Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (30 page)

“What do you do when you get angry?” He began to work the rest of the buttons on my blouse. And then slipped it down my shoulders and pulled it off my arms. The fabric sliding over my skin was yet another embrace, as if he had imbued the shirt with erotic powers so that the very movement of the silk was some sort of lovemaking.

“What
can
I do?” I asked.

“You can tell me about it, Morgan.”

“I just want to find my own images again.” I wasn’t thinking about my words but about how this man’s hair was soft against my chest. How his breath was hot on my stomach and how his hands were kneading the knots out of my shoulders.

What were we doing with this odd combination of bloodletting, massage and seduction? I didn’t want to stop to figure it out. My body was quivering. I couldn’t get close enough to him. My hands finally, after all this time of him touching me, moved up to his arms, and I gripped his muscles.

“Tell me all about the things that have gone wrong in your life, about the things that you’ve rationalized because you’re too smart to get mad, Morgan.”

“I don’t rationalize.”

“Bullshit.”

Almost immediately, my fists came up, curled tight, and attacked him. It was easier than I could have imagined to rain punches on him while he kissed me.

As hard as I was hitting him, his kisses were gentle. His tongue barely grazing mine, playing a hide-and-seek game, holding back as much as he was giving.

His hands were on my back, holding me tight against him. I didn’t want that; I wanted to push at him and knock him down, and I wanted to hurt him, to crash against him.

I stopped long enough to unbutton and unzip my pants, pull them off, then go to work on his, struggling with the buttons and his fly. He did not help. He made me work at it on my own. I moved with the angry energy that had been building up for so long. The passion that I had not found any outlet for exploded. Feelings I had been so sure didn’t exist in me anymore erupted.

As soon as we were both naked and lying on the floor, the whole length of our bodies was in contact, and his hands moved like butterflies alighting on my skin. Hundreds of electric shocks shot through me, and he made me give him more of what was buried inside me.

“This is something. It’s real now,” he whispered.

“Isn’t it?” The anger was moving out of me, replaced by something hot and thick and sweet that pulsed through my body.

This was just want. Not love or even something as sane as lust. This was just want. Everything was gone now. There were not even memories of this in me from some long-ago college night or early courtship. My mind was not running in a logical path. I pulled back to look at him, to take it in with my eyes this object that was under me. This thing that I wanted so badly.

I slid down his body. With both hands I held his foot, then I bent down and used my teeth and lips and tongue to work my way up, tasting his skin, smelling his body, stopping to touch myself between my legs, then moving my wet fingers up his leg. I was marking him in some primitive ceremony, and when he saw me do it once, he took my hand and made me do it again. Touching myself, taking my own slickness, I finger-painted him. His thighs. His stomach. His chest. His nipples. His erection. The scent was around me, a smell that I had never immersed myself in before. My own smell. On a man. All over a man.

He picked me up, saw my startled face and laughed.

“I’m not used to this,” I said.

“Good.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Too bad.”

“You have all the control,” I complained as he carried me into his bedroom.

“Yes.” He laughed again. Deeper in his throat. The kind of intimate laugh that I have heard other couples share at a dinner party when they think no one else is listening. “It’s such torture. Poor Dr. Morgan Snow is not in control. That’s what it will be like with me. You’ll have it. Then I’ll take it back. We will be intimate. And that is the worst thing you can think of, isn’t it? You won’t like it, will you?”

“No, I won’t like it.”

“Shh.” He kissed me quiet and lay me down on his unmade
bed, which was redolent with his scent. I rolled over on the cool cotton sheets and buried my head in his pillow, feeling the cold air from an air conditioner bathe my back. Luxuriating in the bouquet of smells in the pillow, I lost him for a minute. Forgot about everything, breathing in a whole other world.

And then, from behind me, he lowered himself onto me. His arms on my arms, his chest on my back, his stomach on the small of my back, the top of his thighs on the back of my thighs. I was blanketed by him and there was no more cool air, only skin, warming me…no, heating me…as he slid inside of me…and a long, slow, aching moan slipped out from between my lips. A “Yes” that was so stretched out that it was a sound, not a word.

