“My fantasy? Just…one?”
“Yes, Miss Conran. You know the one. The one you’re afraid to speak aloud even in this room where you have already revealed the most tender and intimate parts of yourself to us. That fantasy. Share it with the page exactly as it unfolds for you in the hours before sleep, when it’s just you, the bedroom, and your racing heart. Don’t outline, but leave nothing out once you begin to write. And please, fear no judgment or retribution. Seek clarity, honesty, and desire as you bring pen to page. It’s your fantasy, Miss Conran, but we are the ones who will teach you how to trust it.”
The pen the woman places gently in Emily’s right hand is a Mont Blanc with a black body and gold trim. It’s shaking in her grip.
“Shall we begin?” the woman asks.
No, Emily thinks. We shall not, lady. You don’t get this part of me too. Who the hell do you people think you—Emily steadies her hand, reminds herself of the role she’s playing, reminds herself these people have to come to her in the night because they believe this is what she wants. And if she holds out on this part of the process, she’s not betraying them, she’s betraying Arthur. But she’s astonished to learn that this is the limit of what she can offer this undercover operation to fantasyland. Just a few days prior, she could have confessed it to them easily, seen the whole ritual as a wonderful release from the shame Charles inspired in her when he walked out on her. But something has changed since then.
You can have the taste of me, the feel of me, but you can’t have this. And it’s not because I’m ashamed of it. It’s because it belongs to Marcus now, to both of us. It’s our first shared secret, and I’m not giving that away to anyone.
“Are you ready to begin writing, Miss Conran?” the woman asks.
Emily closes her eyes. Maybe it gives the effect that she’s summoning courage. But that’s not what she’s doing. She’s groping for some fragmented memory of the last stupid porn movie Charles made her watch before they broke up, some memory beyond the awful acting and the bad lighting and the stupid music and the fake stage grunts coming from the obviously bored performers. Finally, she remembers the setup and the scene. It’s as obvious as she hoped it would be, but it has a flash of taboo that will make it seem like something she’d want to keep a secret.
“Yes,” Emily whispers.
The woman sets the hourglass down on the nearest counter with a loud thunk.
Emily starts writing.
Despite the man’s rigid pose, his muscular back doesn’t make for the most even surface, and she can’t reach out to steady the edge of the notebook for fear of smearing its pages with honey. But all of that seems to be by design; they don’t want her to pause and reflect, to spend time crafting her sentences. She’s supposed to let her innermost sexual fantasy spill out onto the page unfiltered, unexamined, so that’s the style she adopts as she rehashes some tired porn cliché about a woman, a doctor’s office, and a lecherous internist with wandering, invasive hands. She adopts the female patient’s point-of-view, describing everything in terms of and then he’s. And then he’s touching the inside of my thighs, and then he’s telling me he’ll need me to take my robe off so he can see closer. And then he’s, and then he’s, and then he’s…
None of what she describes arouses her in the slightest. But that’s the idea, and maybe that’s why the words flow so easily, because each new, inauthentic sentence makes her feel safer, more comfortable, and more removed from the mind-altering series of events that have just taken place inside this beautiful but strange bathroom that doesn’t actually belong to her.
She writes until the hourglass runs out.
“And we’re done,” the woman says quietly. She slides the leather-bound notebook out from under Emily’s still traveling pen before closing it with a dramatic thud and tucking it into her satchel. There’s a warm, satisfied smile on her face. Emily would place the woman in her early thirties at the oldest, but the candlelight could be playing tricks on her. The flickering candles are surely to blame for the small flecks of gold that appear to dance in the woman’s irises.
Emily is so stricken by her visitor’s beautiful eyes she’s barely noticed that her four ravishers are stealing away across the tiled floor in a series of whisper-quiet contortions. They somehow manage to collect their robes around them as they go. But they rise to their feet only once they cross the threshold into the bedroom, at which point they don their robes without so much as a pause.
Maybe they are circus performers, she thinks.
The woman has removed another envelope from her satchel and is holding it in the air between them. When Emily tugs it from her grip, the woman smiles and follows her charges through the bedroom and then, out of sight.
“I’ll tell you when they’re gone,” Marcus whispers into her ear. “Just stay right there.”
His voice is as clipped and neutral as that of an air traffic controller.
She tears open the envelope and parts another four leaves just like the ones she had to pry back that afternoon to read their announcement. While the script is the same as the earlier requests, the message is far more clinical.
8:00 PM
30.313616689930676
-91.60560250282288
Map coordinates. Or GPS coordinates. She’s not sure if there’s even a difference. She places the card on the counter, right next to where the hourglass stood as she fibbed her way through the night’s final exercise. She’s shivering. Surely enough time has passed for their visitors to clear the house, at least.
“Are they gone?” she whispers.
“I think so,” Marcus answers.
“What do you mean you think so?”
“They’re not in the house anymore, but I can’t… I’m going to check the perimeter myself. This doesn’t make any sense. Stay where you are.”
