The Halo Effect

7

Because it was raining when I left the office, I hailed a taxi and popped a peppermint into my mouth before I opened the door. I have a very sensitive sense of smell, and taxis often harbored too many stale scents. But with the candy in my mouth, most of them could be diffused.

I gave the driver the address of my apartment on the corner of Madison Avenue and Eightieth Street, and then opened my briefcase and pulled out the package Cleo had given me.

Inside the manila envelope was a manuscript printed out on three-hole paper with shiny brass brads holding the heavy load together.

The paper smelled clean and inky, a pristine copy. It must have been printed within the past twenty-four hours, because usually the smell of ink didn’t last any longer. There was another scent on the paper, too. But I wasn’t sure what it was. I shut my eyes and breathed it in. Menthol. Faint, but persistent.

For Love or Money

by Cleo Thane

Chapter One

The room is in a five-star hotel. It could be any one of the luxury hotel rooms in any one of a dozen cities in the United States that have such hotels. At least four hundred dollars a night. Sometimes five hundred. Often six hundred. And so the rug is thick and the linens on the bed are from France or Italy and have thread counts as high as the cost of the room.

It is nighttime. The only light in the room comes from the lamp on the desk. The drawn curtains hang, heavy and rich, and their hems pool on the floor.

The wallpaper is pale blue with a slight diamond pattern. The furnishings are ornate and gilded. The man is about forty-two years old. He has dark hair, slicked back, and a slightly receding hairline. He is in decent shape. You can tell because he is practically naked. His arms are muscled-he probably plays tennis every weekend and goes to the gym at least twice a week. And with his arms pulled above his head, the muscles are bulging against the awkward position. His chest is broad. Good skin. A slight tan. You are surprised that he is good-looking, aren’t you? She isn’t. She wets her lips, not to be purposely provocative but because she needs them to be wet, and then she leans down and puts her face very close to his, so close that if he reached up he could kiss her. But they are not playing at romance. This is seduction. And there is a difference.

“Wet enough?” she asks him.

He shakes his head no.

She lubricates her lips more.

“Now?”

He nods.

“Don’t move.”

“I won’t.”

“No, you won’t. If you do, you know I’ll stop.”

He nods again. But he does move, he stretches out his legs just a little against the ties constraining his ankles.

The man who is tied up is waiting for her to put her lips on his nipples and suckle him. First he feels the tips of her hair tickle the smooth skin of his chest. He wants to arch up, to get her mouth on him sooner, but he knows that if he does she will stop. And he doesn’t want that.

The sound of her wet lips on his skin is the melody he is paying her to play. It fills his ears. He shuts his eyes. Her tongue swirls on his skin, her teeth pull at him, taking small nibbles. The muscles in his back are pulled tight and he can feel the heat moving from his fingers, toward his elbows, toward his chest and traveling down, meeting the heat that is traveling up his legs. Everything converges dead center in his body at his erection.

Her hair is fanning his chest now. She raises her face to him and shows him how she is licking her lips once more and then she bows down again before him to take his other nipple in her mouth.

She sucks on it as if she is a baby and starving and he does not even realize, so focused is he on her sucking, that milk of another kind does flow from him, spurting out, arcing over his body, wetting his chest, and her arm and the back of her neck.

She feels it and lessens her hold on his nipple. Slowly she straightens up, still smiling. There is an art to disengagement. She does not just stand up the minute the man has ejaculated and say, “Well, that’s done now, so I’ll be taking off.”

She finesses the rest of the encounter without breaking the fictive dream. She is a poet, and even if she is writing disturbing poetry full of putrefied images that make some people want to vomit, she has to finish the poem. She has to complete the last stanza.

After all, this man has paid for this evening in this chic hotel. And he has been paying for evenings like this for the last two years. He is the son of a man who owns a very large media empire. He is the second in command there, appearing on the cover of the annual report next to his dad.

She knows this because as a bonus last year he gave her stock in this company, and two months ago the report arrived in the mail. Despite a fluctuating market, the stock has performed.

The least she can do is to stay awhile and have something to eat or drink and show her real appreciation. Because this man likes to show off and brag a little. He likes to tell her about what the company is doing so she will be impressed. So she asks as she works the knot, “How’s business?”

“We are starting a new magazine,” Clark Kent says as she unties his left hand. This is not his real name, but this is what she has named him. After Superman, after the mild-mannered reporter who is other than he seems.

“It is aimed at women who aren’t going to stop working no matter how many kids they have.”

She unties his right ankle.

“The demographics show that this is the largest part of the workforce.”

The knot on his left ankle is harder to untangle.

“We were thinking of putting-” he names a celebrity she has seen often on television “-on the cover. But instead, I had an idea that the cover should be made of Mylar so that the woman who picks up the magazine sees herself.”

He is free now and he sits up and reaches for the white terry-cloth robe that the hotel provides guests. It is pristine.

“Would you like a drink?” she asks. He nods. She makes him a dry martini the way she knows he likes it from the tray room service has provided, and then she settles down to talk business with him, helping him to forget that she knows things about his business that he does not want her to know.

This is how she earned her living last night.