“The unknown?”
“The known, no matter how awful, is always better than the unknown. You’re a shrink. That’s what you do for a living. Uncover the unknown. Peek into dark recesses, excavate the subterranean basements of the mind, and shine a light into obscure corners of the psyche. Force people to look at their god-awful selves.”
“You make it sound so creepy.”
“It is sort of creepy.”
“Shut up,” she said, slapping him playfully on his unharmed cheek.
“I’m glad you didn’t go for the bad cheek.”
“They never told me anything. How scary is it to discover a voluminous letter and a shocking picture? The photo alone speaks volumes. How much more do I want to know?”
“All of it, you silly pumpkin. Now shush and come here to Papa. Let’s do it again. I’ve been deprived for way too long.”
CHAPTER 36
There were no more trysts with Dirk. After the debacle, Sophia thought it wise to lie low.
Knowing that Barth was safely buried in work at the museum and craving some contact before the three-month separation, Sophia volunteered to drive Dirk to the airport on Sunday. They sat, forlorn, at the bar, silent amid the cheerful bustle of food and drink consumption, sinking them further into a bottomless funk.
Dirk picked at his pancakes listlessly.
“Waitress? Emma,” he said, reading her nametag, “please bring us lots more butter.”
The word butter perked Sophia up, reminding her of that buttery tryst.
Dirk seemed livelier too. His eyes regained their sparkle.
He took some cash out of his wallet, thrusting it onto the counter. When Emma returned with what looked like a dozen packets of butter cupped in her hands, Dirk was ready to take the butter and run. He hustled a startled Sophia to her feet, prodding her to walk ahead of him.
“Where are we going, Dirk?”
“Shhh. Just keep walking. Hurry,” Dirk said, wheeling his suitcase with one hand while pushing Sophia ahead of him with the other.
He stopped and pulled her into an empty unisex bathroom, looking around for something. A satisfied grin lit up his handsome face when he spied a broom closet complete with a door in a corner of the room. He locked the door.
Oblivious to the dirty mops, moldy smells, and cramped space, Dirk deftly pulled up Sophia’s skirt, ripped off her flimsy undies, and bent her over a table, sweeping its unsavory contents to the floor. While unzipping his fly and releasing his swelling cock, he began ripping open the butter packets, slathering them on as best he could. Sophia was in a state of florid arousal by now and guided his buttery fingers to her rear. Before she knew what hit her, he thrust his engorged member into her anus.
Amped up by the excitement of the stolen moments, they both came quickly, loudly, and intensely.
It took Sophia a few moments to realize the banging she heard was not her lusty heart still pounding in her ears as the orgasm’s effects receded, ebbing away like the outgoing tide, but someone knocking on the door, shouting indignantly.
“What are you doing in there? Open up. I’m calling security,” a gruff, heavily accented female voice threatened.
“Hold on. Coming. Coming,” Dirk said, flushed and lazy from his pleasurable exertions.
They straightened themselves out as best they could. Sophia abandoned the ripped undies. Opened butter packets were strewn all over the dirty, cluttered floor.
Dirk unlocked and opened the door, fishing a crisp hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet and placing it in the bewildered cleaning woman’s calloused hand, gently enclosing her fingers around it.
“For your trouble,” he said, whisking Sophia off and breaking into a run with her and his rolling case.
The cleaning woman was staring after them, her mouth agape, the remnants of Sophia’s red panties hanging from one hand and the hundred-dollar bill clasped tightly in the other.
When they stopped running, they both burst into boisterous laughter.
“Let’s get a quick drink,” Dirk gasped, holding his sides, aching from the intense laughter. “And then I have to get to my gate,” he said, glancing at his watch.
“Yes,” Sophia said, happy and sated for the moment. “That was a mood changer,” she declared as they plopped onto barstools in the busy bar.
“Two Johnny Walker double blacks, straight up,” Dirk ordered.
They savored their drinks, kissed languidly, Sophia tasting the malty drink on Dirk’s tongue, breathing him in deeply, as if she could hold onto his scent while he was gone if she breathed hard enough.
