Max closed her eyes a moment, listened to all the voices in her head, past and present. Bethany on the phone with Achilles, with the other men, Max’s own voice seducing an unseen man in the cab of her imaginary Dodge Ram.
Understanding Bethany the way she did, Max lowered her voice as Freddy had and took a stab at home base. “She described the best way to go down on a woman, Freddy. She wanted to teach you to do it right. Wouldn’t you call that talking about sex?”
He sucked in a breath, hurt fogging his eyes. “She talked to you about me?”
“Not about you, Freddy. Not to hurt you. She cared very much about you. She was ...” She played Freddy’s own game, cutting herself off, forcing him to ask.
“She was what?”
“She was concerned that you were so young. That she ...”
“She what?”
“That you might be thinking you and she could be more than ... friends. That you could actually meet her sometime.”
He bit down on his inner lip, pulling it in. His gaze turned inward. Then he swallowed and looked back at Max. She knew she was right. He’d never even seen Bethany. She’d paid him by check, through the mail. She’d called him to run an errand, or sent him an e-mail. She’d been a seductive voice on the phone, beguiling words on a screen, and a prurient fantasy in a teenage boy’s mind.
“How did you know she had a weight problem, Freddy?”
He took a deep breath, his nostrils flaring. “She told me.” He paused. Max waited. “Some guys in the neighborhood saw her when she first moved in. So I knew before she said anything.”
She doubted he believed in Bethany’s real size. He’d convinced himself his friends had exaggerated, that Bethany herself had exaggerated. “Did you ask to see her?”
He answer indirectly. “I knew she didn’t like how she looked. That she was more than ten years older than me. That my friends would have beaten the crap out of me for even thinking about her. That my parents would have had her arrested for statutory rape ... or something, if they found out ... what we talked about.”
“You loved her anyway, didn’t you, and you wouldn’t have cared what anyone said if she just opened the front door to you?”
Lips half closed, he clenched his teeth and drew in a deep breath between them, but he didn’t balk at her use of the word love. “She never did let me in.” At least not into her house. Again, Freddy hesitated; again Max waited for him to go on. His eyes clouded with a hint of tears. “She was the sweetest, kindest person I ever met. And she loved me. She never expected anything from me. She never talked down to me. She always answered my questions without acting like I was stupid. She ... taught me things just by telling me how to do them. It was innocent stuff, just talking.”
Yeah. Bethany was the sweetest, kindest person. Yet she’d been teaching a beautiful, mixed up, underage kid how to intimately pleasure a woman.
It was frightening, all the more so because, inside her, Bethany didn’t even understand what she might have done wrong.
Had Freddy known about her late night activities? Had he somehow engineered a way to call her without anyone finding out?
Could he possibly be Achilles?
Or was he a jealous kid who killed her when he found out she was doing the real man of her dreams nightly on her phone sex line?
*
Witt hadn’t called.
Parked outside Prunella Shale’s office, Max took the cell phone out of her purse and stuck it in the glovebox where she usually kept it. Wouldn’t do to have the thing going off in the middle of the group session.
Why hadn’t he called?
Not that she’d wanted or expected him to. She’d slept with lots of guys who hadn’t called the next morning. She hadn’t wanted them to, of course.
She didn’t really want Witt to call either. He’d yell at her about ... something. Better to leave the phone off and in the glovebox. Better not to hear his silly questions about why she pushed him away or why she didn’t know how to make love. Why, why, why.
So why wasn’t she completely and utterly happy that he hadn’t called?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Prunella Shale’s therapy room, for lack of a better title, was cool, too cold for the fall day. Max, though she’d chosen to sit on the sunny end of the sofa, pulled on her black blazer over the sleeves of her white shirt.
She’d been the first to arrive. Three more had straggled in. At 102 pounds in her stockinged feet, Max outweighed them by a good twenty pounds. She almost felt fat.