TANISHA
He gestured to the menu with an easy flick of his fingers.
“Please,” he said. “Order a drink. Any drink.”
I almost said no out of reflex. Reflexes I’d developed from years of living within budgets, schedules, and other people’s tempers. But tonight had already gone so far off-script that resistance felt ceremonial at best. If I was going to get through this with my sanity intact, I needed something stronger than willpower.
So I opened the menu. And promptly almost choked on my own saliva. I’d known this place was expensive in an abstract, Manhattan-is-expensive kind of way. But seeing the numbers printed so casually next to words like ‘by the glass’ felt violent. The cheapest wine cost a whooping one thousand dollars. That was almost equivalent to my monthly house rent.
I stal
