There’s a long beat.
“I really am a sick fuck, Kat,” I say simply. “I know I am. After what happened to my mom, I have no business incorporating bondage into my sexual fantasies. That’s just sick. Emma was right. There’s something deeply wrong with me. And telling a girl who’d been raped about it and asking her to try it with me to help me was also deeply fucked up. But what she didn’t get was I was all aboutsavingthe girl, you understand? That’s what gets me off. I just want to be the savior.” I’ve got a lump in my throat. “Just once.”
Kat nods.
I exhale. There’s a goddamned lump in my throat that won’t go away. “It’s still sick, though,” I say, pushing through my emotion. “Not to mention obvious and stupid.” I swallow hard and the lump recedes. “It’s some sort of twisted... I dunno. I guess I don’t have the best imagination.” I take a deep breath. “And, shit, I guess I should tell you something else, as long as I’m telling you the whole truth.” I exhale and roll my eyes. “You might as well know just how obvious and stupid and deeply disturbed I really am.”
Kat’s sitting on the edge of her seat, her blue eyes fixed on me without blinking.
“My mom was blonde,” I say. “Just like you. Just like Emma. Just like all the girls in my Sick Fuck folder. And she was gorgeous, too. Everyone always said she looked just like Grace Kelly.”
Kat grabs my hand. “I figured.”
“You did?”
She nods. “What did your dad look like?”
“Like me, pretty much. I have his dark hair.” I squeeze her hand, grateful for her reassuring touch. “I look like my dad and Jonas looks like my mom.”
Kat chuckles. “But you and your brother look so much alike, other than your hair.”
“No, Jonas is the one who looks like my mom, and I’m the one who looks like my dad. My dad always said so. Maybe that’s why my dad could never even stand to look at Jonas.”
She blanches.
There’s a long beat.
“If Jonas looks like your mom, then you do, too, Josh,” she says softly. “Just with darker hair. You two look so much alike.”
I shrug.
Kat strokes my arm with her free hand. “So. Okay. Fine. You’re a sick fuck, Josh. Your mom made an indelible impression on you. You’re obviously deeply traumatized by what happened to her. And you probably feel all kinds of guilt—totally misplaced, by the way—that Jonas was there and you weren’t.”
“But, Kat. It’s pretty fucked up that all I wanna do is fuck beautiful blondes and my mom was a beautiful blonde. Emma thought that was really sick.”
“Fuck Emma. You weresevenwhen she died. Where else wereyou gonna get your idea of female beauty other than from your mom—especially if she happened to look like Grace Kelly? Growing up, that standard of beauty must have gotten reinforced for you everywhere you looked. Magazines, movies. It’s everywhere.”
I stare at her for a long minute, not saying anything. I’m too blown away to speak. I’ve never had a conversation even resembling this one before. Not even with my childhood therapists.
“Josh, the bottom line for me is that the stuff you wrote in your application turned me on.” She squeezes my hand. “Look, I totally get what you’re saying—and I agree you’ve obviously got some deep-seated issues that have influenced your sexual fantasies—you’ve definitely got some sort of complex relating to what happened to your mom and you’re searching for some sort of therapeutic release, some sort of... what’s that word?” She snaps her fingers and scrunches her face.
“Catharsis?” I offer.
“Yes. Catharsis. Exactly. As an adult, you’re using sex as some sort ofcatharsisor redemption or whatever. Okay, I get it. But so what? We’re all perverts in one way or another, if we’re being honest—it’s just that people are so rarely honest when it comes to what they like behind closed doors. Well, I say let the doctors figure out your diagnosis if ever you’re in danger of harming someone or yourself—but until then, who cares? All I know is that you make me soak my panties every time I’m near you and when I read your application, I started dripping down my thighs.”
My breath catches in my throat. “Oh,” I manage to say, but it’s all I can muster.
The subtlest of smirks dances on her lips. “All I know is that whatever you did to those women in The Club, I’m turned on by the idea of you doing it to me, too, exactly the way you did it to them.” The smirk she’s been suppressing takes over her mouth. “I want you to pretend I’m one of the women in The Club and show me exactly what you like, without treating me any differently than you treated them.” She lowers her voice to barely above a whisper. “I want you to treat me like your high-priced whore.”
I’m rock hard right now.
Her eyes are blazing. “Actually, that happens to be one of my top fantasies.”
My heart is absolutely racing. I swallow hard. “Well, but...” I sputter. “Kat, as it turns out, the women in The Club actually were paidhookers. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but in retrospect, there’s a very good reason they were all so ‘uncannily compatible’ with me and eager to please.”
She makes a face like I’m saying something nonsensical.
“So,” I say, feeling the need to explain myself further, “unlike them, you might have, you know...limits.”
