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Another security guard is pouring coffee as Joshua hurries in, looking a little frazzled. I feel a twinge of worry. He never used to be late to anything. I see faint circles under his eyes.
But I’ve already asked him if anything was wrong, and he shut me down quite decisively, so I just murmur a “good morning”.
We work our way through fluffy stacks of pancakes and plump, salty sausages. Life with Joshua is one gourmet experience after another. He seems to revel in delivering exquisite sensations of all kinds.
Conversation is casual but careful. There are so many subjects to be avoided. Astrid and the bodyguards and her kids settle on talking about sports, which leaves me out because I can barely tell a football from a basketball.
When we’re done, Joshua pushes back his seat. “Sparring practice starts today at eleven a.m.,” he says. He looks around the table. “For all of you. My men will take you to the exercise room.”
“Sparring? Like karate?” Paul says, looking interested. “I’m a yellow belt. I can break a board with my hand.”
“I’m going to teach you skills that you can actually use,” Joshua says, a little more sharply than I think is necessary. Paul winces.
Joshua stands up and inclines his head at me. “Tamara, come with me.”
I follow him out of the room. Halfway down a long hallway, I stand in his way and block him. “You know what? You’re lying to yourself, Joshua.”
“Oh?” He folds his arms across his chest, looking disinterested. “Do tell.”
“You actually care about them. You do. You brought them here because you want to keep them safe. It wasn’t just for me.”
“You’re giving me too much credit, Tamara.” His brow creases in annoyance. “Remember what I am.”
I look up at him. “I did a lot of reading when I was in the hospital. There are different kinds of psychopaths, and they’re not all bad or evil. A lot of them take the more useful traits like being hyper-focused and having the ability to make decisions without emotion, and make them work for them. Like you did with your business.”
He rakes me with a scornful look. “Oh, you did research on my condition? Why didn’t I think of that?”
“And now you’re trying to push me away with sarcasm because I’m getting close to an uncomfortable truth.”
The contempt on his face would have melted me into a puddle when I first met him, but I’m made of stronger stuff now.
“Thank you, Dr. Bennett, will you send me a bill afterward?”
I keep pushing past his nastiness and his attempts to be hurtful, because it’s important.
“You’ll never know what you would have been if you’d been raised by normal parents, but seeing the things you do for other people…it makes me think that maybe you’re not a psychopath at all. Maybe you just built up all those walls and convinced yourself that you were something dark and terrible because it was the only way for you to survive. You have compassion. You care about Astrid and her family, not because it benefits you in any way, but because you have some normal human feelings after all.” I shake my head at his scowl. “Having compassion doesn’t make you weak, Joshua.”
“We’re done with this conversation, Tamara.” There’s a snap of impatience in his voice as he pushes me through a doorway.
We’re walking into his bedroom—the one I wasn’t invited to last night.
He leads me through the bedroom, and I scan the room as we’re walking. There’s a four-poster bed with thick poles of round wood, a chifforobe, big framed photographs of desert scenes, a bureau, a desk with papers stacked up haphazardly, and a chair with clothing draped over the back.
Joshua’s obsessed with cleanliness and order. Never in all the time that I was imprisoned at his house in Maine did I see so much as a stray sock or a crumpled piece of paper or a speck of dust.
Should I be worried?
Maybe it’s a good sign. Maybe those rigid walls of his are coming down.
He steers me through the bedroom and into the bathroom. There’s a giant white tub in the middle of the room. And he’s made some modifications to the tub. He’s screwed in chains with cuffs at the ends to all four sides.
“Take off your clothes,” he says to me, shutting the door behind him. We’re in our own little world.
Instantly I’m under his spell. “Yes,” I say, as if in a trance. The sentence feels incomplete. It needs another word. And he knows it.
He bends toward me. He’s unbuttoning his slacks. “Say ‘Yes, Sir’,” he whispers into my ear as I peel my shirt off. “Just in here.”
“Yes, Sir.” A sense of rightness settles over me. Our clothes are falling off us, dropping onto the cool marble floor. I’m naked so fast I barely have time to notice, and so is he.
