Stranded (15 page)

I fear what I will do when she leaves me. I know now what it is to be driven by an obsession that is beyond control. I understand the mentality of stalkers, because that is what I am becoming. Her leaving me will bring my house down in ruins about me because I will not be able to let her walk away. The need in me is too fierce.

I fear what I am becoming. I look in the mirror in the morning and see an edge of madness in my own gaze. I have run too many defences not to know the damage that this could wreak if I let it spiral further out of control. The only thing I can do to save myself, to save my life, is to act now, while I am still capable of organised, rational thought. If I wait till she leaves me, as she undoubtedly will, I shall be beyond such niceties.

And so I have made my plans. This will be our last night together. The room is booked in Stevie's name. What she doesn't know is that I have already ostentatiously checked into another room in a motel on the far side of town; the sort of place where nobody sees you come or go. I made sure she got here first tonight, and I will sit it out until I can lose myself in the early morning departures and go straight to court. I've been very careful not to touch anything that would take a fingerprint; I know better than to wipe down the surfaces, because that would be a sure sign that someone else had been here with her.

We're going to play bondage games tonight. I asked her to bring her toys with her, and she has, because she still cares enough to want to give me pleasure. I've been reading up on cases of autoerotic asphyxiation. It's mostly a male thing, but there have been cases where women have died playing the sort of games that are supposed to enhance sexual pleasure. I've worked it all out. Her feet bound to the foot of the iron bedstead. Her hands tied in front of her. The orange spiked with poppers in her mouth. Then the noose round her neck, fastened to the bed head.

The tragic accident.

The hardest part will be avoiding her eyes.

When Larry Met Allie

W
e'd done virtually everything before we even met.

Let me rephrase that. We'd done, virtually, everything before we even met. Or perhaps, we'd done virtually everything, virtually, before we met. Amazing what a difference a couple of commas can make.

The difference between life and death, sometimes.

I chose her very carefully. I knew what I was looking for. Distance was a key factor; I didn't want there to be any possibility of her appearing in my world. No witnesses, you see. That she already had a lover was also important; there had to be a good reason for her to keep me clandestine. I didn't want her beautiful, either; beautiful women are accustomed to having men come on to them. They know how to brush us off and they don't think twice about it. As every teenage boy knows, the ugly girls are always grateful for attention.

The other vital element in the selection process came from her work. I was looking for a writer who revelled in sensuality, whose work displayed a hunger for the wilder shores of sexual experiment, whose prose had the power to inflame a flicker of desire. There's no shortage of sex in crime fiction these days, but most of it is about as erotic as the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
. I had to plough through a lot of depressingly grim attempts at arousing the reader before I found her.

Allie James. Author of four psychological thrillers featuring FBI profiler Susan Sondheim. None of them had been
New
York
Times
bestsellers, but she had respectable sales and a growing fan base, if her sales ranking and reviews on Amazon.com were to be trusted. I read the books and felt a prickle of excitement run up the back of my neck. On the face of it, she was a prime candidate.

Her protagonist had two lovers during the course of the four novels. Allie's descriptions of their encounters managed to walk the tightrope between graphic mechanics and sentimental euphemism. There was a genuine erotic charge in what she wrote, a sly, knowing sensuousness that tightened my stomach, dried my mouth and made me want more.

The brief author biog on the back flap was encouraging too. ‘Allie James was born and raised in rural North Carolina. She trained in graphic design and worked for ten years in advertising in Chicago. She now lives in Virginia with her partner.' There was no photograph, which made me think that Allie James didn't have a high opinion of her looks. And with her background, she probably wasn't as sophisticated as a big-city girl. She'd be easier to flatter, to convince and to capture.

I needed more information, however. Next stop, the search engine. Google.com gave me a couple of hundred hits, and I worked my way through reviews, through online booksellers, through newsgroup discussion strands on her work until I eventually found a couple of lengthy interviews that coloured in the picture more fully. Allie was thirtyseven, a Gemini onlychild who professed to be fascinated by the extremes of human psychology. Her partner taught English literature in a small college in Virginia. They'd been together for eight years. They had no children, but doted on their Weimeraner bitch. And still no photograph anywhere.