He moved like jazz. He riffed inside of me. He made some bluesy kind of music out of movement. Never fast, just easing along, changing the rhythm, the cadence and the tone. I danced under him to music that I hadn’t ever heard.

We were wet, sweating despite the cold, moving so intensely together, striving not to get to the end of the song, letting each note play out long and slow, touching some of the keys with intensity and others much more softly.

When I thought I was going to stop breathing and just break apart, he turned me around, carefully, and then he just looked down at me.

We were both panting. He took a glass of water from beside the bed, drank from it, and then put his head close to mine and fed me water from his mouth. The shock of it didn’t diminish the pleasure.

“More…please…”

I didn’t know what I was asking for. More of the water? More of the jazz? More of him playing me?

He took more of the water, but this time, instead of putting it in my mouth, he dripped it on my chest, on my breasts,
on my neck. And at the same time he started to move in me again. Slowly, beating out a new rhythm that was more insistent and less gentle than the one before. It was still too slow for me. I was in a hurry and I thrust up at him, but he wouldn’t let me change the pace.

“No control, Morgan.” He smiled.

I gave up then. Just let go. Stopped being. Whatever thoughts still lingered were lost in the sensations flooding my insides. He went so slowly that it turned into some kind of pain. And there was real pain, too. Because I was reaching up, kissing him on his shoulders, his neck, using my teeth, gnawing his flesh, and he was biting on mine. He found a spot where my neck met my shoulder—by accident, because he knew, because our bodies were mirror images of each other’s, because I had found this spot on his body without knowing it. It didn’t matter, he found this spot, this two-inch-wide circle, and he kissed it and then bit into it and I arched up and screamed. It was as if the feeling between my legs and the sensitivity of this spot were connected by a live wire and he was jiggling it. Shocks. Fire. Pain. Bursts of cold, spasms of hot. Sounds. Long, held-out notes. Music. Circles circling on one another. There was nothing anymore at all. Eyes shut. Skin. Teeth. Full up inside. So full, too full, and too much sensation, lifting me up, taking off, spinning, pain, no control, his hair on my cheeks, falling on me, his lips on my lips, then back at that spot while he spun inside of me, and I was circling again and again until the circles widened and I let go, shuddering and crying out and digging my fingers into his back to get him in me farther still, and then farther, so that I might split apart and finally get to the heart of the feeling. But it wouldn’t come. I kept reaching for it. How do you have this much feeling after so long and let it go?

He knew that, too. He waited for as long as he could. Noah strung out every second of sensation, like the longest note you
have ever heard on a piano. And then he just stopped moving. There was no sound. Neither of us breathed.

There was nothing but that bed and our bodies and the empty fullness I felt. Brain drained, satiated. We were both waiting. Still connected by the tip of him hovering on the edges of me. Holding back, holding out. He was up on his elbows, looking down. I opened my eyes and he caught me in his glance.

Waiting. More silence.

Then he smiled like a little kid with a secret.

“Now, Morgan. With me, now,” he whispered in a musical kind of singsong invitation.

He swooped down and slid in, and the surprise and quickness and the heaviness and tightness and fullness, along with the intense, pure pain of it after so many hours of being teased toward it, was all it took. And I did let go. Finally.

H
e made us omelettes early the next morning before the sun was up. They were fluffy and filled with ripe summer tomatoes, juicy and fat, that softened into the melted Gruyère cheese. We gorged on the eggs and the promised beignets sprinkled with powdered sugar and the bitter coffee that tasted much better in the morning than it had the night before. I was wrapped in his terry-cloth robe, which enfolded me in excess fabric. He didn’t let me do anything. And I didn’t mind. Come what may, it didn’t matter. I’d found something that I hadn’t even realized was missing. And with it some of my anger had dissipated.

While we ate, we talked about silly things. Noah asked me questions about what I liked to do, places I had been, trips I wanted to take.

