Kiss Of Evil

30

It is Christmas Eve and I am in the white room. I have one session left, something set up weeks ago. A woman who, were I not so embroiled in my current activities, I would pursue mightily. She is divorced, in her mid-thirties. Or at least that is the role she is playing. We have had two sessions; both with her watching me.

Tonight, though, she has promised to appear on camera, to show herself to me.

I am in the white room early, nearly beside myself in anticipation. When the video stream opens at eight o’clock I see her for the first time. She is sitting in a desk chair, wearing a dark scoop-neck dress. Behind her, a bedroom.

She leans forward, tilts the camera slightly upward so that I may see her pretty face. In doing so, I am privy to a maddening few inches of cleavage. It appears as if she is wearing a black lace push-up bra.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hello.”

She sits back, crosses her legs. I can now see the hem of her dress, a hint of her slip. “Merry Christmas.”

“And the same to you,” I say. Her hair is a light color, strawberry blond perhaps.

“Do you like what you see?” she asks.

“Very much.”

“Do you feel it was worth waiting for?”

“Yes.”

“If I can get away, I will be at Jayson’s on Chagrin Boulevard in one hour,” she says. “Do you know it?”

“Yes.”

“I will save the seat next to me until ten.”

“I understand.”

She stands, unzips her dress, slips out of it. She is wearing a black bra, matching slip. She turns to the side, places one of her spike-heeled shoes on the computer chair and adjusts what I can now see is a thigh-high nylon.

Then, incredibly, she turns off her camera and closes the session.

Is she baiting me?

I look at my image reflected in the now-black monitor. The reflection tells me the truth.

It is a mistake.

This is my chorus as I shower, shave, dress, and head for Jayson’s.

She is nowhere to be seen. The Christmas Eve crowd is thin, just a handful of couples scattered around the room, invisible in their sameness; just a pair of Asian businessmen at the far end. I sit at the bar, near the door, sip my Ron Rico, wonder. Perhaps she had car trouble. Perhaps she was in an accident. Perhaps her husband had intervened.

Perhaps I have no business doing this when I am so close to my goal.

I wait another ten minutes, drain my drink. I decide to pay the bill and leave. It was a mistake to come. I have appointments.

A few minutes later, waiting for my change-my mind adrift on the scent of a doorway on East Fortieth Street and Central Avenue, on bleached white skin, blued by moonlight-I hear, from just behind me, a man’s voice:

“Could you stand up please?”

The noise erupts. This time, a loud, discordant blood rush in my ears. The blaring brass of imminent violence.

Again: “Sir?”

My hand moves slowly toward the knife sheathed on my left hip. Heart slips into high. Exits mapped-front door to my right, back door through kitchen. I calm myself enough to speak. “I’m sorry?”

I turn around to see a graying, Asian businessman of sixty, pointing to my stool. His jacket is hanging from the back.

It is nothing.

I get up, blow past him, rage out of the bar.

The cacophony in my head begins to recede slightly as I walk to the parking lot, disgusted with myself for coming in the first place. I start the car, pull into westbound traffic, drive toward the auditorium, my fury, for the moment, turned inward, my heart beating in my ears like some ancient metronome counting down a coda of inescapable madness.