The Delilah Complex

by MJ Rose

  And then the pressure lifted. The lips became soft. The tongue teasing. The attack a caress. No, an apology. It waited for my apology back. I gave with my mouth opening wider for him, with my tongue stroking the inside of his cheeks. The kiss went on. Metamorphosing again into his invitation to me. A wordless inquiry to let him be in me. In this way and in other ways.

  He put down his drink without breaking the kiss and led me to the couch, pulling me down with him. Still kissing me. Seconds went by. Minutes. How many? I don’t know.

  This is the problem with romance or love or whatever word you want to use. It distorts reality. The rush of hormones tricks you into thinking you are feeling emotions. And if there are emotions mixed in with the hormones, the distortion is even more profound. The way it was with Noah.

  I pulled away. Got up. I paced. He stayed on the couch. I felt a pinprick of disappointment but pushed it away. It was better that we had stopped the kiss. I sat down in the chair opposite him.

  “I like this room. Those chairs are in great shape. Original Grange?”

  Noah was also a connoisseur of antique furniture. The one time I’d gone to his place in Greenwich Village, I’d been amazed at the quality of his mission furnishings.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. My whole body was shivering, but I took a sip of my cold drink anyway, sucking on the ice, hoping it would numb my lips and extinguish the heat still burning inside my mouth.

  “I liked seeing you at dinner the other night,” he said.

  Damn. He wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

  “So, this is a personal visit?”

  “So you’ve put your armor back on.”

  I shrugged. “I’m tired. I’m worried.”

  “I know,” he said, with so much warmth that I felt it surround me and settle on my shoulders like a soft blanket. “Talk to me, Morgan.”

  It was a more sexual and frankly erotic invitation than the long glissade of kisses had been. His words shot up inside me, making me clench my legs together to try to stop the instant and intense throb deep in my womb.

  I, who knew exactly what to tell a patient, who could help people navigate the most complicated interpersonal relationships, had no idea what to say or how to think about this man and what he could arouse in me. I didn’t even know where to look. Into his eyes? Not if I wanted to get out of this encounter alive. He could swallow me up. He could water down my logic, reduce me to feelings.

  “You are a bad man,” I said with a halfhearted laugh.

  “Because I care about you even though you don’t want me to—or don’t think you want me to?”

  “Don’t be clever. And don’t try to shrink me.”

  “I wouldn’t dare.” He was teasing and for a minute I didn’t mind. For those sixty seconds, I wished that he wasn’t a detective and I wasn’t a therapist and I didn’t have any information about the case that I knew was keeping him up at night.

  “Noah, what do you want? Why did you come here?”

  “To have a drink. To sit here with you. To listen to you.”

  It was a nice offer but I had to be on guard now—he was the line I could not cross. He was the temptation that Nina had so correctly warned me against.

  I was a therapist. He was the police. He wanted to know what I could not tell him.

  Except, I remembered, for one small thing. I’d gone there to help him. It wasn’t fair of me to be angry with him now because he’d shown up to find out what I was offering. Be it myself or help with his case.

  He got up. Came to me. Bent over and kissed me again. My head was raised to his. His hands went into my hair and his fingertips moved against my scalp. He raised me up so that we were standing body to body, the whole length of each of us against the other. His lips did not stop moving, nor did mine. His hands left my hair, moved to my shoulders. Then he unbuttoned my sweater, and everywhere he touched my skin I became aware of nerve endings that I didn’t know existed. The tremors that overtook me shook him. He pulled back and gave me a smile that was as grateful as it was seductive. “Just from my fingers?” he whispered.

  I nodded, thinking I could not have said anything even if I wanted to.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “Tell me,” he repeated.

  I put my mouth up to his ear; he put the flat of his hand against my back. It burned. I was sure that in the morning I would be branded by his five fingers, that the red mark would never leave, that my skin would be scarred so badly I would be able to feel the ridges of the scarring.

