Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 19: Underground

The subway hit Zara like a sensory memo she hadn’t received in years.

Ryan watched her take it in as they came through the turnstiles — the particular underground smell, not quite bad, just aggressively present, the distant rumble of something arriving somewhere else in the system, the acoustic specific to tiled tunnels where every sound bounced twice before it reached you.

She looked around the platform with the careful attention of someone in a foreign country trying not to look like a tourist.

"It’s louder than I remembered," she said.

"It gets louder."

A man at the far end of the platform was having what appeared to be a serious disagreement with a hot dog. Not with another person — with the hot dog itself. He was holding it at arm’s length and speaking to it in measured, disappointed tones.

Zara stared.

"Don’t make eye contact," Ryan said pleasantly.

"Is he—"

"Yeah."

"With a hot dog."

"New York," Ryan said, by way of complete explanation.

Zara looked at the man one more time, then forward at the tracks, then at Ryan, with an expression that said she was revising certain assumptions about how she’d been spending her Tuesday mornings for the past however many years.

The train arrived with the specific violence of sound that the subway reserved for arrivals — the screech, the gust of warm stale air, the doors opening with a mechanical thud.

They got on.

---

It was busy enough that they stood, fingers on the overhead bar, close enough together that the movement of the car made the proximity occasionally closer.

Zara looked around the car with the same careful attention she’d given the platform.

Across from them a woman was asleep upright with the practiced commitment of a professional, chin perfectly balanced, not moving with the car’s motion so much as existing independently of it.

Next to her a kid, maybe seven, was standing on the seat looking at Ryan and Zara with the open unfiltered stare that only children and very confident adults could pull off.

Ryan looked back at the kid.

The kid held it.

Ryan looked away first.

"That child just won a staring contest with me," he said quietly.

Zara glanced over. The kid was now looking at something else entirely, completely unbothered. "You let a seven year old beat you."

"I didn’t ’let’ him. He just — he had nothing behind his eyes. No self consciousness. You can’t win against that."

Zara smiled at the overhead bar. The train swayed and she shifted her weight, her shoulder briefly against his.

"So the fashion world," Ryan said.

She glanced at him. "What about it."

"What’s it actually like."

She was quiet a moment. The train rattled through a dark stretch of tunnel.

"Loud," she said finally. "Constantly loud. Everyone’s always saying something — about what you wore, what you should wear, what you wore last season, who you were seen with, who you shouldn’t be seen with." She shifted her grip on the bar. "And it’s fast. Things are relevant for about four minutes and then they’re not and if you’re not already onto the next thing you’re behind."

"Does that bother you?"

"Some days." She looked at the doors across the car. "I got into it because I genuinely loved clothes. The way they communicate something about a person before they open their mouth. The craft of it." She paused. "That part still excites me. The rest of it—" she made a vague gesture with her free hand, "—is just the job."

"The industry eating the thing you loved."

She looked at him. "Yeah. Exactly that."

"That’s what you were talking about back there," Ryan said. "About artists staying hungry because of something internal. You were talking about yourself."

Zara held his gaze for a moment. Something moved in her expression — the specific feeling of being read accurately and not being entirely sure how you feel about it.

"Maybe," she said.

The train slowed into a station.

A large man got on with a bicycle that absolutely was not supposed to be on the train, maneuvering it through the doors with calm, you can tell he has never once been successfully stopped.

He positioned it in the center of the car, nodded at nobody in particular, and stood beside it with his arms folded as the doors closed.

Ryan and Zara looked at the bicycle. At the man. At each other.

"Completely normal," Ryan said.

"Completely," Zara agreed.

---

They got seats at the next stop when a family of four got off together, and settled into them, it came with the satisfaction of subway seating that was never guaranteed and therefore always felt slightly earned.

Zara crossed her legs and turned slightly toward him. "Can I ask you something."

"Go ahead."

"At the gallery. When you were going around the room making your connections." She studied him. "Were you working at me specifically or did I just happen to be there."

Ryan looked at her. Considering the honest answer, and what form of it to give.

"You happened to be there," he said.

"So you really just randomly insulted art I like."

"Yes, and somehow that got you to buy me a drink."

She laughed, short and genuine. "It did." She looked at her hands a moment. "Most people try to impress me."

"I know. I watched them for about twenty minutes."

She raised an eyebrow. "You watched me for twenty minutes."

"Studied the situation," Ryan said.

