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“Fucking—”
“But I kept taking it because it let me forget. I didn’t have to think about… This thing we have… You and me… The stuff we do… I love it. I love you. But sometimes my brain gets scrambled.”
“Scrambled how?”
I try a dozen sentences inside my head. None of them fits. None of them is right.
“How?” he asks again. “Just tell me what you’re thinking. It doesn’t have to be fucking perfect.”
“I’m a whore!”
He’s shocked. Whatever he thought I was going to say, that isn’t it.
I hurry, before I lose my nerve. “You give me everything—a house and clothes and food. Trips to New York. An entire library of books. Anything I want, you’re handing it over before I even know how to ask.”
“But I—”
“No.” I cut him off. “Let me finish. It’s not justthings. It’s lawyers. It’s a job. It’s taking in Leo—”
“I don’t—”
“Please! Let me say this. You were willing to take out Jonas and Ansel because of what they did to me. Youknowwhat it means to kill a man. You’ve seen what it did to me. But you’re willing to killtwo, because they hurt me. Because they might hurt me more in the future.”
His throat works. He wants to interrupt. But he squares his shoulders and clenches his jaw and lets me go on.
“And the only thing I can give you in return is sex. Here. In New York. Inside your freaking car… I’m a real-life, flesh-and-blood blow-up doll.”
The shock on his face is the only thing that gives me the courage to continue.
“Sex. Where you want it. How you want it. I’m your whore.”
He pulls back. Edges away. I’m going to lose him, but I have to say the last bit. I’m so close to the end.
“I always knew good girls say no. I knew I’d go to school, get good grades, work in a psych lab for the rest of my life. I’d marry another grad student. Maybe we’d have sex on my birthday. On his. On our anniversary. Maybe even once a week, like clockwork, whether we wanted it or not.”
Trap doesn’t want to hear about grad students, about my having sex with anyone but him. So I clutch his hands. I look into his eyes. And tell him the rest of it, the worst of it, the end.
“But every time we fuck, you and me, I feel things I never imagined. I love being your toy. I love how you know exactly how much I can stand. I love that eternity before you say the word, before you let me come. I’ll do anything for that feeling. I’m embarrassed, and I’m sad, and I’m disappointed that I don’t have a single shred of self-respect. But none of that changes one basic fact: I’m your whore.”
I’m shaking. My head feels like it’s floating above my body, attached by a single knotted string. I’m breathing like a racehorse who’s just broken a record at the Kentucky Derby.
Trap waits. And waits. And waits some more.
Finally he says, “Can I say something now?”
I nod.
“You’re not my whore. You’ve never been my whore. You’re the one woman I’ve ever loved, the only person I want to spend the rest of my life with. If Nurse What’s-her-name walked through that door this minute and told me I could never touch you again, I’d still stay here with you. If Dr. Hanson said you were off-limits for any reason, in any way, I’d sit here till my balls turn blue and fall off, pick them up and throw them away, but I wouldn’t leave your side. If you decide you don’t want me, if you can’t ever stand the thought of fucking me, I’ll spend a hell of a lot more time exhausting myself in the gym downstairs, but I’m never letting you go. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”
I open my mouth, not sure what I’m going to say, but he shakes his head fiercely.
“No. I let you talk. Now you have to listen to me. I brought you home from Debasement because I thought you were hot. I had no idea you could tame the Beast. But when I’m with you, the animal in my brain goes to sleep. When I’m with you, that fucker doesn’t stand a chance.”
“That’s because—”
“I’m not done,” he snaps. “Because it’s not just me you help. It’s not just me you heal. You walk around the freeport like you’re carrying a goddamn magic wand. You solve problems before I even know they exist. You came up with the idea for the Diamond Ring before you had the first clue about what we really do here. You kept the security guards from walking off the job. You ran the Monet auction like you were born with a gavel in your hand.”
I start to deflect his praise. Those things weren’t magic. They were examples of applied psychology, of my using years of education to achieve simple, practical goals.
