“Lady, you’re weird. I want my money back. Who do I call?”
“Well.” She made a little displeased noise. “I don’t know.”
He slammed his receiver down in her ear. “So much for his sense of humor.”
Cameron chuckled in the corner. “I don’t think that’s the way to draw them out, Max.”
“It wasn’t him. I knew three seconds into it.” She jumped to her feet, snapped open the kitchen door, hung up the phone.
“I can’t believe you’re embarrassed. You, of all people.”
She rounded on his slight ethereal glow in the dark. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m talking about your parade of one-night stands. How can you be shy after those?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t do that anymore. I only did because—” She stopped.
“Go on, Max. Tell me. You only slept with those strangers to fill the void in your life after I died.”
She swallowed. He’d pricked her conscience and stabbed straight into the microcosm of grief that still festered inside her.
“So you wouldn’t feel alone and powerless,” he went on.
“So I wouldn’t have to subsist on fantasies the way these pathetic men on the other end of that line do.”
“You were never alone,” he whispered as if she’d hadn’t spoken.
He was a ghost. He could be a figment of her imagination. He could be a manifestation of her psychosis. And he could only love her in her fantasies, no matter how real they seemed.
She squeezed down on the pain, ignored it, and attacked him instead. “You forgot to mention that I was only reverting to type.”
“Why does the truth hurt you so, Max? You had no friends—”
“What about Sutter?”
“You didn’t let me finish. Before you met me, you had no friends except Sutter. You were a loner, with a concrete wall around you a mile thick. You pretended you were powerful with a handful of men you didn’t even reveal your real name to.”
Stoic. That’s what she was. Pretending she was stoic kept her from grabbing her stomach and crying out with the torment he caused.
The phone rang again, right next to her, and she jumped.
“Play the sex game, Max,” Cameron whispered insidiously. “You remember how. Use sex for something good this time. And please, try to sound a little bit more like Bethany. You’re not going to fool anyone as it is.”
Ring. She disregarded it. “Why are you riding me?”
“Answer the phone.”
She did. It was part of the plan. This could be Helen’s Achilles. Cameron was right. She had to at least try to sound like Bethany. She closed her eyes. “Hello, this is Helen. What can I do for you tonight?”
“What are you wearing, Helen?”
Sloppy sweatshirt and jeans. She plopped down on the floor with her back to the wall. “Black lace bra. Garter belt. Stockings. High heels.”
“What color are your panties?”
She bit her lip before answering. The pages of the script were supple in her fingers, but Bethany had long since stopped needing them. They fluttered to the floor. “I’m not wearing any.”
“Christ. Are you wet?”
“I don’t know. Do you want me to touch myself?”
“Jesus, yes.”
She let out a soft sigh. “Mmm. Yeah, I am. Real wet.” She didn’t know where the words came from, nor the tense, needy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Bethany’s strength trickled through her veins.
“Are you hard?” she whispered with a throaty growl.
Bethany writhed. Bethany’s nipples popped out. Bethany basked in the power of his harsh moan across the wires. Max knew this time she really did sound like the woman.
“I wanna stick my cock in you.”
“I want you so bad.”
“I wanna fuck you until you scream, oh yeah.”
“I’m screaming while you’re doing it.”
“Oh yeah.” He grunted, groaned, let a harsh cry, and then the phone went dead. He wasn’t going to pay for a second more than he had to.
She felt dirty.
“Was it him?” Cameron asked.
“No.”
“Why does a little sex talk bother you?”
She didn’t answer his question, but asked her own instead. “Why did she do it?”
“You tell me.”
Max closed her eyes, leaned her forehead against the cool paint of the wall. There was an ache in her belly that didn’t come from too many jelly donuts, a pain in her heart that had nothing to do with watching Cameron die two years ago, and a hollow place inside her that couldn’t be filled. “Talking to them was the only time she ever really felt like someone wanted her.”
Phone sex was a drug to medicate Bethany’s loneliness, like Max used one-night stands.
“She wanted to be wanted, and someone killed her for it.” Max swiped at the tear on her cheek. It wasn’t her own. She never cried.
She took a breath, then gathered up the pages of the script and stuck them back in their hidey-hole. Neither she nor Bethany needed them.
“Find her killer. Give her peace, Max.”
She looked into the darkness as if she could see him. “That’s why you wanted me to do this, isn’t it?”
“So you’d have empathy?”