“I feel much better, thanks. Kid wasn’t using his eyes, so we ripped them out.”

He felt her nails dig into his trapezius muscles. “Ripped out is hardly appropriate. It’s a very delicate operation. And because we did it, another child is able to see. You seem to be missing that aspect of what we’re doing here. Every time we deliver a kidney, we’re saving a life.”

She was right. He hadn’t thought about that. “I just fly the plane,” he said.

“And take the money. You could have this same job back in the States. You could be flying the organs of accident victims on Life Flight jets and accomplishing the same thing, except you wouldn’t be making enough to pay the taxes on what you make here, right?”

No, not exactly, he thought. Back in the States, he couldn’t fly anything but a hang glider without his license. “I guess so,” he said. “But you could have told me what you were doing.”

“And have you thinking about the little blind kid at five hundred miles per hour. I don’t think so.” She bent over and kissed his earlobe lightly. “I’m not a monster, Tuck. I was a little girl once, with a mother and a father and a cat named Cupcake. I don’t blind little kids.”

Finally he turned in the chair to face her and was grateful to see that she was wearing one of her conservative Donna Reed dresses. “What happened to you, Beth? How in the hell do you get from ‘Here, Cupcake’ to the Murdering Bitch Goddess of the Shark People?” He immediately regretted saying it. Not because it wasn’t true, but because he’d given away the fact that he knew it was. He braced himself for the rage.

She moved to the couch and sat down across from him. Then she curled into a ball, her face against the cushions, and covered her eyes. He said nothing. He just watched as her body quaked with silent sobs. He hoped this wasn’t an act. He hoped that she was so offended that she would take his murder accusation for hyperbole.

Five full minutes passed before she looked up. Her eyes were red and she’d managed to smear mascara across one cheek. “It’s your fault,” she said.

Tuck nodded and tried not to let a smile cross his lips. She was playing another part, and she didn’t do the victim nearly as well as she did the seduction queen. He said, “I’m sorry, Beth. I was out of line.”

She seemed surprised and broke character. Evidently, he’d stepped on her line, the one she’d been thinking of while pretending to cry. A second for composure and she was back at it. “It’s your fault. I only wanted to have a friend, not a lover. All men are that way.”

“Then you must not have gotten the newsletter: ‘Men Are Pigs.’ Next issue is ‘Water Is Wet.’ Don’t miss it.”

She fell out of character again. “What are you saying?”

“You might have been a victim once, but now that’s just a distant memory you use to rationalize what you do now. You use men because you can. I can’t figure out what happened in San Francisco, though. A woman who looks like you should have been able to find an easier way to fuck her way to a fortune. The doc must have been a cakewalk for you.”

“And you weren’t?”

Tuck felt as if someone had injected him with a truth serum that was lighting up his mind, and not with revelations about Beth Curtis. The light was shining on him.

“Yeah, I guess I was a cakewalk. So what? Did you think for a minute that you might try not to go to bed with me?

“Other than when I found out that you’d almost torn your balls off, not for a minute.” She was gritting her teeth.

“And how big a task do you think you took on? It’s not like you were corrupting me or anything. I’ve been on the other end of the game for years. I know you, Beth. I am you.”

“You don’t know anything.” She was visibly trying not to scream, but Tuck could see the blood rising in her face.

He pushed on. “Freud says I’m this way because I was never hugged as a child. What’s your excuse?”

“Don’t be smug. I could have you right now if I wanted.” As if to prove her point, she placed her feet at either end of the coffee table and began to pull up her dress. She wore white stockings and nothing else underneath.

“Not interested,” Tuck said. “Been there, done that.”

“You’re so transparent,” she said. She crawled over the table and did a languid cat stretch as she ran her hands up the inside of his thighs. By the time her hands got to his belt buckle, she was face-to-face with him, almost touching noses. Tuck could smell the alcohol on her breath. She flicked her tongue on his lips. He just looked in her eyes, as cold and blue as crystal, like his own. She wasn’t fooling anyone, and in realizing that, Tuck realized that he also had never fooled anybody. Every Mary Jean lady, every bar bimbo, every secretary, flight attendant, or girl at the grocery store had seen him coming and let him come.

Beth unzipped his pants and took him in her hand, her face still only a millimeter from his, their eyes locked. “Your armor seems to have a weak spot, tough guy.”

“Nope,” Tuck said.

She slid down to the floor and took him into her mouth. Tuck suppressed a gasp. He watched her head moving on him. To keep himself from touching her he grabbed the arms of the chair and the wicker creaked as if it was being punished.

“That’s a pretty convincing argument,” said the male voice. Tuck looked up to see Vincent sitting on the couch where Beth had been a minute ago.

“Jesus!” Tuck said. Beth let out a muffled moan and dug her nails into his ass.

“Wrong!” Vincent said. “But never play cards with that guy.” The flyer was smoking a cigarette, but Tuck couldn’t smell it. “Oh, don’t worry. She can’t hear me. Can’t see me either, not that she’s looking or anything.”

Tuck just shook his head and pushed up on the arms of the chair. Beth took his movement for enthusiasm and paused to look up at him. Tuck met her gaze with eyes the size of golf balls. She smiled, her lipstick a bit worse for the wear, a string of saliva trailed from her lips. “Just enjoy. You lost. Losers flourish here.” She licked her lips and returned to her task.

“Dame makes a point,” Vincent said. “I give you three to one she brings you around to her way of thinking. Whatta ya say?”

“No.” Tuck waved the flyer off and shut his eyes.

“Oh, yes,” Beth said, as if speaking into the microphone.

Vincent flicked his cigarette butt out the window. “I’m not distracting you, am I? I just dropped in to take up on the dame’s side, as she is unable to speak for herself at present.”

Tuck was experiencing the worst case of bed spins he’d ever had—in a chair. Sexual vertigo.

“Of course,” Vincent continued, “this is kinda turning into a religious experience for you, ain’t it? Go with what you know, right? You let her run the show, you got no decisions to make and no worries ever after. Not a worry in the world. You got my word on that. Although, if it was me, I’d check out her story just to be safe. Look in the doc’s computer maybe.”

Beth was working her mouth and hands like she was pumping water on an inner fire that was consuming her with each second that passed. Tuck heard his own breath rise to a pant and the wicker chair crackle and creak and skid on the wooden floor. He was helping her now, wanting her to quench that flame and that was all there was.

“You think about it,” Vincent said. “You’ll do the right thing. You owe me, remember.” He faded and disappeared.

“What does that mean?” Tuck said, then he moaned, arched his back, and came so hard he thought he would pass out, but she kept on and on until he couldn’t stand the intensity and had to push her away. She landed on the floor at his feet and looked up like an angry she-cat.

“You’re mine,” she said. She was still breathing hard and her dress was still up around her waist. “We’re friends.”

It came out like a command, but Tuck heard a note of desperation below the panting and the ire, and he felt a wrenching pain in his chest like nothing he’d ever felt before. “I know you, Beth. I am you,” he said. But not anymore, he thought. He said, “Yes, we’re friends.”