Just like that. Just that quick and easy. A little banter in the cab's backseat.
The man. She wasn't like that. She'd never gone for rich guys, even young, when she was proper bait.
But still, here she was, safe, in this bedroom, high above the streets. It was admit it a little fucked up. Probably. It was a little bit cold. Wasn't it? She gave him street cred; she tickled his edgy bone. She made him more complicated. He gave her, well… this.
And love. She did in fact love him, and he seemed to love her, too. She'd gone years without anything she could call love. She hadn't expected Simon or anyone like him, but here he was. Here were his thumbs and lips and eyebrows; here were his gravitas and prosperity; here was his secret self, that tiny, harmed, indignant quality she sensed in him, thought she detected on his face as he slept.
Simon came out of the bathroom naked, got into bed beside her. He said, "Do you think the kid will call again?"
"It's hard to say."
"You must have some idea, don't you?"
She said, "Once a perpetrator has initiated contact like this, odds are he'll want to reestablish."
Screw it, talk dirty to him. You're too tired to resist. "That figures," he said.
"What you try to do," she told him, "is supplant the existing object. If you're lucky, if you're very lucky, you can become the person he loves and wants to destroy. He starts redirecting all that feeling to you."
Shameless. Not even true. Just sex talk. "Like you would in therapy," Simon said.
"Yes and no. You need to be compassionate but authoritative with someone like this. Somebody like this usually wants a boss. A voice in his head is telling him to do things he suspects he shouldn't do. He wants a new voice. That's probably why he called in the first place."
Was that enough? Now could they just have sex, or not have sex, and go to sleep?
He said, "So, you try to become the voice in his head?"
He ran a pink fingertip precisely along her forearm, as if he were reading Braille. They could make one beautiful baby together, no denying it. Caramel-colored skin, head of billowy curls. Cat was probably still young enough. Maybe she was.
"Yeah," she said. "As opposed to the aliens, or the CIA, or whoever."
"You try to be the new, better delusion."
"Right. And if that doesn't work, you track the fucker down and blow him away."
That did it. Simon kissed her and worked his hand up to her breast.
She woke at a quarter to four. She gave it five minutes, on the off chance, then slipped out of bed. She went into the living room, took