“You haven’t traveled a lot.” He sounded surprised.

“I’ve been working too hard. And vacations were complicated. They allowed me to think. Without my patients to obfuscate
my own reality, it was easier not to go away unless we were taking Dulcie with us.”

“We’ll go to Europe,” he said as he poured me more coffee and then spooned in the sugar.

I nodded.

“Do you like the beach?”

“Yes.”

“Once this case is solved we’ll jump in the car and go up to the cape. We’ll go swimming in the ocean. And it will be just a little too cold.”

“You are totally taking charge?”

“You’ll figure out how to even that out, but for now, yes. We’ll be lovers and you’ll be happy and we’ll figure out how to balance it all.”

The phone rang. Like a shrill reminder that a world existed beyond his apartment. Almost as if we’d both forgotten, we stared at the instrument on the wall.

And with a forlorn look he took the call.

“Jordain,” he said into the mouthpiece, and then he listened.

“How many of the places checked out?” he asked.

I got up, went into the bathroom and took a shower. When I came out he had taken all the plates off the table and now the table was covered with paperwork. Notes, computer printouts and faxes.

“They have a lead,” he explained.

I walked over and stood beside him, looking down.

“This is a list of all the religious-supply houses that have had orders for those nun’s habits in the last six months. Who ordered them, how they were paid for and where they were shipped. We’ve finally narrowed it down to four that fit the specs.” And he slid the list to me.

My blood started pumping in a way that was different from
the night before but with the same intensity. I read down the list.

Six habits were sent to the St. Mary’s Convent in Minneapolis. Four to Our Lady of the Flowers retreat in Southampton, New York. Another six to the parish of St. Francis of Assisi in Bernardsville, New Jersey, and five habits to Our Lady of Sorrows in St. Martin, N.A.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
N.A
. I knew those initials. I’d seen them before, sometime in the past three weeks. But where?

I pointed to them. “What is N.A.?”

“Netherlands Antilles. Does that mean something to you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I think so but don’t know why.”

“We have someone investigating all of these places. We may be lucky and actually connect this up. One of these places could have had a robbery. Or been used as a drop. We’re getting the receipts. Court orders, subpoenas. It’s the fucking weekend and we may not be able to get everything we need till Monday. But I have to go into the office.”

“That’s okay.”

“Will you stay here?”

I was surprised. And smiled.

“I’m having lunch with Mitch and Dulcie.”

“Will you come back here afterward?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call you.”

“Okay.” His eyebrows were raised. He was trying to read me and I wasn’t making it easy.

His phone rang again.

“Jordain,” he said, and listened.

I was about to go into the bedroom and get dressed, but something about the consternation that settled on his face and the nervous way his fingers started playing an imaginary piano on the table made me stop.

“When did it come in?” He listened while the party on the other end of the line spoke. “When will the lab have results?” He listened again. “Okay. I’ll be there in an hour.”

He put the phone down.

“What is it?”

“Morgan, I need your help.” His voice was weighted down with exhaustion even though he’d only woken up an hour before. I nodded.

“It’s about Cleo.”

Now the skin on the back of my neck prickled. I held my breath.

“If there is a connection…and since you think there is, I’m willing to go with that. I need to know more about who she was seeing.”

I shook my head.

“Morgan. You’re withholding evidence.”

“I am protecting my patient.”

“But you’re impeding an investigation.”

“No. I’m doing my job and you are doing yours.” I was suddenly back in my office the first time I met Noah. I had the book in my possession. And Detective Noah Jordain stared at me with his steely blue eyes. He wanted to know what I wasn’t telling him.

“Is that what last night was about? All this? Did you bring me here and seduce me, hoping that I’d go all soft on you and just turn over the book and all my information to you? Are you nuts? I have an ethical obligation to protect my patient’s privacy.”

His eyes clouded over. His spine stiffened. He stepped back from me as if I had flung hot oil at him.

“Are you crazy? You think I was using you?”