The Delilah Complex

Thirty-Six

It was just eight-thirty but it had been a long day and I was exhausted. I’d only been home fifteen minutes. The shopping bags were still in the front hall where I’d dropped them when I got in. I’d taken off my work clothes and had changed into leggings, a cashmere cardigan, and a pair of black suede ballet slippers. I’d even had time to stick some frozen thing in the oven and pour myself a glass of vodka with a splash of Rose’s lime juice when the buzzer rang.

It wasn’t really a surprise. I had gotten to know Jordain better than I’d thought in the short time we’d known each other. That he wanted to know why I had turned and left the police station when I’d obviously come to tell him something was not unexpected. But the reality of him filling the door frame shocked me.

I stared at the drops of rain on the broad shoulders of his leather jacket and in his silver-streaked hair. How long was he going to want to stay? How could I get him to leave?

“Can I come in?” he asked.

His eyes were too blue. “What will happen if I say no?”

“I’ll come in, anyway.”

“I guessed as much.” I opened the door wider and he walked into my apartment.

“Is Dulcie here?”

I shook my head. “She’s with her father.”

He nodded and looked around. He’d been here before and he seemed to be remembering it, reacquainting himself with the space and my things in it.

“Did you eat yet?” he asked.

“No, I was just having a drink.”

“That sounds great. I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

Wasn’t he going to ask me what I had come to tell him? Why couldn’t he just get it over with? As I moved toward the bar, my mind tried to deal with a half-dozen different emotions at once. Had Nina been right? Should I stay out of the police investigation and let them find out who these men were and why they were being killed on their own? Or was I just thinking that because Noah was here?

I took a glass off the shelf above the bar. My hand was shaking. Did he see it? I poured the vodka, splashed in the Rose’s. There was no ice. I left him, walked into the kitchen, put three ice cubes into the glass and went back to him. He was looking out the window and turned as he heard my footsteps. He walked toward me, took the drink, sipped at it, smiled, and then without putting it down or saying a word, pulled me toward him with his free hand and kissed me.

His lips were cold from the drink. He tasted of lime. He smelled of rosemary and mint. He pressed his whole body against mine and reminded me how it felt to be alive with every cell of your body, not just with your brain. The room fell away. The reason I’d gone to see him and the rain and the impropriety and the rules I was bending were all gone.

That the coming together of bodies could be such a delight, such a powerful force, that it could be so pleasurable was both a gift from the gods and a mercurial force of science. That I was still wary of it shamed me. That I was thinking of giving this gift back made me feel ungrateful.

Noah did not stop kissing me.

I lost my balance.

His arm held me up.

He knew even that.

I pressed into him.

He responded, reciprocated.

He did not stop kissing me.

I could not remember ever being kissed like that. I did not remember when a kiss was as good as fucking. When a kiss was as intimate as having a man inside me. No. More. More intimate. Noah breathed into me. I inhaled his breath. The rest of our bodies disappeared. The point of contact between us burned. I knew my lips would be bruised when we stopped. I only hoped his would be bruised just as badly. Months of long nights were in my mouth, spewing from me into him. My teeth gnashed into his, letting him know that he had waited too long to come back. I bit down on his lips, trying to punish him for taking me at my word. He had known better. I had counted on it. He had tricked me.

He bit back. He pushed back. He used his tongue like some kind of weapon, berating me for what I had prevented, castigating me for having kept us from being together before this. He inflicted the kiss on me. I accepted it as my sentence. I argued with my mouth. It had not been all my fault. He had not fought back. But he was fighting back now.

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 skin 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.