"Same thing."

"Is it?"

"You’re strange," she said. Not as an insult — more like a classification. Like she was putting him in a category that didn’t have many occupants.

"I’ve been told."

The train rocked through another curve. Outside the windows was the dark wall of the tunnel, the occasional light strobing through.

"The fashion thing," Ryan said. "The craft part that still excites you. What does that look like now?"

Zara thought about it. "Styling sometimes. When I have control over it — not when a brand is telling me exactly what to wear and how to stand and what expression to make. When it’s actually my choices." She looked at the middle distance. "I’ve been thinking about a line. My own. Small, nothing massive. Just — things I’d actually want to wear."

"Why haven’t you."

"Because the industry is loud," she said. "And when something is loud for long enough you start to mistake the noise for your own thoughts."

Ryan nodded slowly. Didn’t say anything to that, just let it sit where she’d put it.

She glanced at him. "What."

"Nothing. Just — I understand that specific problem."

She held his gaze a moment. Then looked away.

---

The weird guy, the one on every subway - appeared two stops before Madison Avenue.

He got on at 68th, wearing a fur coat that had seen better decades, a hat that Ryan couldn’t categorize, and the energy of someone who had made a decision.

He looked around the car, clocked Zara immediately — most people did, even when they were trying not to — and made his way over with the confidence of a man who had never once been told no and appeared to be genuinely unaware that it was an option.

He positioned himself directly in front of them.

"Excuse me," he said to Zara, voice carrying further than necessary. "Are you — you’re her aren’t you. From the internet."

Zara produced a smile that Ryan was learning to identify — warm, practiced, the one she wore like armor. "I don’t know about that."

"No, you are," the man said, more certain now. "My daughter follows you. She’s going to lose her mind." He produced a phone from somewhere inside the fur coat. "Can I get a picture, she would absolutely—"

"Of course," Zara said, the smile not moving.

The man took the photo, and as he did one could see he was someone unfamiliar with his own camera app, turning the phone several times. Ryan reached over quietly and tapped the actual shutter button for him.

The man looked at the result, looked at Zara, looked at Ryan.

"Is this your boyfriend," he asked Zara, pointing at Ryan with the phone.

"He’s—" Zara started.

"Yes," Ryan said.

Zara looked at him sideways.

"My daughter will love this," the man said, examining the photo again. He then looked at Ryan with sudden focus. "You look familiar. Are you also on the internet?"

"No," Ryan said.

"He has a face for the internet," the man told Zara seriously.

"I’ll pass that along," she said.

The man nodded, satisfied, pocketed his phone, and made his way back down the car to a seat, apparently done with the entire interaction. He did not look back.

Ryan and Zara sat in silence for a second.

"You said yes," she said, not looking at him.

"It was faster."

"You said yes," she said again, the same tone, but the armor smile was completely gone now, replaced by something she apparently couldn’t fully suppress.

"Hate to say it but if we said otherwise, a sweet moment could’ve quickly turned distasteful," Ryan said. "Now we only get to know him as a good dad, not the old guy who hit on you."

"So it was for the best."

"Entirely."

Zara shook her head slowly, looking at the doors, and Ryan could see from the side of her face that she was actively refusing to find it as logical as she did.

The train began slowing.

*77th Street.

One more stop.

---

They came up out of the subway at 86th and walked the two blocks south in the pale afternoon light, the neighborhood shifting around them as they went — the particular Madison Avenue energy, different from the rest of the city, quieter and more deliberate, the storefronts spaced generously, windows displaying single items in ways that communicated exactly how much they cost without mentioning numbers.

Zara moved differently here. Not more comfortable exactly — she’d been comfortable the whole time — but more purposeful, like a musician picking up an instrument they knew well.

She stopped in front of the first window and looked at it with the focused attention she’d given the paintings at the gallery, except this time there was no ambivalence in it.

This was her actual language.

Ryan stood beside her and looked at the same window.

"Okay," he said. "Educate me."

Zara glanced at him, and for the first time since the subway platform something in her expression fully relaxed — the practiced composure that she wore in public softening into something that looked like genuine enthusiasm, barely contained.

"First lesson," she said, turning toward the door. "Don’t talk. Just look."

She pushed the door open and walked in.

Ryan followed her, the warm air of the store meeting them at the threshold, and thought that this was probably the most expensive education he was ever going to receive.

He was fine with that.