AVA'S TERMS

CHAPTER 5: MY CALL

He hadn't answered, and the car kept moving, through streets that got quieter and greener, past a gate I recognized from three weeks ago, toward the house I had absolutely no intention of walking back into tonight.

I sat up straighter and looked at him.

"Steven. Stop the car."

He raised an eyebrow, unbothered, like he'd been expecting a different kind of protest, the kind that dissolves two streets later. "Ava."

"I mean it. Have the driver take me home."

Something shifted behind his eyes, not anger, more like recalibration, a man realizing the evening wasn't going to end the way he'd already decided it would. "I thought —"

"You thought wrong." I kept my voice level, though my pulse hadn't caught up to my resolve yet. "We had one dinner. That was the deal you made in your office this afternoon, in those exact words. Dinner, and you'd fund the project. You never said anything about after."

"I didn't think I needed to spell it out."

"Then we have a communication problem, because I meant exactly what I said. One dinner. Not an open invitation to wherever the night decides to go."

He studied me for a long moment, and I watched him do the thing I'd watched him do across the boardroom table that morning: recalculate, fast, and not entirely unhappily. "You negotiated a full investment out of me over a proposal you delivered without notes," he said slowly, "and now you're renegotiating the terms of a car ride."

"I'm consistent. You should factor that into your due diligence."

That got a real laugh out of him, short, surprised, nothing like the smile he wore in meetings. He knocked twice on the partition and gave the driver a different address in a voice that had lost most of its earlier certainty.

We rode for a while without talking. The privacy glass was up; the city slid by gold and unbothered on the other side of the window. I could feel him watching me instead of it.

"Can I ask you something," he said finally, "without it counting as an attempt to get you back to my place?"

"Depends on the question."

"Why stop it here. Last night you didn't exactly need convincing."

I considered how much of the honest answer he'd actually earned. Not much yet. But some.

"Because last night I didn't know I'd be pitching to you the next morning," I said. "Tonight I know exactly who you are, and I'm also the woman who's about to run a project with your money in it. I'm not spending the first month of that arrangement wondering whether people are being kind to me because of the work or because of what happened in your bed. I'd rather not find out the hard way."

He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again the amusement had thinned into something more careful. "That's... fair. More than fair."

"I know."

"I wasn't trying to make it feel like the deal came with conditions."

"I know that too. But you didn't exactly ask, either. You just assumed the night kept going the way it started. I'm telling you it doesn't work like that. Not with me."

He nodded slowly, and for once there was nothing performed in it: no smirk waiting in the wings, no line loaded and ready. Just a man taking in information and actually adjusting to it, which I suspected was rarer for him than he'd ever admit.

The car pulled up outside my building a few minutes later. Neither of us moved right away.

"So," he said. "Where does this leave things. Professionally, I mean."

"Exactly where the contract says it does. You're my investor. I'm going to build something you'll be glad you funded."

"And the rest of it?"

"The rest of it isn't part of the deal," I said. "If it happens, it happens because I decide it does. Not because you drove me somewhere and left me without an exit."

He looked at me for a long moment, and something about the streetlight through the window made his expression harder to read than it had been all night.

"I can work with that," he said finally.

"I didn't ask if you could work with it."

The corner of his mouth moved. "No. You didn't."

I reached for the door handle. His voice caught me before I got it open.

"Ava."

I looked back.

"Goodnight," he said. Nothing loaded into it this time. Just that.

"Goodnight, Steven."

I got out, and I didn't look back at the car, and I let myself feel, for exactly as long as it took to reach my door, how much it had cost me to mean every word of it.

Upstairs, I stood in the shower a long time, longer than I needed to, and let the water run hot until the tightness in my shoulders finally let go.

It would have been easier to go with him. Easier, and simpler, and exactly the kind of story I'd have regretted telling myself in the morning: that I'd let one good dinner and one very good argument undo a line I'd drawn on purpose. I hadn't come to LA to be easy to get. I'd come to build something, and Steven Wolfe's money was now part of that, whether either of us was fully prepared yet for what that meant.

I turned off the water and stood dripping in the quiet of my own apartment, in my own space, on my own terms, and told myself that was the whole point.

I was almost convinced.