“Do you want me to control you?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Do you want to control me?”
I shook my head again.
He lay down next to me. We were connected at a hundred different points. Slowly, his hands ran up and down my sides, warming my skin, electrifying it. I started to feel myself losing even more consciousness. I was trying to say words to him, to keep talking about the voices I heard in my head whenever I tried to get back to myself. About how difficult it was to get rid of my patients whenever I had tried to have sex. Before. Before the one time that Noah and I had been together. But I couldn’t. Not anymore. Every place on my body that he touched had become aroused. My skin was going to orgasm. Not inside of me, not up high where it was dark and oceanic and the waves of blood were pounding-but on the surface of my body. My shoulders, my neck, the small of my back, behind my knees, the tops of my thighs, the soles of my feet: all of these places were humming with sensation. Setting my body reverberating. The words were gone in the feeling. The voices had been drowned out by the simple sound of Noah’s breath, more hurried as the time went by. Matched by my breath in my own ears. Even more rushed than his.
“Morgan,” he said, so low that I wasn’t sure I’d heard it until he said it again. “Morgan.” As if he had found something he had known once but had lost.
Thirty-Seven
We lay on the couch afterward, wrapped in each other, stuck together from our sweat and the heat we were still generating. He kept kissing me. And I didn’t stop him. For a long time, I floated on his lips until the sensations calmed and I remembered who I was. And who I was with.
“If you will stay out of my head,” I said, pulling back, ending the kiss, not even realizing I had answered a question he had not asked out loud.
He nodded. Not in assent. Just in acknowledgment that he had heard me.
“That’s wrong, Morgan. You need me in your head. You need to be able to talk to me. You need me to be able to listen to you.”
“You can’t not push, can you?”
“You didn’t mind my pushing ten minutes ago.”
“Don’t,” I said. Despite his levity, I was scared. And, of course, he knew it. So he moved away, reached for the long-abandoned drink, took a long pull, then asked, “What is this, by the way?”
“Vodka, ice, lime juice.”
He nodded and took another long sip. “Not bad. See, you can cook.”
I smiled despite myself.
“Speaking of food…” Noah stood, pulled on his pants and went into my kitchen. I found him there after getting my robe. He had just opened the stove and, laughing, was pulling out the pathetic, once-frozen, now dried-out chicken entrée. He threw it into the garbage and said, “Real food, Morgan. You need to eat real food.”
He returned to the hallway and retrieved a plastic shopping bag that I hadn’t even seen him walk in with.
Back in the kitchen he withdrew packages and lined them up on the counter. Then he opened the cabinets and took out bowls and mixing spoons, a frying pan and a pot.
He put water on to boil. Cut two of the three lemons he’d brought and squeezed them into a measuring cup.
“Strainer?” he asked without turning around.
“Cabinet under the silverware drawer.”
I wanted to fight him. To get him out of there. And, just as strongly, I was so happy to sit down at the kitchen table and watch this impossibly sweet man cook for me that I didn’t know how to stop smiling. Just for tonight, I thought to myself, I will forget about what Nina warned me about; I will not worry about what is going to happen between Noah and me, not worry about the murders and the newspapers and the women in the Scarlet Society.
He opened a container of cream and poured it into a saucepan. After turning on the flame, he stirred it slowly. Watched it. Stirred it some more. After another minute, he poured in the lemon juice, stirred the liquids together, swirling them with a wire whisk, and then turned the flame down.
Listing the ingredients he assumed I had, he watched me as I pulled them out of the cabinets. Then, moving over to the sink, he unwrapped a package of fresh scallops and washed them in the sink, gently, careful not to bruise the white flesh. Just as tenderly, he patted them down with a paper towel. His long fingers picked up one glistening scallop at a time and slowly dredged it, giving it a fine coat of flour, salt and pepper. With a knife, he sliced off a knob of butter and set it in the pan to melt.
While he waited, he opened a bottle of wine and poured us each a glass. By then, the butter was sizzling and Noah added the scallops to the pan. His whole body was intent on cooking this meal. The same way it had been focused on every inch of our bodies that had been touching fifteen minutes before.
The dry, crisp white wine he’d brought was an excellent accompaniment to the delicately lemon-flavored pasta and sautéed scallops. The tastes worked off one another- the buttery and salty flesh of the seafood giving up their perfume, softened by pasta coated with the lush cream, spiked with the tart lemon juice. For a few minutes, I didn’t say anything but just luxuriated in the food.
Mixed in with my admiration of the detective’s skill was a little resentment. I didn’t want to admire him. Or look at his too blue eyes and strong cheekbones, or watch his hands bringing forkfuls of food up to his mouth and remember-
“Why are you really here?” I asked, knowing, sadly, what I was doing. Sabotaging a lovely night. But I didn’t have any choice, did I?
He frowned. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to talk about that until after I’d made coffee. Want to take back the question? You’re allowed to do that, you know. It’s part of the rules when I make dinner. People who ruin the mood are allowed to retract their words. You have thirty seconds.” He looked at his wristwatch.
“Wish I could. Why, Noah?”
“I came here hoping to find out that your visit to me at the station was a personal one. That after seeing me at dinner last week, you’d decided that you’d been wrong last June. That you regretted having stood me up and wanted to make amends and start over.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t personal. I’m sorry.”
“Are you, really?” His voice was suddenly edged with sarcasm.
I hated hearing it and yet was relieved. I was back in control.
“Okay.” He gave a small sigh as if starting down this path was saddening him. “Why did you run out of the precinct then? You obviously came all the way downtown to see me. What made you change your mind?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, Noah. I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t?”
Damn, I’d given too much away with one word. I’d forgotten how sharp he was, like a magnet that picked up the slightest sliver of iron from a bushel of wood.
“We’ve followed Betsy Young. We know she’s been to your office. I should have realized she wasn’t just there to interview you. So she’s a patient.”
“No. I don’t know Betsy Young. I told you that last week.” I was confused. Why had he brought up the reporter now?
“You told me she’d interviewed you.”
“Right. Over the phone.”
“You never saw her, never met her?”
“No, Noah. I already told you that.”
“If that’s true, why did your eyes widen a mile when you saw her in the hall?”
I didn’t say anything. I was too surprised. Betsy Young? No. The woman Noah had been escorting out of his office was Liz-without-a-last-name, from the Monday night Scarlet Society group, albeit with different hair.
Finally, I got it.
So that was why Betsy Young had called me to get a quote for her article on the first killing. She hadn’t thought of me because of my involvement in the Magdalene Murders at all.