Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 56: Eleven on Park

Ryan got there at seven.

He stood outside and looked at the entrance and made the immediate and logical decision not to go in. The reservation was made because of Zara’s name. Showing up alone and trying to explain her absence would produce a conversation he didn’t need before the evening had started.

He stood to the side of the entrance with his hands in his coat pockets and watched the street.

It was a good evening for it — the city doing its Sunday night version, quieter than Saturday but still alive, temperature that wasn’t cold enough to be unpleasant but enough to justify the coat. A couple went past him into the restaurant. A cab stopped and discharged a family of four.

A man walked by talking on his phone in a language Ryan didn’t know but with the universal energy of someone losing an argument.

A black car rolled slowly up to the kerb.

It stopped.

The door opened.

Zara stepped out and Ryan forgot what he’d been looking at.

She was in a deep burgundy dress — different from the coat he’d bought her but the same color, which he suspected wasn’t a coincidence.

The dress was fitted, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic, the hem falling just above the knee. Her hair was down and slightly curled, and she’d done something with it that made it look like she’d done nothing with it, which Ryan now understood was the more difficult achievement.

Heels that added three inches she didn’t need. A small dark clutch.

The car pulled away and she looked toward the entrance and then found him standing to the side and her face did a thing that Ryan felt in his chest before he’d processed it — a brightness, immediate and unguarded, the expression of being genuinely glad to see a specific person and hasn’t yet decided to manage that.

She walked toward him.

The people near the entrance looked. Not all of them, but enough — the unconscious gravitational pull of her.

She was visibly aware of it and visibly tired of it, the slight tension in her shoulders that appeared whenever a stranger’s gaze landed and stayed too long.

Ryan moved to meet her, putting himself between her and most of the looking.

She reached him.

He looked at her for a second.

"You," he said. "You look gorgeous."

She looked down briefly at the dress, then back up. "Really — I hope the dress isn’t too—"

"It’s perfect," Ryan said.

She smiled. Full and warm, the one with nothing behind it except that she meant it.

Then her eyes moved over him — the dark suit, the navy shirt, the coat — and she tilted her head with the mock-formal gravity of a judge reaching a verdict.

"You look quite dashing yourself, sir."

Ryan looked down at his clothes and back up with exaggerated indifference. "Oh. This old thing."

She laughed, and he held the door open for her and they went in.

---

The reservation produced their table in under two minutes, a corner booth with enough privacy to have an actual conversation and enough of the room visible that neither of them felt buried.

The lighting was warm. The menu arrived and was the one that described things briefly and confidently, no lengthy justifications.

They ordered drinks and looked at the menu and Zara said she had no idea what half of it was and Ryan said he had no idea what any of it was and they agreed to ask the waiter, who explained things with patient enthusiasm. The waiter seemed to genuinely loved food and had found the correct profession.

"The duck," Zara said.

"Same," Ryan said. He handed back the menus. "And we’ll figure out the rest as we go."

The waiter approved of this approach and left.

Zara put her elbows on the table and looked at Ryan. "Okay."

"Okay," he said.

"I feel like we’ve spent a lot of time in situations," she said. "Galleries and parties and shopping and running from people with cameras."

"We have."

"And I don’t actually know very much about you." She picked up her drink. "I know you’re from the Bronx, you hate bad art, you’re building a company, you once had four hundred dollars and now you apparently don’t, and you’re impossible to read half the time." She looked at him. "That’s the file."

"That’s a reasonable file," Ryan said.

"So fill in the rest."

"Where do you want to start."

She thought about it. "What were you like as a kid."

Ryan considered this. "Quiet. Observant. My mum used to say I watched things too long before I got involved in them, like I was running probability calculations before I committed to anything."

"Were you."

"Probably. I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. I just didn’t see the point in getting into something if the odds weren’t right."

"And now?"

"Now I calculate faster." He sipped his drink. "What about you. What were you like as a kid."

"Loud," she said immediately. "Embarrassingly loud. I had opinions about everything and I shared all of them constantly. My dad called me his little parliament."

Ryan smiled. "What happened."

"The world happened." She turned her glass on the table. "The older I got the more I realized that being loud meant being heard, and being heard meant being seen, and being seen meant—"

"People wanting things from you."

"Exactly." She looked at the table. "So I got quieter. Selectively. I stopped giving opinions to people who’d use them to take up more of my space."

"But you still have them."

"I have so many," she said. "I’m full of opinions. It’s a problem."

"Give me one," Ryan said. "Something you’d normally not say."

She looked at him.

"The fashion industry," she said, "produces more miserable people than almost any other industry on earth and has collectively decided to call that misery aesthetic. And everyone inside it knows it and nobody says it because the moment you say it out loud you’ve broken the spell and the spell is the entire product."

Ryan looked at her. "Do you still want to be in it."