I headed off to a site I'd discovered where it's possible to track down who owns domain names. I typed ‘alliejames. com' into their search engine. As I'd expected, I was told that the site was already owned. Any writer with any sense has figured out the importance of owning their domain name, even if they're not doing anything with it yet. If they don't register it themselves, they run the risk of being held to ransom by some nerd who's seen the potential of selling it back to them. Or worse, having their name bought by their publisher, to do with as the parent company wishes.

I chose the option that allowed me to find out the site's owner. Most people don't realise this information is readily available, so they don't bother to hide behind their agent or a box number. Allie was one of those who hadn't. Within seconds, I was staring at her address and the phone number I'd already discovered was unlisted. I printed out the details for future reference, then went on-line to set my bait.

From: Lawrence Ryan, [email protected]

To:Allie James, [email protected]

Re:Your books

Dear Allie,

I wanted to write and tell you how much pleasure your books have given me. Few writers achieve the insight into the human condition that you seem to manage so effortlessly. I love the depth of characterisation in your work, and the way you convey the passion of the hunter for her goal. Susan Sondheim is one of the best-rounded protagonists in the genre, a woman with a heart and soul as well as a brain. As one who toils in the same part of the garden as you, I know how difficult it is to create something genuinely fresh in the genre. I just wanted to tell you how much I respect what you do.

Best wishes,

Larry Ryan

I had few doubts that my approach would provoke a response. And I was right. Within twelve hours, I had her reply sitting in my in-box.

Dear Larry,

Wow!
What an honor to get fan mail from a fellow writer
of your achievement! I've been a huge – albeit silent – fan of
your work since
The Lazarus Angel
was first published over
here. Since when, I've had to break the bank to
import the UK editions, because I just don't want to wait
for your US publisher to catch up :-)

I'm so
thrilled that you enjoy my adventures with Susan. All fan
mail is great, of course, but it means so much
more to hear it from someone I admire.

So, where are
you up to? When can I expect my next fix?

Yours,
in awe,

Allie

Of course, I was straight back on to her. There would be a time to keep her hanging on, but not yet.

Allie,

What a charming reply.You certainly know how to flatter! I didn't expect you even to have heard of me, never mind to have read my books, given the complete lack of promotion my US publishers throw my way. So it goes . . .

< So, where are you up to? When can I expect my next fix?> I've just finished the proofs for my new book,
Night
Sweats
, which means I have a blessed period of about three weeks before I begin the next book. I'm afraid NS won't be out for another five months, so you'll have to possess your soul in patience.

Unless, of course, you'd like me to e-mail it to you? I know there's nothing more tedious than to read a book in typescript, but if you can bear it, I'd be happy to let you see it. You can be the first person to read it cold, knowing nothing at all about it . . .

Best

Larry

It was, of course, an offer she couldn't refuse. I'd known that when I made it. This hadn't been part of my original plan, but the fact that she'd read my work short-circuited the long game I'd initially had in mind. It was a gambit that accelerated the pace enormously, and within days we were deep into exchanges about the craft of writing, the business of publishing, the process of getting a book together, and all the other things that outsiders imagine writers talk about all the time. Although, in fact, we seldom do. But it built bridges between us, principally because I let her do most of the running, then made sure I agreed with almost all she said.

Inevitably, the small details of her life began to slide into the e-mails. I discovered the lover was called Jeffrey, that he was a self-obsessed Aquarius who resented Allie's success. Not that she told me this directly. But it wasn't hard to read between the lines. I avoided criticising Jeffrey, concentrating rather on making myself seem the considerate and supportive type. I let slip that my lover had died a couple of years before and that I hadn't felt able to open up to anyone since.

From there, it was a short step to gentle flirting. Given that we were by then exchanging between twenty and fifty e-mails a day, ranging in length from a few sentences to twenty-k messages, it didn't take long to escalate into something much more intense. We even swapped our favourite porn sites. Which, of course, both of us only ever accessed in the interests of research.

One of us might have been telling the truth, but it certainly wasn't me.

When I had to leave town for a couple of days, I told her I wouldn't have my laptop with me. She sent seventeen messages, regardless.

Of course, we got to the inevitable point where Allie said Jeffrey was beginning to wonder if she was having an on-line affair, she was spending so much time on her computer. :-}

So what constitutes an on-line affair?