  “Tell me,” he said once more.

  And my whispering began. Words I couldn’t hold back any more than I could have stopped him from touching me.

  “I told you before. I don’t trust any of it. I’ve heard every awful thing I can imagine that two people can do to each other. The way that passion poisons. The way that this kind of feeling becomes so big that other things are crowded out. It makes women weak, Noah. I talk to them. I help them. I try to figure out ways for them to find themselves again after they have been swallowed whole by this kind of touching. By the exact same sensations that you are making me feel…”

  He worked the clasp of my bra, pulled it off me, lowered his head to my chest and circled my nipple with his tongue.

  “Don’t stop,” he said. Exactly what I was thinking. But he’d said it first. He wanted my words the way I wanted his touch.

  “It’s not real. It’s too tempting. It’s fleeting. Don’t you see? It’s temporary. It won’t last like this. We will suck each other dry and all that will be left will be the memory of passion. And then we’ll try to live on that, to make that enough, and it won’t be, but neither of us will want to admit it.”

  He had put my whole nipple in his mouth and was sucking on it. Acting out on my body exactly what my words suggested. The next second the warmth of his mouth was gone and the air was puckering my skin. One fingertip, slick with wetness from his mouth, made circles around and around my breast, teasing out more words.

  “I will not do this, Noah. I can’t. I know better than this. I feel what you are doing and I keep hearing all the people who’ve been in my office, betrayed by this. Who have fallen for the exultation of this only to find out that it is a mirage.”

  He didn’t ask me to stop talking. In fact, as he undressed he asked me questions. Wanting more.

  “What do you tell the women? The ones who fall for this? The ones who want more of it? Who won’t let go of the hope that they’ll get it back?”

  He was naked now. Erect. His whole body strong and supple. I looked at him, not even hearing the words as they came out of my mouth. “I help them find themselves again. To separate the feelings from the fears. To see where their own issues interfered with the intimacy of the relationship. To deal with their conflicts about wanting to be controlled and yet rebelling against it.”

  He undressed me until, like him, I was naked, and he gave me that smile again. I’ve never met a man whose smile pulled at me like Noah’s did. It made promises; it reassured; it invited. It was a secret. A very different expression than the grin that he showed in public. This was a private face that was more naked than his body. He expressed joy—but a joy that was mingled with an acknowledgment of how tenuous any single moment was.

  “Do you want me to control you?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Do you want to control me?”

  I shook my head again.

  He lay down next to me. We were connected at a hundred different points. Slowly, his hands ran up and down my sides, warming my skin, electrifying it. I started to feel myself losing even more consciousness. I was trying to say words to him, to keep talking about the voices I heard in my head whenever I tried to get back to myself. About how difficult it was to get rid of my patients whenever I had tried to have sex. Before. Before the one time that Noah and I had been together. But I couldn’t. Not anymore. Every place on my body that he touched had become aroused. My ski
n was going to orgasm. Not inside of me, not up high where it was dark and oceanic and the waves of blood were pounding—but on the surface of my body. My shoulders, my neck, the small of my back, behind my knees, the tops of my thighs, the soles of my feet: all of these places were humming with sensation. Setting my body reverberating. The words were gone in the feeling. The voices had been drowned out by the simple sound of Noah’s breath, more hurried as the time went by. Matched by my breath in my own ears. Even more rushed than his.

  “Morgan,” he said, so low that I wasn’t sure I’d heard it until he said it again. “Morgan.” As if he had found something he had known once but had lost.

  Thirty-Seven

  We lay on the couch afterward, wrapped in each other, stuck together from our sweat and the heat we were still generating. He kept kissing me. And I didn’t stop him. For a long time, I floated on his lips until the sensations calmed and I remembered who I was. And who I was with.

  “If you will stay out of my head,” I said, pulling back, ending the kiss, not even realizing I had answered a question he had not asked out loud.