She’s too cold to stay exactly where she is. Too cold and too sticky and too naked and too drained and too something else she’s having trouble putting a name to. And then all of the lights come back on, a reverse of the same lazy process in which they each appeared to be drained of life. The strange event lacks the sudden cacophony of clicks, pops, and whirs that usually accompanies power coming back on after a blackout. That’s when she sees they left the four purple candles behind; that’s when she sees the flames flicker out in the same instant.
The AC. It must be. The AC came back on at the same time and blew them out.
Even though she knows Marcus has left his surveillance trailer, she can’t stand being exposed to this sudden burst of harsh, overhead lighting. He told her the earpiece was waterproof, but she doesn’t want to test it, especially after that little disruption downstairs. She sets it on the counter next to one of the candles. Inside the shower, the drained Lucite cube still hangs overhead, but it blocks only two of the shower’s four showerheads. Hands shaking, she turns one on and lets the steaming water pour down her body, even though it does almost nothing to shift the second skin of honey coating her naked flesh. Despite the sudden rush of hot water, she’s still shivering, bone-deep tremors that seem driven by so many emotions at once she’s having trouble naming a single one.
What good is it? she thinks. What good is all that pleasure if at the end of it you’re wrapped in a blanket of loneliness and cold?
She tells herself it’s to send the hot water sluicing through the honey all over her back, but when she sinks to her knees underneath the spray, the prayerful pose allows her to take her first deep breaths since her shattering orgasm. She’s still sucking air hungrily when she hears confident, hurried footsteps.
Marcus. It has to be.
But as soon as his sneakers squeak on the bathroom tiles, a silence falls.
What does she expect him to say? Excellent form!
But still, the longer Marcus is silent, the more she wants to attach some sense of shame to what she’s done. To what they did. To what she allowed them to do. To what he did not stop her from doing.
The touch of his fingers
startles her. Bare flesh. No gloves. He shushes her in a long gentle exhalation between pursed lips as he gently kneads her shoulders under the spray. Is he getting wet too? She can’t tell. His slow massage is too relaxing, too perfect, for her to do anything to disrupt it.
“You okay?” he asks her.
“Are you?” she asks.
“Stand up,” he says.
She complies, and he pulls her gently out of the spray until they’re standing in the driest part of the shower stall together. She has trouble looking into his eyes at first, but when she finally risks it, she sees he can’t make eye contact yet either. He’s too busy wrapping her in a plush bath towel, and then prying his feet out of his sneakers when he realizes they’re both hopelessly stuck in honey puddles.
“Alright, now,” he says. It sounds like he’s trying to prepare her for something, not comfort her, and she’s not sure what until he lifts her up with one arm under her back. He carries her out of the bathroom bride-over-threshold style and begins to walk through the house with her. She buries her head against his chest, breathes in his smell for the first time; sandalwood with a strange sweet tang, almost like slightly burnt shortbread cookies.
Even though she’s completely swaddled in the bath towel, she still jerks when she hears him sliding a deck door open with his free hand. But when the ocean wind hits her, she boroughs more deeply against his chest and allows him to carry her down the long wooden walkway to the beach. She doesn’t monitor their progress, but she can hear the surf getting closer, and when he stops, she assumes they’ve reached the waterline.
“Put your legs around my waist.”
“But…”
To answer her question, he gently removes the towel from her. The sudden flush of salty wind across her naked back inspires her to assume the position more quickly. And then, once her breasts are pressed against his chest, and her exhausted sex sealed to his stomach just above his belt buckle, and once her head is resting comfortably against his broad, muscular shoulder, he walks with her into the surf.
When the surface of the water reaches his waist, he stops, which leaves her more exposed than she’d like to be, but then when the first wave washes over her, coming up as high as her shoulders, she realizes he’s positioned himself in relationship to the incoming whitecaps, so that each one douses her, doing more to strip the honey from her skin than a long shower ever could. Instead of standing rigid under the sea’s steady assault, Marcus allows himself to rock slightly back and forth in every swell; pliable, patient, determined, silent, his embrace never loosening.
It’s a ritual—no, it’s more than that—it’s a service that exists somewhere between the two responses she feared most from him—complete rejection or the sudden, jealous expectation of sex. Instead he has sensed not only her exhaustion, but also the loneliness that closed in around her as soon as the sticky feast was over. More importantly, he has sensed her need to be cleansed; her need to be released from the blank stares of glass eyes that chilled the passions unleashed upon her by those practiced, hungry mouths.
There are so many questions he could be asking her in this moment, so many questions a different man wouldn’t think twice about peppering her with, confronting her with, bullying her with.
Did she fake her orgasm? What fantasy did she write down in that leather-bound journal? Was it the same secret she shared with him earlier that day?
But instead, he holds her silently, his embrace creating a quiet, sacred space in which her conflicted feelings can unravel themselves from each other, and her body can become her own again. It’s the first time in her life she can remember being this aware of her fundamental need for tenderness and love to accompany passion and pleasure.
After a long while, he turns her around and starts a slow walk back toward the shore.
Once they’re standing in water up to his waist, he tells her, “Wait here.”
He pulls gently free of her and black jeans and black T-shirt streaming water, he jogs up onto the sand, picks up the bath towel he discarded earlier, and holds it open against the wind. Arms clasped over her bare breasts, she runs into its embrace, allows him to gather it around her body until she’s fully cloaked, and then, with one hand pressed gently against her upper back, allows him to steer her toward the walkway back to the house.
