Chapter 46: The Belrose Auditorium Or Building A Website During Someone Else’s Ego Trip

Damon had not made a single move on Marguerite Hale.

Not a singly one like leaning closer, lingering word much the lowering of his voice the way he had with Agrat at dinner the night before. He had sat in that chair for twenty-five minutes being exactly what she wanted him to be: quiet, competent, willing to take BUS 100 without crying about the workload, and otherwise keeping his dick out of the conversation.

Because he already knew what she hated.

Performative Boys.

That turn-off had been sitting right there on her panel like a warning label.

Every idiot who had ever leaned across her desk, dropped his voice half an octave, smiled too smoothly, and tried charming his way around some university rule had probably been dead to Marguerite before he finished his second sentence.

Trying too obviously with a woman like that was not seduction; but he would’ve been basically handing her a signed confession that said Hello, I am an amateur and I think I’m slick.

Damon was still an amateur.

He just did not need to advertise it to her although he would if she were into it. Although she liked taking First Times, that was different now, wasn’t it?

The funniest part was that Damon had probably already made the best move available without intending to. He had shown up, answered her properly, taken the harder class, and left without trying to impress her.

Competence sat right at the top of Marguerite’s turn-ons, and unlike flirting, competence became less convincing the second a man started announcing it.

So he would leave her alone...

...for now.

Marguerite was the kind of woman who would smell a performance before the idiot performing it reached his second sentence, and Damon had no intention of becoming another freshman anecdote she complained about over coffee.

Slow suited her better anyway.

Annoyingly, now that he actually had something worth waiting for, patience suddenly sounded less useless.

Besides, he had no excuse to keep appearing in her office unless something actually went wrong, and deliberately fucking up his schedule just to visit a hot advisor was the kind of horny stupidity even Damon wanted to believe he was above.

He gave himself until midterms before making any promises, self-awareness did not require commitment.

’Look at me. Strategic. Responsible. Yet still thinking about how I will break into her house window a few days from now.’

By two in the afternoon, he was sitting in the back third of a hall big enough to host a small war, one of several hundred freshmen packed into stadium seating beneath a domed ceiling with Blackwood’s crest glowing gold behind the stage.

A brass plaque by the entrance had caught his attention twice on the way in.

THE BELROSE AUDITORIUM

Of course it was.

Old man Belrose’s name was apparently structural at this point. Damon had spent one dinner learning that Dear Ol’ Belrose’s grandsons could barely survive a wine bottle and attractive catering staff without producing enough gossip to feed Manhattan for a week, yet here the family name was carved into another expensive building like nobody had ever heard anything embarrassing about them.

Money really was incredible.

’Make enough of it and eventually even your relatives’ stupidity became architecture.’

Onstage, the Dean of Admissions was forty minutes into what had allegedly been a twenty-minute welcome.

Harold Winthrope he was called. he had silver hair swept back with serious dedication, a suit expensive enough to make half the freshmen sit straighter, and the unmistakable confidence of a man who had spent decades believing everybody was delighted he had entered the room.

He had opened with a joke about Blackwood’s football team but nobody laughed, so naturally he had tried another version ten minutes later.

That one died too.

Damon almost admired the persistence.

Persistence in a dean was just being bad at reading a room and calling it leadership.

"That," Winthrope was saying as he gestured toward a slide full of percentages Damon had already forgotten, "is what separates a Blackwood education from every other institution claiming to prepare young minds for the real world. You are not merely students. You are the future stewards of industries that don’t yet exist."

Some girl several rows below was nodding like there would be a quiz afterward. Damon watched her for a second, then looked away before her enthusiasm started becoming contagious. He did not need a new personality.

He already had too many.

He had already noticed three or four guys scattered through the hall sitting painfully straight and laughing half a second too early whenever Winthrope attempted humor. One of them had even stood during the Q&A and somehow transformed a question into a two-minute advertisement for his father’s position on some board Damon vaguely recognized.

Winthrope loved him.

Damon had spent enough time around actual powerful people to know the loudest guy in the room was usually just the one enjoying himself the most. The people with actual power usually did not need to keep reminding everybody they had it because, eventually, somebody else would do the reminding for them.

The board-member kid had laughed at every bad joke, nodded at every sentence, and managed to mention his father twice without anyone asking. Another guy near the aisle kept checking an expensive watch like the watch itself might eventually notice and adopt him.

Damon almost felt bad for them.

Then Winthrope clicked to another slide titled THE BLACKWOOD DIFFERENCE, and Damon decided he had donated enough of his afternoon to another man’s ego.

He opened his MacBook.

He was in the back third of a giant auditorium with several hundred students, not hiding porn under a math textbook. He rested the laptop on his thighs, lowered the brightness a little because the guy behind him had wandering eyes, and opened the blank page he’d been thinking about since morning.

’Okay. Website. Let’s make money before this guy reaches slide fifty.’

The name immediately pissed him off.

His first idea sounded like an escort agency, the second was like a perfume company, the third sounded suspiciously like one of those fake luxury brands selling sunglasses on Instagram for ninety percent off.

He deleted it.

’How the fuck is naming a site for horny rich women harder than getting into Blackwood?’

Another idea went in.

No.

Another.

Worse.

One sounded like a dating app for divorced bankers and Damon sat there staring at it long enough to become offended with himself.

Eventually he landed on something short and neutral. Not sexy, not romantic and not so obvious. Something that could sit on a woman’s phone screen while she was having dinner with her husband and nobody glancing over would think anything of it.

That felt right.

Discretion was not writing SECRET MILF FUCKING SERVICE in a prettier font.

The landing page came next.

Photos were going to matter eventually because, obviously, the women needed to know what they were getting. Damon was many things, but he was not delusional enough to think wealthy women were going to throw money at a black rectangle and a mysterious paragraph because his vibes were immaculate.

His face, though?

Absolutely fucking not.

’Body, yes. Face, no.’

He could already imagine some divorce lawyer standing in court with a blown-up printout of his torso while somebody’s furious husband stared at him from across the room.

"Exhibit C: the reason Mr. Thompson stopped sleeping properly."

’Yeah. No thanks.’

He briefly considered one of those dark shirtless silhouettes websites loved using, added it, stared at it for three seconds, then deleted the thing so quickly he nearly hit the wrong key.

’No. Protein powder and herpes.’

That was not the image.

These women had seen attractive men before... rich women probably had trainers, security, assistants, coworkers, pool guys, drivers, and whatever other handsome guys who naturally spawned near their money.

The site could not just yell [LOOK, ABS.]

That was lazy... it also needed to make them curious enough to stay without making them feel like they had opened the wrong tab in public.

He picked a dark background, simple text, nothing loud. The first draft looked too empty, so he added more. Then it looked like some crypto scam trying to sell women emotional Bitcoin, so half of it disappeared again.

Eventually he wrote: [Discretion guaranteed.]

Fine.

Then: [By application only.]

Better.

Then, after sitting there chewing the inside of his cheek for a while: [For women who have stopped waiting.]

Damon stared at that one.

’Okay. This shit is actually really hard.’

He reread it.

Still hard.

He left it.

Maybe because it sounded good. Maybe because he was eighteen and any sentence that sounded vaguely dangerous got bonus points. Either way, it stayed.