She was still kneeling on the couch next to me, holding perfectly still. The only sound in the room was the hissing of the gas fueling the fire. She didn’t seem horny anymore. She seemed speechless.

“So what happened to you? Were you molested by your father? Raped by your brother? What was it that turned you into such a cliché? Or do you even know?”

“You’d better stop right there.”

“Am I hitting close to home? You like poking around in other people’s psyches and you’re good at it. It’s probably what makes you good at your job. But when the game turns around, you run. You’re scared.”

“I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“All you do is hide. Behind your big tits and your makeup and your fancy clothes and your money. You’ve had fun dissecting me and making me strip for you. Come on out here into the light and show me what you’ve got.”

“Ooh. Are we going to play doctor now? Should I stretch out on the couch for this part? I’d much rather stretch you out. I could make you forget all about men.” She tried to sound sultry, but she was off her rhythm.

“That’s not going to work with me. I want to know about you, but I don’t want to have sex with you. Can you grasp that?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to do business with you. You know better than anyone how important it is to understand your client. I’m trying to understand you.”

She stared for a long time before letting her shoulders relax. She put her elbow up against the back of the couch and rested her head against her hand.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing what?”

“Nothing happened to me. I saw the way the world worked and I made a choice. That’s all.”

“How does the world work?”

“When I was fifteen years old, I had to take a job in a department store after school, because my daddy was such a dumb bastard that he couldn’t support his own family.”

I recoiled slightly, the way I always did when I heard one person call another one dumb, and especially someone they were supposed to love. But I also thought that maybe, just maybe, this could go in the direction I wanted it to.

“There was a dress in stock that I wanted to wear to the freshman dance. It was a teal green with a sweetheart neckline. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and there was no way on God’s green earth I could pay for it. I was going to steal it, but then one day the store manager saw me pawing it. He was this dickhead who wore short-sleeved shirts where the sweat stains under his arms never quite came out. His oldest daughter was in school with me. He told me I could have the dress if I went to the back room and sat on his lap. I remember he had this pocket watch he used to wear. It was a gold watch and he wore it on the end of this cheap old chain. I never did understand that. The chain got caught under my thigh, that’s what made me think of it. He came in thirty seconds.” She smiled. “I came home with my dress, and I wore it to that dance, and I had a blast. After that, I could get anything I wanted if I went with him to the stockroom. Easy as pie.”

“That’s your life-altering moment? You fucked a man for a dress, and that set your life on the course it’s on?”

“Not really. I fucked a priest. That’s probably what did it.”

“You…” I looked at her more closely. She stared into the fire.

“You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

“I was raised Catholic,” I said.

“I knew it. I can always tell.” Her voice had gone all dreamy. “Dried-up old men in collars and nuns in burkas, they teach you that sex is dirty and anyone who engages in the sins of the flesh is a filthy heathen who will rot for eternity in hell. What do they know? They’ve never gotten any in their lives. The only priest that ever taught me anything worth knowing was the one who stuck his dick in my mouth.” She gave me a half smile. “He taught me everything.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged as though revealing this much had left her with a chill. “I went down on him, up on him, inside and out with him. It’s the ones who know they’re doing wrong that make me the hottest.”

“Did you ever tell anyone?”

“Tell them what?”

“That you were molested?”

“Doll, if there was any molesting going on, it was me doing it to him. I was what you’d call an early developer. He couldn’t resist me. No man ever could and I needed it, too.”

Right. “How old were you?”

She offered a gentle smile. Her face softened. She rested her hands on her thighs. She looked as tranquil as I’d ever seen her. She dropped her head and looked as though she were in some kind of meditative pose. I almost wanted to reach out to her. Then she raised her head and I saw into her eyes. Something had gone off inside, some kind of light had been extinguished. She stared right through me. When she spoke, her voice was scarily dull, completely devoid of emotion.

“So tell me, Alexandra, does any of this get you hot?”

“Molestation? Not generally.”

“Because you won’t let it.” She started to come at me again, moving slowly. She reached over and started to play with my hair, running her hands through it and pushing it behind my ear. “You know what your problem is? You’re all about control. You need to lose control, or have it taken away from you. Then you could just lie back and enjoy.”

“That would be rape, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, that would be rape. Don’t you ever fantasize about being raped? Taken against your will with all choice removed. No choice means no games, no angst, or confusion, or questions. Just giving in. Letting go…and enjoying. It makes it so easy.”

“That’s not one of my fantasies.”

“Taken by someone more powerful and more experienced than you are. Someone who would know what you wanted before you did and would do it to you even when you said no. Someone who would make you do…things…to her…that you’ve never done before.”

The smile was still there, but tighter, crueler, and deeply unsettling. She moved her hand to my face. This time when she touched me, it set off an adrenaline surge that ripped through my bloodstream with one clear message:run.

I tried to get up. She put her knee and all her weight on my thigh and locked me down. At the same time, she grabbed my wrist, wrenched my arm around, and held it up between us like half a turkey wishbone. The come-on was over. The pretense was gone. Now we were down to the pure, unvarnished conflict that had been there between us all along.

“You’ve been trying to get close to me, sugar.” Her smooth-as-maple-syrup voice was back. So was her attitude. “Is this close enough?”

“Angel, all I was doing was-”

“You bitch.” She twisted my arm half a turn in the wrong direction. It hurt like hell. “You think you’re so smart. Did you find out what you wanted to know? Do you understand your client now?”

I did understand some things. First, that there wasn’t much point in engaging in discussion. I could look into her eyes and see what I hadn’t seen before. Second was that it wasn’t the sex that turned her on. It was the manipulation. She got off on making people do what they didn’t want to do. She liked making them uncomfortable and ashamed, how she might have felt giving a blow job to a priest. Sadly, I understood too late that making her feel that again would result in this kind of reaction.

“You’re nothing but a whore like me. What’s your price? What will make you do what you don’t want to do?”

She was now stroking my forehead with her free hand. I tried to figure out if I could push her off. Probably not. If I could twist out from under her. Doubtful. If I had any advantage at all. Not really. Not physically.

“I could force you,” she said.

She looked crazed, like an animal. It reminded me of something I had read about wolves, about how the weaker wolf in a fight can save itself by offering its throat, giving the stronger animal the choice to rip it out. Or not. All I had left was to offer her my throat.