If my daughter could do that, then how hard could this be for me?
I imagined Cleo. Her mouth in a tortured O, her eyes wide with some kind of terror. I didn’t know where she was or what was happening to her, but I could conjecture. I knew the kinds of sadistic things a man could do to a woman if he wanted to.
I tried to hear her talking to me, telling me how to act this part. What would she say? What kind of advice would she offer? She’d tell me to take my time. To be the honey that Dulcie had been. That her clients would like honey: heavy, sweet, golden, viscous liquid.
I reached out and touched the hairs on the back of Judas’s hand. Lightly. The way Cleo might. Not the way I ever would.
“I hope you aren’t too disappointed,” I said softly. “I know you were expecting Cleo.”
“Well, I’m certainly surprised.” But had he seemed surprised when he met me? I didn’t think so. Perhaps he meant when Gil had first told him, before he’d brought him over to meet me. But even if Gil had just told him, only a few moments had passed.
On the other hand, if he was involved in Cleo’s disappearance, he wouldn’t be surprised.
“I’ve been seeing Cleo for two years. I didn’t know she was taking a vacation. Last time she did that she told me in advance. Why wouldn’t she have told me this time?”
I gave a shrug. “I don’t know.”
I try to teach my patients the power of not always answering a question. There is no rule of the universe that you must respond to what people ask. You have every right to hold your thoughts inside and not reveal them. In a time when revelation was fodder for the constant news-and-talk-show-type entertainment, questions were usually answered. But in real life you didn’t have to do that. And I didn’t. And Judas, as I had hoped he would, just kept talking.
“But I can’t stay mad at her for too long.”
“Have you ever been mad at her?” I put my hand on his.
To anyone watching, it would look like my fingers were courting his hand, but I had the pad of my forefinger on his pulse and I was feeling the steady flow of his blood through his veins. My own, not very accurate lie detector test. It would never, like its more scientific sibling, be admissible in a court of law, but I knew that it was a good way to judge. When people are telling the truth their heart rate tends to stay consistent, but when they lie, especially about something that might be making them nervous, the rate can speed up.
“I don’t know if it’s fair to talk about her,” he said.
His pulse seemed slightly faster.
“I don’t mind talking about Cleo,” I told him. “She’s very special. I don’t expect to take her place. Just fill in a little while she’s gone if that’s what you’d like.”
“Fill in.” He gave me a wicked grin. And then it disappeared. “It’s not just what we do together that matters to me. It’s that she doesn’t judge me.”
His pulse was definitely more rapid now.
“There isn’t anything to judge. What makes us happy, what gives us pleasure, isn’t about other people’s opinions. It’s not up for debate. We’re really fragile inside our skin, and the reasons that some things excite us and others don’t is a very mysterious science.”
He was nodding, but I was horrified. I had just slipped back into jargon. Luckily, he not only didn’t seem to mind, he actually became more attentive. But I had to be careful. I knew Cleo was smart and knew that her clients would expect someone who was equally intelligent. But I also knew there was a difference between pleasing someone and pandering to their desires, and being their therapist.
“You know, this is ridiculous, but I actually missed her last week. And it surprised me.”
I nodded.
“Do you think it’s strange? That I could get attached to someone I see once a week?”
I almost laughed and I might have if my heart wasn’t pounding in my chest, because he had just reached across the table and pushed my blouse off my shoulder.
“No. I think you must be a very sensitive man. Of course Cleo can mean something to you.”
I had no idea what to do. Gil had said that these meetings were “dates” in order to give both the client and Cleo’s girls the opportunity to see if they wanted to do business together. All the girls had twenty-four-hour veto power. Cleo relied on them to follow their instincts about the men they met. She didn’t want anyone to go with a man she didn’t feel comfortable with. Certain girls didn’t mind going with strangers, but they were the ones who usually did the “outside” dates and trips.
I wouldn’t have to go to a room with any of these men; just meet them and get a sense of who they were and see if I could pick up on anything untoward, any hint that they were capable of harming Cleo. Then Gil would take it from there and go to the police with one name.
If, indeed, she was even missing. If she had not just decided to run away from her life and not tell anyone. The idea kept repeating like the notes of a song you can’t get out of your head.
Cleo was a very confused young woman in love with a man who had issues with her profession, a man she couldn’t make love to, and at the same time she was writing a book that she knew was going to create havoc and possibly cause a lot of pain. She was also a woman with two boyfriends, neither of whom, it seemed, knew anything about the other.
Judas trailed his fingers across the inside of my wrist and up my arm. It was an unfamiliar sensation. I wasn’t used to the feeling of having a man touch me like this.
For the last few years of my marriage to Mitch and all the nights we held each other, there had been love and there had been comfort, but there had not been much more. And now a total stranger was making me feel something that I hadn’t remembered forgetting.
Skin is alive. It breathes. It is made up of nerve endings. It is sensate. His fingers were doing something to me that had nothing to do with our knowing each other or liking each other or even caring if we ever found out anything more about each other. My skin didn’t care that this was obscene, that I was playing a very dangerous game. My skin was enraptured by the ever-so-slight pressure of a man’s fingertips sailing across its expanse. I shut my eyes, not pretending, not being coy, but rather finding myself in this unusual place, sitting across the table from a successful and nice-looking middleaged man who liked to touch women’s skin and knew how to do it with exactly the right pressure.
The rest of my body was jealous of that thin line of skin. It hadn’t been touched lately, either. It hadn’t touched. There was a war going on between my mind/body and sensation/intellect.
I moved away. “Not yet,” I said as coyly as I could but not really sure what coy sounded like.
“I know I’m being bad. But your skin is so luscious.”
“Should I know anything about your being bad? Is that something you do? You need to tell me. I have to make sure that I can be who you want.”
There were things I knew from the book that had made me nervous about Judas. He was conflicted. He cared about his wife and their children and his life. His professional stature was immensely important to him. But he was sexually impotent unless he felt that he was doing something wrong. It was the thrill of danger and deceit that turned him on. Not only was it something he didn’t know how to explain to his wife, the judge, but out of every possible scenario of what could turn him on, the need to be bad-to do illegal things-this was the worst.
“I like to be afraid.”