Once they reach the sliding door to the kitchen, he stops, and when she turns, they look into each other’s eyes for the first time that night. His soaked black T-shirt is plastered to the ridges of muscle beneath, his short cap of hair flattened forward like a helmet. Seawater drips from one corner of his mouth. His eyes appear to be pleading with her, but she’s not quite sure what he’s saying.
“I can’t come in like this,” he says. “I have to change.”
“Okay.”
“The note, the last one she gave you. Can you bring it to me?”
A minute later, she returns to the sliding door to find him standing in exactly the same place. “It’s some kind of coordinates, I think.”
He nods, as if the information is barely relevant to the riot of thoughts fighting for dominance in his head.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he mutters, but he’s staring down at the deck boards between them. “I need to change and I need to just check a few things and then I’ll…I’ll be back.” He says these words after he’s staring into her eyes again.
“Yes,” she says. “Come back…please.”
“If they left anything, don’t touch it. I’m going to bag it all and send it back to Magnolia Gate.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He nods, and then he’s gone.
As soon as she reaches the bedroom, she hears a strange, loud clatter and scrape from somewhere outside. It sounds like a small piece of debris being driven across asphalt in hurricane force winds. But there isn’t a hurricane outside, and when she arrives at the nearest window, she sees what caused it.
Marcus has just torn an aluminum mailbox from the wooden post behind the neighboring house and hurled it down the street. He’s bent at the waist like he’s just finished a marathon and for a few minutes he grips the back of his head with both hands as if his skull is about to fly apart. She can see the force of the agonized, furious breaths he’s taking from the rise and fall of his back. And then, whatever eruption of jealousy he’s just allowed himself, the same eruption he managed to keep plugged as he held her against the waves, has passed, as he’s trotting back to his surveillance trailer as if he were a local out for an evening jog.
18
If Emily lies down, she’ll trigger disorienting flashbacks to an orgasm so powerful it made her forget her name, so she sits on the foot of the bed instead, dressed in a T-shirt and boxers as she waits for Marcus to come back, even though she’s convinced, on some level, that he’s never coming back. That her orgasm shattered him as well, only beyond repair, and that he’s now speeding out of the subdivision in the Navigator, calling Magnolia Gate to arrange for his replacement.
And so, when she hears the door to the deck outside of the kitchen slide open, when she hears his powerful footsteps coming up the stairs, she finds herself choking back something that feels like a sob.
Exhaustion, stress, postcoital confusion. Those are only a few of the excuses she can think up for the rawness she’s feeling now. But when he appears in the bedroom door, dressed in something other than the black jeans and black T-shirt that are practically his uniform, she is blinking back tears. Can he see the threat of them on her face? Is he just choosing to ignore it? He holds up the card. “GPS coordinates,” he says. “Atchafalaya Basin, just south of the 10. Jonathan was given a different set, due south and on the eastern flank. But it’s the same swamp.”
“It’s a pretty big swamp,” she says.
“Yeah, and my bet is wherever you’re going tomorrow night, you’re both going by boat.”
Is that what she gets now? Is it going to be all business from here on out?
“So he passed apparently,” she
says.
“With flying colors, I hear.”
“Did he get any names?”
“No, and no sign of Ryan either apparently. Doesn’t matter, though. I got some shots of Miss Fantasy and sent them back to Magnolia Gate. They’ll use face-matching software on them and we should know something about her by tomorrow.”
“Jesus. Tell me you didn’t record that, Marcus.”
“Of course I didn’t!” he snaps, visibly offended. “I used one of the cameras to take still images of her face, and only her face. I would never…” He stops short, maybe to keep himself from describing what’s just happened in terms that might embarrass her.
“We’ll have to get moving first thing in the morning. The good news is we’re going close to our base of operations so we can put everything in place pretty quickly. Dupuy and I will follow either by car or by boat. If things get really gnarly, we’ll have a four-man security team as close to your final destination as we can get it.”
“Who’s on this team?”
“Guys from a private security outfit I used to work for. Not Arthur’s regulars. They’re very skilled. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“We’re not talking about a plan to kidnap Ryan here, are we?”
“No. This is to protect you and Jonathan.”
“But…trained killers. Is that really necessary?”
“I’m a trained killer, Emily.”
“Coulda fooled me,” she whispers.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It is. It is a compliment, Marcus.”
Her gentle tone catches his attention as effectively as if she’d closed the distance between them and gripped his chin in one hand.
“Thank you,” he whispers, and there’s a tremor in his voice, a tremor that sounds like it could turn into a low growl if he let himself release the angry beast within, the same beast that just tore down the neighbor’s mailbox.
“Look,” he says, trying to get a businesslike tone back into his voice. “These people managed to shut off power to the whole subdivision and I’m still not exactly sure how they got in or out of the house. There's probably an explanation for both, but the fact is, they’re pretty damn skilled at what they do so I want to make sure we have plenty of manpower to counteract their little magic tricks if something goes wrong out there tomorrow night.”