  He nodded. Not in assent. Just in acknowledgment that he had heard me.

  “That’s wrong, Morgan. You need me in your head. You need to be able to talk to me. You need me to be able to listen to you.”

  “You can’t not push, can you?”

  “You didn’t mind my pushing ten minutes ago.”

  “Don’t,” I said. Despite his levity, I was scared. And, of course, he knew it. So he moved away, reached for the long-abandoned drink, took a long pull, then asked, “What is this, by the way?”

  “Vodka, ice, lime juice.”

  He nodded and took another long sip. “Not bad. See, you can cook.”

  I smiled despite myself.

  “Speaking of food…” Noah stood, pulled on his pants and went into my kitchen. I found him there after getting my robe. He had just opened the stove and, laughing, was pulling out the pathetic, once-frozen, now dried-out chicken entrée. He threw it into the garbage and said, “Real food, Morgan. You need to eat real food.”

  He returned to the hallway and retrieved a plastic shopping bag that I hadn’t even seen him walk in with.

  Back in the kitchen he withdrew packages and lined them up on the counter. Then he opened the cabinets and took out bowls and mixing spoons, a frying pan and a pot.

  He put water on to boil. Cut two of the three lemons he’d brought and squeezed them into a measuring cup.

  “Strainer?” he asked without turning around.

  “Cabinet under the silverware drawer.”

  I wanted to fight him. To get him out of there. And, just as strongly, I was so happy to sit down at the kitchen table and watch this impossibly sweet man cook for me that I didn’t know how to stop smiling. Just for tonight, I thought to myself, I will forget about what Nina warned me about; I will not worry about what is going to happen between Noah and me, not worry about the murders and the newspapers and the women in the Scarlet Society.

  He opened a container of cream and poured it into a saucepan. After turning on the flame, he stirred it slowly. Watched it. Stirred it some more. After another minute, he poured in the lemon juice, stirred the liquids together, swirling them with a wire whisk, and then turned the flame down.

  Listing the ingredients he assumed I had, he watched me as I pulled them out of the cabinets. Then, moving over to the sink, he unwrapped a package of fresh scallops and washed them in the sink, gently, careful not to bruise the white flesh. Just as tenderly, he patted them down with a paper towel. His long fingers picked up one glistening scallop at a time and slowly dredged it, giving it a fine coat of flour, salt and pepper. With a knife, he sliced off a knob of butter and set it in the pan to melt.

  While he waited, he opened a bottle of wine and poured us each a glass. By then, the butter was sizzling and Noah added the scallops to the pan. His whole body was intent on cooking this meal. The same way it had been focused on every inch of our bodies that had been touching fifteen minutes before.

  The dry, crisp white wine he’d brought was an excellent accompaniment to the delicately lemon-flavored pasta and sautéed scallops. The tastes worked off one another— the buttery and salty flesh of the seafood giving up their perfume, softened by pasta coated with the lush cream, spiked with the tart lemon juice. For a few minutes, I didn’t say anything but just luxuriated in the food.

  Mixed in with my admiration of the detective’s skill was a little resentment. I didn’t want to admire him. Or look at his too blue eyes and strong cheekbones, or watch his hands bringing forkfuls of food up to his mouth and remember—

  “Why are you really here?” I asked, knowing, sadly, what I was doing. Sabotaging a lovely night. But I didn’t have any choice, did I?

  He frowned. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to talk about that until after I’d made coffee. Want to take back the question? You’re allowed to do that, you know. It’s part of the rules when I make dinner. People who ruin the mood are allowed to retract their words. You have thirty seconds.” He looked at his wristwatch.

  “Wish I could. Why, Noah?”

  “I came here hoping to find out that your visit to me at the station was a personal one. That after seeing me at dinner last week, you’d decided that you’d been wrong last June. That you regretted having stood me up and wanted to make amends and start over.”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t personal. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you, really?” His voice was suddenly edged with sarcasm.