He stood up, licking away the salty tears oozing from her forlorn eyelids, and walked off without another word. The rolling of his suitcase wheels echoed dismally after him.
CHAPTER 37
The unmedicated manic woman’s ramblings barely intruded upon her thoughts. Her patient’s charged mental meanderings usually left her lost along the way, but today, Sophia hadn’t even started out on the path. One month after Dirk’s departure, Sophia was as freshly forlorn and raw with aching loneliness as she had been when he left her at the airport that carnal Sunday afternoon.
“Dr. W.?” Oona said. “Why won’t you answer me? Are you angry? Do you think the guns will make them wary? Will the cops put us on some sort of list? Watch us? Follow us? We had every right to have those shotguns in the trunk when they stopped us. They’re all legal. Every last one of them. Jeremy likes his guns on hand. Top of the fridge, under the bed, in the car.”
“Sorry, Oona. I just don’t have a simple answer for you. Is some of it your paranoia, or will they keep an eye on you? Hard to tell given those circumstances,” Sophia said, attempting to recover her focus as she covered up for her apathy. Luckily, Oona chattered so much that she was able to pick up the thread amid all the repetition.
Leave it to Oona, whom she had been seeing for almost two years, to choose Sophia’s distracted days to solicit her opinions. Usually she prattled on happily, self-absorbed, not allowing room for much feedback or intervention. She cycled from plucky mania to teary despair, preferring her own loose chatter to Sophia’s responses. She staunchly defended her decision to cease all medication, unaware of how harmful her mood swings might be to her and those around her. She didn’t want to hear anything on that topic. Her mind was made up. According to her, at work, allowances were made for her, the fragile flower. Her boyfriend also made concessions. Oona never considered these exceptions might wear thin.
That young woman has her antennae up. The one time I’m not all here, she zones in on me. Usually she shuns my feedback, preferring to be wrapped in her cozy bipolar cocoon, Sophia thought, bitter at being wrenched away from her self-pitying wallow.
“I’m afraid we’re out of time, Oona.”
“It always goes by so fast. Flies by.”
“Next Tuesday, same time, Oona?”
“Yes, Dr. W. See you next week,” an energetic, beaming Oona said, leaving on an upswing.
Sophia duly noted her next appointment in her book. Then, stretching her arms overhead, she clasped her hands and bent over, touching her toes to maximize the stretch. She had been sitting and listening for six fifty-minute hours and was ready for some movement.
A short while later, she was climbing the stairs to her bedroom, planning on getting into lounging clothes, pouring a glass of wine, and reading when she was inspired to change her plans.
I’m sick of moping around. I’m getting a bit dolled up and hitting Lincoln Road tonight. I’m sure Dirk’s not sitting home night after night, pining away for his love slave, Sophia thought, jutting out her jaw in a gesture of defiance. Defiance against whom, she did not know. Barth was working late. Perhaps she was directing her jaw at an imaginary Barth.
She shed her clothes, showered, and slipped on a shimmering green-and-black underwear set. She then chose a simple short black dress, casual yet sexy. Oversized red-coral earrings and matching necklace, liberal spritzes of a new Hermes cologne called Love, pl
enty of dramatic black eye makeup, and she was ready to go, energized and upbeat, like her last departing patient.
Sophia strolled along in her comfortable Tory Burch black flats with their perky silver designer buckles, heading for Books and Books for browsing and people watching.
The sultry starry night enveloped her in its loose damp arms, making her feel all was right with the world.
That’s what I needed. To get out and stop isolating, she thought, grinning in anticipation of the books, wine and food, and absorbing people watching at their outdoor café. Lincoln Road was a people watcher’s wet dream.
When she arrived at the bookstore, she was surprised to find an outdoor table would be opening up soon. She managed to buy a Swedish mystery and a book about creativity and the brain in twentieth-century Vienna by Eric Kandel, a neurobiologist who had escaped the horrors of Nazi Vienna by emigrating to New York as a child, followed by his parents six months later. She even managed to put herself on a waiting list for Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume fictional memoir, My Struggle. As far as she could gather, he was a Norwegian Woody Allen type who had received plenty of publishing attention for his candid, scrupulous work, which didn’t sound all that fictitious.
