nothing but smiles until now—turned cold. His glass-blue eyes glittered as he spoke.

"I'll say it again, Hanna. When I get in the car, I want to feel as fresh as possible. For that, I'd like you to provide a little something extra beyond just being my physical therapist."

I scowled openly.

"What kind of service?"

At first I didn't understand. But the moment I met the smoldering fire in those blue eyes, something clicked. I wasn't that naïve.

It can't be.

For a second my breath caught in my throat and no words came out. I half hoped I'd misunderstood, that he would clarify—then Harold spoke.

"Sex. I want to sleep with you."

I grabbed the glass sitting on the sofa table and flung the milk tea straight at him.

Harold didn't even flinch at the tea baptism. He simply closed his eyes, then opened them again, calm as ever. Wiping the droplets from his brows with one hand, he said,

"…I expected this too. No matter how carefully I tried to phrase it, I figured this would be the first reaction."

To take a faceful of tea and not so much as blink—Harold's reaction was anything but ordinary. I swallowed the urge to shout. This was still my workplace, after all.

I kept my voice as low and cold as I could manage.

"Get out before I call security. If you want sex, use an escort service."

"An escort? I've never used one of those, and I don't plan to. I just want a physical therapist who can perfectly solve every problem my body has. When I'm stressed I want to work it out with sex, but I have to move cities every two weeks, so serious relationships are hard—and I refuse to use dating apps."

"…"

"I don't like sleeping with strangers."

So I'm not a stranger?

It was absurd. I briefly wondered whether I should have thrown the cup instead of the tea, then stopped myself. No one in their right mind would make a proposal this ridiculous and mean it.

So what was his real intention? If he'd come here just to make me furious, he'd succeeded.

"So what's the real reason you came looking for me?"

"I just told you. I want you to sleep with me. Physical therapy on the side."

Harold wiped his face with a handkerchief he'd pulled from his trouser pocket.

"I thought you were pretty."

He let out a sigh.

"I'm serious. If you want me to prove it, I will. However you want."

"…"

"It's not all coming off. I'll have to wash the rest in the bathroom. This is my personal number. Think it over carefully. Contact me as soon as you can. I want my body ready before the season starts."

Harold set a business card from his case on the table, then stood. I watched him walk out slowly.

Is he insane?

At first the heat in my head was dizzying. I went straight to Angela and told her that from now on, for any reason, I did not want to do private consultations with clients.

I don't remember how I got through the rest of that day. All through the afternoon treatments something kept surging up in my chest, and I kept thinking I really should have thrown the cup at his face.

But day by day, the anger cooled.

Even factoring in raises, the objective fact that I would never hold that kind of money in my hands unless I worked forty years or won the EuroMillions began to surface like flecks of gold in muddy sand.

But do I even need that much money?

Between treatments I kept turning the offer over in my mind. London, where I lived, had some of the most murderous prices in Europe, yet once you subtracted the rent on a one-bedroom flat with a shower stall and the various building fees, I didn't spend all that much.

After I lost my sense of taste and smell, food had become nothing more than fuel.

Clothes, then? I worked somewhere with a uniform, and I hadn't bought new clothes in over five years. My body was the same as it had always been and, barring anything unexpected, would stay that way.

I don't hate this job enough to sell my body just to retire early.

I forced a CL client's stiff knee past its range of motion and sank deeper into thought.

And no matter how I look at it, that bastard is crazy.

So there was nothing to agonize over.

Not if I didn't need that kind of money. Yet why was I agonizing over something that required no thought?

I don't need the money… but it would still be nice to have it, I suppose.

On the walk home during Christmas season, under streets glittering with lights and decorations, I exhaled.

In the white breath that scattered into the air, my younger sister's face rose.

If only I had made it into F1 and succeeded as a driver—if only I could have repaid the emotional debt I owed my family.

At least our parents had the chance to choose sacrifice, under the banner of supporting a child who showed a flash of talent.

But what about my sister? Had she chosen to have an older sister like me?

My F2 career hadn't left debt behind, yet the family that had been comfortably well-off before I started karting had plummeted downhill supporting my talent.

My sister would still clearly remember the days when money had never been a worry.

If I had never said I wanted to be a driver, our family could have lived without fretting over money at all…

After the accident, once Anna's scolding finally snapped me awake, the guilt had eaten at me. It peaked when she chose a job over university.

I'm ashamed.

Of course not everyone has to go to university. But could I honestly say the family's finances hadn't influenced her choice?

I have no face to show Anna, or the family. If I'd known it would end like this…

If the accident had been written into fate, I never would have started. Never would have chased that dream.

And yet now, perhaps, an opportunity had come to earn enough money to ease the family's situation. What could that kind of money do?

Like someone who hadn't won the lottery yet was already planning how to spend the jackpot, I thought about what I would do if I held a year's salary under Harold.

That much would buy a flat on the outskirts of London, so I wouldn't have to pour most of my paycheck into rent. The rest I could send to my parents to pad their retirement. And after all that, there might even be enough left for my sister's university fund. Just from the victory bonuses Harold paid.

It isn't exactly legal…

But aside from wounding my pride, it wouldn't harm anyone else, would it?

Does pride put food on the table?

The moment the thought formed, I shook my head hard.

It's a nasty prank. No matter how much money he has, why would he spend it on me?

I tried to guess how word of me had reached Harold's ears.

I worked at the largest sports research institute in London. Because we mostly treated athletes, the rumor that a former F2 driver was working as a physical therapist had probably spread without anyone meaning it to.

It must have reached Harold—or some driver I'd once competed against—by chance.

I knew my old rivals had felt inferior to me. Men already burning with competitive fire; the idea of losing to me must have been unbearable.

Was Harold one of them?

Maybe he had come to settle some long-held inferiority complex about me.

If I accepted the offer, he might laugh at how easily I'd been fooled, then turn the whole story into a war tale for the friends still in the industry.

Look how far that high-and-mighty Hanna has fallen.

Even if that were true, so what? I had no intention of accepting. I shook my head.

I had already decided to forget the world I'd once set foot in. I wasn't going to die without money tomorrow; there was no reason to be jerked around by some rich boy's proposal—or prank.

I came back to reality and bought tomorrow's food at the supermarket.

I would protect the quiet second life I had painstakingly built after the first one collapsed. I would give the rude invader not even the smallest crack.

And two weeks later.

"Harold."

"Call me Harry."

For all those resolutions, I was already in Harold's grasp.

Unbelievably. Sitting on the bed in a robe, he smiled at me as I came out of the shower.

"We're going to get close now, aren't we?"