  I hated hearing it and yet was relieved. I was back in control.

  “Okay.” He gave a small sigh as if starting down this path was saddening him. “Why did you run out of the precinct then? You obviously came all the way downtown to see me. What made you change your mind?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Noah. I can’t tell you that.”

  “Can’t?”

  Damn, I’d given too much away with one word. I’d forgotten how sharp he was, like a magnet that picked up the slightest sliver of iron from a bushel of wood.

  “We’ve followed Betsy Young. We know she’s been to your office. I should have realized she wasn’t just there to interview you. So she’s a patient.”

  “No. I don’t know Betsy Young. I told you that last week.” I was confused. Why had he brought up the reporter now?

  “You told me she’d interviewed you.”

  “Right. Over the phone.”

  “You never saw her, never met her?”

  “No, Noah. I already told you that.”

  “If that’s true, why did your eyes widen a mile when you saw her in the hall?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was too surprised. Betsy Young? No. The woman Noah had been escorting out of his office was Liz-without-a-last-name, from the Monday night Scarlet Society group, albeit with different hair.

  Finally, I got it.

  So that was why Betsy Young had called me to get a quote for her article on the first killing. She hadn’t thought of me because of my involvement in the Magdalene Murders at all.

  Shelby Rush had told me that many of the women who belonged to the society slightly disguised themselves when they participated. I hadn’t questioned that. Of course they would. If they had any kind of public persona, they would want their participation in the society to be anonymous. And they couldn’t just show up in masks all the time. Hence wigs turning brown hair blond, sunglasses, hats. Certainly not all of them changed their appearances. But Betsy Young had.

  “I thought she looked like someone I knew, Noah. Someone I didn’t expect to see there. It shook me up. I ran out. That’s it.”

  “Is the person you saw with me a patient of yours, Morgan?”

  “You know better than to even ask me that. If she were, I couldn’t tell you, anyway.”

  “You’re right. And I don’t have to ask you. Because I already know. When I asked you why you ran out of the precinct, the first thing you said was I can’t tell you. N
ot I won’t tell you. Only one reason for that.”

  He stood and picked up our plates. His shirt was unbuttoned and I looked away from his bare chest. Not wanting to think about his flesh now.

  “Don’t do that, Noah. I’ll clean up after you go.”

  “So, I’ve been dismissed?”

  “I don’t know what you expect of me. You come over here to seduce me and once that’s done you switch gears and start digging to get information that might help your case. How am I supposed to deal with all of that?” It was all I could manage not to scream. This had happened to us before. We’d gotten our roles mixed up. We’d crossed the line, and now I’d let it happen again. What was wrong with me?

  I grabbed the plates—my plates—out of his hands. “This is my house. You can’t come in here and take over. Uninvited. You can’t.”

  The dishes sounded as if they had shattered as I dropped them into the sink. I didn’t look to see if they had.

  “You’re right,” he said in a low voice that curled around me like his arms had before.

  Damn him for that, too. The easiest way to defuse someone’s anger is to apologize. And I couldn’t afford to have my anger defused. It was the only way I could get him a safe distance away.

  I went back to the table to get the glasses and utensils. When I came back, Noah was standing at the sink filling my teakettle with water. In four steps I was by his side, pulling the kettle out of his hands and managing to splash myself and him with a wide arc of water.

  “Glad that was still cold,” he said.

  “This isn’t your kitchen!” I shouted. “I told you that.”

  “What are you so mad about? You love my cooking. I remember that you loved my coffee, too. I even bought chicory.”

  There was a whole subtext to what he was saying that I didn’t want to hear, because after he left, when I was alone again, I didn’t want to think about what else he’d implied.

  He retrieved the kettle out of my hands before I realized what he was doing and finished filling it up.

  “Noah, I’m asking you to get out of here. To leave me alone. And to give me back my goddamn kettle.”