“That’s what she said anyway.”

She turned away, her face filled with disgust, and walked slowly and broodingly toward the kitchen but I ran, dripping a trail of water behind me, and caught up with her midway to the door and grabbed her by the arm and turned her toward me. I looked into her pretty green eyes and found not a stripper but an injured child. She was willing to strip in front of men, but at heart she was an innocent. She was a victim. I felt a close connection with her. She really had fallen for me. She had been sitting back quietly while she watched Amber come and go and all the while she had been waiting for me to put aside playful things and come to her. I was both flattered at the level of her commitment and warmed that someone so young and Beautiful could feel a genuine love for a wretch like me. I was twenty years older than she. I was an accused murderer with no real prospects and yet she wanted me. And I found, in that moment, that I wanted her too.

“I’m just telling you what she said. Please don’t be upset with me. I’m a little trapped here.” I suddenly longed to have her warm body next to mine for the night. At that moment Melanie reminded me of Catherine in the way that she had exposed her vulnerability to me. And I was a romantic at heart. I wanted and needed her love and comfort and understanding, and I wanted to give her the same.

I tugged her hand but she pulled it away, “You’re playing me.”

I turned to her again and held her hands, and spoke softly, “I don’t know where we’re headed. My life is a complete train wreck right now, and I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but I’m not playing with you.” I drew a deep sigh, “I would like to be with you tonight. I would like to take it slow and see where this leads if you still want to be with me. I don’t have any control over the rest. All I can tell you is that Amber means nothing to me anymore. You, on the other hand, mean a great deal to me.”

She studied my eyes for a moment and then she pulled herself to me and kissed me. I led her to my bedroom and closed and latched the door and I made gentle love, for the first time in my life, with someone besides Catherine. And afterwards we spooned and I cupped her breast in my hand and I slept peacefully for the first time since the night Catherine died.

11

For the next few months Melanie spent her nights with me, except on the evenings when Amber would stop by for her sexual servicing. Amber would call me after work on a Friday or early in the day on a Saturday and she would inform me of what time she would be arriving. She never came out and directly coerced me but whenever I would make an excuse as to why I could not keep my appointment with her she would retort with a veiled threat such as: I don’t think that would be wise of you, or more directly, That detective Bergant called me again today looking for you. Do you think we should invite him to share our bed?, and I would ultimately capitulate

I must admit that at first I was a little confused at Amber’s obsession with me; at her unwillingness to relinquish control over me. I was nothing special. I’m sure that I was an adequate lover and I was by no means hideous, but I am equally as sure that given Amber’s firm young body, her long alluring blond locks and her undisputable beauty, that she could have slept with any man she wished if she had plied her wares publicly; but upon reconsideration I think she got off sexually on the whole power trip. She just seemed to enjoy the manipulation. She had, in her mind, a sexual slave in me whom she controlled under the guised threat of incarceration. Her orgasms were no doubt heightened with each session in which I acquiesced to her primal demands. She grew bolder towards the end as she brought sexual toys to spice up her play. On the last night that we spent together, at my most degraded moment and despite my fervent protest, she tethered me to the bed with my own neckties (the only four I had). Then she pulled out a strap-on dildo and dangled it in front of me while I shook my head from side to side (my mouth was gagged) then she strapped the device to her body and she raped me while I cried like a little baby begging her to stop with every violent thrust of the un-lubricated plastic prosthesis. Had I known what she had in mind

I never would have let her tie me up. I was so humiliated that I never confessed the violation to anyone, not even to Melanie.

By that time Melanie had all but moved in with me. She had quit stripping altogether and she lived off of her apparently vast savings and she spent her time with Sarah shopping and cooking and cleaning for me. During this time she experienced a strange but understandable emotional pattern in which she would be sweet and loving at the beginning of the week but would day by day grow listless and finally she would become malicious towards me only to become loving and sweet all over again, overnight, in the early part of the week. Beginning Sunday morning Melanie was as sweet to me as a girl could be going out of her way to do the little things to show me that she loved me, like baking chocolate-chip cookies, my favorite, or stopping out at my jobsite with a thermos full of hot coffee, or by simply making love to me in the most tender fashion. But as the weekend approached, knowing that Amber would soon be calling, Melanie would become agitated and short tempered. How could I blame her? For all she knew I was enjoying the sexual sessions with Amber. That is not to say that I deny experiencing orgasms with Amber; I did, but at what price? I was a victim. I had been systematically raped and sexually abused much as she had been as a child. But Melanie probably thought that given our history of a years worth of titillating phone conversations that I actually looked forward to being Amber’s subject. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Melanie did try to reason with Amber, asking her to back-off out of friendship and to let us be a happy couple, but Amber had responded in her catty fashion with the suggestion that the three of us ‘get it on’ together. I suppose any normal woman would have left me under those circumstances; would have turned me in and tossed me to the hounds. But Melanie was a damaged human-being and I was her first male lover. But she grew less intolerant with each passing week. I couldn’t understand why Melanie stood by me throughout the whole ordeal because to be truthful her logic defied me. Had our situations been reversed, had she been the one who was forced to sleep with another man, I could not have stood by her. I would have gone insane with jealousy. It is beyond my comprehension that she tolerated my confederation with Amber; which is why I first suspected her when I woke up to find Amber dead in my bed.

On the night she was murdered, Amber, for the first time since we had been sleeping together, had arranged to spend the night with me by telling her husband that she was spending the night at her sister’s house.

I suspected that Amber had chosen to spend the night with me because she knew that it would cause Melanie a great deal of emotional pain. To give me up for a few hours a week for a physical encounter was one thing but to spend the night with me suggested a more intimate involvement. Amber knew that it would get under Melanie’s skin which lent credence to my suspicion that Melanie had killed Amber. And given the bloody nature of the crime it seemed likely that Amber’s assassination was an act of rage. Amber’s throat had been slit, saturating the mattress and the bed sheets completely, and then the knife had been thrust downward into the area where her heart would have been had she been born with one. It was only natural that my first inclination was to think that Melanie had killed her; but that she did so while I slept on the very same bed spoke volumes about the indignation that she must have realized and the animosity that she felt towards me as well. And who could have blamed Melanie for killing Amber (except perhaps a jury of her peers). Amber had trifled Melanie beyond the human threshold and when Amber decided to spend the night with me, coveting an intimacy that she had to that point not demanded, Melanie had simply snapped. She had brooded, back in her home, like a festering volcano until her imagination got the best of her and she popped a rivet. She stormed over in the middle of the night, used the key which I had long ago given her, to sneak into the house, took a knife from the kitchen drawer and stealthily crept into my room and sliced Amber’s throat where she slept. Like I said before, if our roles had been reversed I would have been a jealous mess. I might have done the same. And the worst of it was that I was the one who stood to lose the most. I would, of course, be blamed; I would be labeled a serial-killer; a repeat offender, tried, convicted and put to death. Once the beast has tasted human blood…