I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don novel · Chapter 1 of 76
Chapter 1: Charge It to Me
At her worst, rich girl Lucia makes a classmate thank the floor for a desk, sends back an omelet four times, then offers to buy a stranger's grandfather a new heart for the price of a year of his company.
The morning I bought my boyfriend, I'd already made a girl say thank you to the floor.
It was a Tuesday in October of my junior year.
The girl was a sophomore in my costume studio, and she had the desk by the window.
I wanted the desk by the window.
"Three hundred dollars," I said. "You can have mine by the radiator."
She looked up from her muslin with a pin between her teeth.
"It's just a desk," she said. "I like the light."
"Everybody likes the light. That's why it costs three hundred."
She didn't answer.
I laid three hundred-dollar bills on her cutting mat.
She didn't touch them, so I laid three more.
Everyone in the studio was suddenly very busy measuring things.
"Say thank you," I said.
"Thank you," she said, to the mat.
"They can't hear you in the back."
"Thank you," she said, louder, to the floor.
She wouldn't look up. I took that as good manners.
Then I carried my bag to the window desk and sat down in the light I'd paid for.
My father's name was on a brass plaque in the lobby downstairs.
MORELLI CONSTRUCTION, BUILDERS OF THIS HALL.
I walked past it every morning.
At eleven-thirty I went to the dining hall in the student union, and Serena Lazzaro came with me.
Serena lived four doors down from me on the third floor of the dorm.
She'd carried my bags since freshman year, and she laughed at everything I said a half second before I finished saying it.
She called us best friends.
I never called us anything.
I just paid.
Two spring breaks in Cabo. Every bar tab. The black dress she wore to her cousin's wedding.
Her father had money, and he kept it.
Mine handed it to me, and I handed it out.
Seven years later I would kneel at her feet with pins in my mouth, and I'd have earned that too.
At the omelet station I ordered spinach and feta, no onion.
The woman behind the counter was about fifty, in a hairnet.
Her name tag had a name on it that I had never once used.
The first omelet had onion in it.
I slid the plate back across the counter without a word.
Serena laughed.
The second omelet came out with the feta cold in the middle.
I slid it back.
Serena laughed.
The woman's hands were shaking by the third one.
"It's overcooked," I said.
"Miss, it's the same as the others."
"Then the others were wrong too."
Behind me a line of students had stopped talking.
The fourth omelet was perfect.
I took one bite, and then I opened my wallet.
I put a hundred-dollar bill on the counter.
"For the trouble."
"We can't take tips, miss."
"Then it isn't a tip."
She looked at the bill for a long time.
Then she took it and put it in her apron pocket without looking at me.
I'd known she would.
Everybody did.
It was the one thing I was ever completely sure of.
"Luce, you're a menace," Serena said, and linked her arm through mine.
I took that as a compliment.
I never ate in the dining hall.
I carried my tray out through the quad to the arts building, and up to the back stairwell between the third floor and the fourth.
Nobody used it.
There was a wooden bench on the landing, under a window that didn't open.
It was the one place on campus where nobody was watching to see what I'd do next.
Serena waved me off at the door and went to her class.
Damiano Santangelo was the only person in the building I couldn't price.
He was an architecture student on a full scholarship, and he waited tables five nights a week.
For a month, he and I had been the last two people on the studio floor every night.
He built a library out of basswood, one tiny stair at a time.
I built a corset for a play nobody came to.
He'd walk over to borrow my glue and then stay an hour.
He made fun of my radio, and I made fun of his terrible coffee.
He walked me back to my dorm three nights in a row and never once tried to kiss me.
I had a theory about that.
He was waiting for me to name the price.
That day I came around the landing with my tray, and he was already on the bench.
He had his phone in one hand and his other hand over his face.
"Nonno, no," he was saying. "We'll find it. Don't you sign anything. I'll find it."
He hung up and saw me.
His eyes were red.
He didn't try to hide it, which I hadn't expected.
His grandfather needed a new heart valve.
The insurance covered almost nothing, and the hospital wanted eighty-six thousand dollars before they'd put him on the schedule.
Damiano told me all of it in about two minutes, because he couldn't stop.
I sat down on the bench beside him and put my tray on my knees.
My trust paid me an allowance every quarter, and I'd never come close to spending all of it.
I'd spent that morning on a desk and an omelet.
I knew exactly what I was going to say.
I'd known for only a moment.
"I'll pay for it," I said.
He stared at me.
"I'll pay for it," I said again, faster, before he could tell me no. "All of it. If you'll be my boyfriend for a year."
I said it like a business deal so it would sound like one.
So when he said yes, I'd know why.
So I'd never have to hope.
His mouth started moving.
My ears were ringing too loud to hear a word of it.
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