I think cyber
fucking.

Phew. Well, that's all right, then, we've never been in a private chatroom together . . .

I certainly don't feel as if we'v
e crossed a line. I'm very open with you and I share m
y feelings, but that's what friends do, right? Do you fee
l like a line has been crossed?

No, I don't feel we've crossed a line. I think we've both danced kind of close to it, but we use humour to bounce back from the danger zone.

This is not an easy thing to discuss in e-mail. Face to face or on the phone, you get the verbal and non-verbal cues from the other person as to whether they're thinking or . In e-mail, if you get into these complex zones, somebody has to put their toe in the water first then bite their nails till the other party has the time to deal with it. So, here goes . . .We are very open with each other and we go places we would neither of us go with anyone else.We miss each other when we're not in touch. We've got a lot in common and we connect on many different levels. We've got mutual respect and we laugh a lot together. It would be disingenuous to deny there is some sort of attraction between us. But we're neither of us up for taking chances with your relationship with the man you live with. So we've found a way to relate that walks that tightrope.

I think.

What do you think/feel?

I think/feel the same as you. I'm glad this
is cleared up. I really do enjoy our friendship. It's become
very, very important to me. I can't imagine what life was
like before. Or what it would be like without you
and your crazy humor that gets me through the days. You
are the best thing that has happened to me for a
very long time, Larry. And that's not to say anything
against Jeffrey. Though I don't think he'd be comfortable with the
way we're so open about sex.;) I mean, it's kind of
like with porn, isn't it? It's hard to explain it
to someone who doesn't like it. What about you?

I think I'm in more or less the same place as you on this. I don't want there to be barriers between us, though.That's really important to me in terms of my relationship with you.

Same here.

Consciously or not, it was her way of seeing whether the ante was about to be upped. I nearly danced round the room. Hook, line and sinker. I let a couple of weeks go by, then, when I knew Jeffrey was out of town for a couple of nights at some post-modernist seminar, I started to reel her in. First, I planted a couple of lures in that morning's e-mail. Then I called her number.

‘Hello?' She sounded more assertive than I'd expected.

‘I bet you can't guess who this is,' I said.

‘Larry?' Her voice rose an octave.

‘Right first time.' I laughed. ‘Amazing.'

‘How did you get my number?' She sounded bewildered. ‘It's unlisted.'

‘What kind of stalker would answer a question like that?' I teased.

Now it was her turn to laugh. ‘No, but really, tell me how you tracked me down.'

So I did. I could hear the mixture of delight and unease in her voice. She didn't mind me finding out, but it worried her that other, weirder people might be able to find her so easily. ‘I need to change that,' she said.

‘You really should. After all, the only person who needs to be able to find you already has.'

The ice was broken. We started talking about things we'd been discussing in our recent posts, and I let the conversation glide round to the fresh bait I'd laid that morning. ‘Like I said, I wish I had your ability to write credible sex scenes,' I complained. ‘I really need to show the interaction between Guy and Zoe, but the more I work on it, the more wooden it gets.'

She bit. Within seconds, we were talking each other through what I needed to write. Within minutes, we were practising method writing. ‘I can't believe you're making me so horny,' she sighed.

‘Oh God. Me too . . .' I let the pause hang for a moment while our breathing crossed thousands of miles. ‘It would be very bad manners of me to leave you in that state,' I said, aiming for that ironic English politeness that Americans love so much. And of course, she didn't demur when I moved the conversation up another gear. I told her exactly what I knew she wanted to hear. The deliciously dirty things I was doing to her. The forbidden fantasies she was unleashing on me. At first, she said almost nothing, but that didn't last. When the dam broke, it was as if we were playing a new Olympic sport of competitive arousal.

The thing about phone sex and cybersex is that anyone can be the perfect lover. I'd studied everything Allie had ever said to me about sex, pondered carefully the porn that turned her on. Because I was interested only in impressing her with how perfect a fit we were, I could give her everything she had ever wanted without having to consider for a moment whether or not it aroused me or turned me off. Women can fake it anywhere; men need to be invisible to achieve the same result. That first time on the phone, I really didn't care whether I came or not. What I was concerned with was keeping Allie on the hook.