Once seated in the balmy outdoors, Sophia ordered a half carafe of their excellent Chardonnay, gazpacho, and a pasta salad with plenty of veggies. She was examining her books and sipping Chardonnay when the gazpacho arrived. A memory jolt transported her back to another cold soup, the vichyssoise, and her trip into the soup. She wondered if her hallucinations had stopped as abruptly as they had begun.
One of the best spots in the world to view an eccentric farrago of humanity beckoned, dissipating her anxious brooding. She watched hermaphroditic models looking like a gaggle of aliens alighting from a space ship; gorgeous gay boys exposing well-oiled baby-bottom-smooth skin bulging with fourteen-hours-a-week gym-session muscles; tourists from all corners of the earth weighed down with bags of expensive merchandise; scantily clad saturnine Latina beauties showing off their dusky wares, scanning the horizon for worthy sugar daddies; male and female young hopefuls tattooed to the nines, bursting with good health, good looks, and blind ambition; ladies past a certain age, worshipping the god Youth in hot-pink Juicy Couture, sporting faces so frequently lifted that the skull beneath the skin shone through; lipstick lesbians in their girly girl getups walking hand in hand with their lumbering diesel-dyke partners; the occasional hallucinating wild man dressed in filthy rags, gesticulating urgently. And dogs, dogs, dogs paraded by their owners. Large and small and everything in between, the pooches augmented the ambience, their doggy beings a treat to watch.
Sophia’s thirsty eyes drank in the stimulating masses milling past her in a constant stream. However, they could distract her just so long before she felt a serrated stab of loneliness sawing at her gut. All these quirky people and Dirk was not there to share with her. It was a strange longing since they had spent all their time indoors.
She hadn’t touched the pasta salad but had polished off the wine. She ordered another half carafe.
“You shouldn’t be drinking alone.” A smoky voice caressed her.
She looked up at a blond, blue-eyed clone of Paul Newman.
“I know what I’m talking about. I’m a highly experienced solitary drinker,” he drawled. “It’s not good for the psyche. We humans are social animals.”
“You are the most beautiful man I have ever seen,” Sophia said, entranced. “Did I just say that out loud?”
“Yes, you did. But you’re not the first. By the way, I’m not a dumb blond,” he said, eyeing her books on the table.
“I’m sure you’re not. But even if you were, I could just look at you forever. Please sit down and have some wine.” She gestured to the waiter for another glass. “I can’t believe I said that either. All my judgment has flown away like a parrot escaping from its cage.”
“Never mind,” he said lazily, pouring wine with measured deliberation into the glass that the waiter deposited on the table. “Behavior, actions count more than words. What you do. And what do you do?” he asked, taking long slow sips of the golden wine, savoring each before swallowing. His long slender fingers reminded her of Barth’s.
“I’m a psychologist,” she said, fascinated by his languid rhythm.
“Oh. I better watch what I say, Doc.” He grinned.
“Yes, you better. I’m certainly not watching what I say,” she said, mirroring his wide grin.
“I’m an arborist. I work with trees. I cultivate and study them. That’s why I’m so strong, even though I’m slender. But at age forty-eight, my days are numbered. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.”
“You look like you can keep it up for a long time,” she said, shocking herself when she realized what she had said. “I mean you…you don’t look ready to retire from physical work any time soon,” she stammered.
“I can keep it up for a long time,” he said, his eyes burning, his voice smoking. He reached for her free hand, entwining his wiry fingers in hers. “I’m staying at the Casa Victoria Orchid on Espanola. You want to come?” he asked, looking at her cleavage so intently, she thought he could see the shimmering green of her bra. “Naturally, green is my favorite color,” he said, his eyes lingering on the green, which was indeed exposed.
“Yes,” she said. She paid the check, collected her books, took a final swig of wine, and left with him.
The short walk to Espanola was a hot blur.
“What’s your name?” she asked, matching his slow strides.
“Paul,” he said.
“That’s funny because you look just like him.”
“Not funny at all. I changed my name to Paul because I look just like him and because my name was Ezra.” He graced her with that beatific grin again. “What’s yours? Might as well know each other’s names before we take our clothes off.”
“Sophia. My real name.”
“Well, sure you’d keep that one. Sounds pretty and it means wisdom.”
This guy was so friendly, so easy, and so insouciant, she wasn’t even nervous. She just couldn’t wait to get her hands and lips on that face.
He stopped for a bottle of wine. “Red or white?”
“Red. I can only take so much white.”
They climbed to his second-floor room. Sophia, on the king bed in her underwear, sipped the wine in between drags on a joint he produced, which they were sharing.
As soon as they had entered the room, leaning against the closed door, he had raised her arms and stripped her dress off. Then he had stripped down to his boxers.
He smelled of caramelized sugar, tasted like thick oozing honey, and felt like silk. She melted into him.
“Now it’s time to take it all off,” he said, crawling onto the oversized bed.
He removed her bra, staring at her breasts.
“Love those big boobies,” he said, fondling and kissing them.
“You like older women,” she said.
“Yeah. Guess I have a mother fixation, Doc. Or more like older sister. You’re not that much older than I am,” he whispered, trailing off to begin sucking her nipples in earnest, ending any conversation.
CHAPTER 38
Sophia woke momentarily disoriented next to Paul’s sprawling nakedness. He had his left hand on his cock while his right lay carelessly on his smooth chest. She was sitting up when his eyes slid open, his arms pulled her down, and he began slipping his tongue between her teeth.
“What time is it, lover boy?” she asked, reluctantly breaking away from him, her voice thick with sleep, and her breath smoky and alcoholic.
“It’s only midnight. Time for one more. You know I can’t get enough of your super boobs,” he said, beginning to knead them.
“Much as I would love to stay, I have to get home. I have a husband who is going to be furious.”
“I understand. We have to grab our pleasure when we can. I’ll call a cab,” he said, his husky voice enthralli
ng her as she struggled to resist. He lit up the joint while calling the desk to arrange a cab.
She dressed. He kissed her, exhaling a miasma of pot smoke, pulling her close, licking her cleavage.
“Let’s exchange cards,” he said. “This was too good to be a one-night stand.”
“Okay,” she said, rummaging in her bag for a card.
“Don’t forget your books,” he said.
And she was out the door, dashing down the stairs, finding the cab waiting for her on crowded Espanola Way, where people were just beginning their evening.
While she was slithering into the bedroom, shoeless, a disgruntled Barth snapped on the light, his bleary eyes accusatory.
“Where have you been? I’ve been calling your cell. I didn’t get home till ten, and you weren’t anywhere to be found. Have you been fucking around?”
“Are you crazy, Barth? I was restless after work. So I decided to eat at Books and Books. I bought some books, people watched, and drank a little too much wine.”
“Lincoln Road and too much wine is a blueprint for getting laid,” Barth raged.
“Maybe if you’re a gay guy looking for a blow job.”
Barth bounded out of bed and slapped her in one fluid movement. He grabbed her wrist, flinging her onto the bed, twitching her dress overhead, ripping her bra off, and pulling her panties down to her ankles.
Wrath-fueled excitement drove his urgency. He was ready right away. He entered her easily while he was gnawing on her lips, pulling her hair back roughly.
When it was over, he lay back, satisfied.
“I wish I smoked in bed. I’m gasping for a smoke,” Barth said.
“Go get two. We can smoke on the balcony, have a drink,” Sophia said, feeling rubbery relaxed.
“You don’t smoke, darling.”
“I know. But extraordinary circumstances demand exceptional behavior. I just made that up. Pretty good, huh?” she asked, throwing him a sideways grin, lazy with that postcoital lethargy.
“Great,” he said absent-mindedly, fetching his cigarettes and a bottle of brandy from his studio.
Time's Hostage: The dangers of love, loss, and lus (Time Series Book 1) Page 25