“True. But I want to help if I can.”
“You’re kind of friendly for a dominatrix,” Cyrus said. “Where’s the whip and chains?”
“You wanna see ’em?” She glanced at him over the top of her sunglasses.
He pointed at her. “You’re trouble.”
“Yeah, sorry.” She pushed her sunglasses back on and faced forward, eyes on the road. “Old habits die hard.”
“I hear that,” he said, wincing.
“Oh…there’s a story there.” She laughed. “Spill it.”
“Not telling it.”
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
“You already told me yours,” he said.
“Not all of it.”
Cyrus laughed. He liked her. That was a fact. Whether he should like her…well, that he didn’t know.
“I’ll tell you something,” Cyrus said. “Doctor’s orders.”
“Now I’m intrigued,” she said. “Tell me anything you want.”
“I’ve had…ah…issues in the past. With women.”
“Issues?”
“Honesty issues,” he said. “I’m seeing someone for all that. And it’s helping. One of the things I’m supposed to work on is being truthful with the women in my life. No false pretenses, no lies. Not even white lies. So, you know, don’t ask me something if you don’t want an honest answer.”
“Are you lying to me about something?”
“No, no, not that. Just…I’m supposed to have a female friend. A woman in my life who I’m not related to who I can confide in and be friendly with. Paulina said today you might be a good candidate for the job.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Throw me in the deep end, I guess.”
“And I’m the deep end?”
“You are definitely not the kiddie pool, lady.”
They’d turned into construction traffic and slowed to a crawl. The sun was high and hot, so Nora hit the button to raise the convertible top. Once latched into place, she turned the A/C on. Suddenly it was cooler, darker, and much more intimate in the car.
“This is coming from a therapist, right?” Nora asked. “Sounds like it. What do they call it? Exposure therapy. Spiders freak you out, so they have you make friends with a spider. Women freak you out, so they have you make friends with a woman?”
“Something like that,” he said. “Therapy was Paulina’s idea. And when I say ‘idea,’ I mean ‘order.’”
Nora grinned again. “So you used to play around a lot, then you met your dream girl, and now you’re behaving yourself?”
“I did not play around,” he said. “There was no playing. I made girls my second full-time job.”
“Nice work if you can get it. I guess you got it.”
“I got it,” he said. Cyrus didn’t say anything and neither did Nora. She seemed to be waiting for him to go on. “I was not a great guy back then.”
“No judgment here. I’ve been the bad guy, too,” she said. “And trust me, you’ve got nothing on King. Even after he met Juliette, it took him a long time to settle down. Céleste finally did the trick. That man is lucky to be alive. In his heyday, it was a different girl—or guy—every day almost.” She didn’t sound like she was joking.
“That’s almost better than what I was doing,” Cyrus said. “A new girl every day and nobody really gets hurt because nobody expects anything. Me? I’d play the girls, play with their minds, their hearts, make them crazy about me, make them think we had something real. Then I’d get bored, pick a new girl, start all over. Run down my list…” he said, miming an imaginary list of women’s names. “Get to the bottom. Start at the top again. Apologize. Flowers. Beg for forgiveness. Win them over.”
“Power trip.”
“You got it. Therapist thinks—I do, too—that it’s because my father died of a heart attack when I was fifteen. Tough time to lose your dad. I started looking for any way to feel better, to feel in control. I found girls.”
“What changed? You don’t seem like much of a player anymore.”
“I got shot,” Cyrus said. “I was off-duty, rolled up on a bunch of squad cars outside a gas station. Owner got shot during a robbery. They had it under control so I went home. Drove past this alley, saw a kid running—matched the description down to his yellow Adidas tennis shoes. I knew it had to be our guy. I got out and ran down the alley…came out the other side and BAM—hit right in the shoulder. Another cop thought I was the guy.”
“Jesus Christ,” Nora said. “You got shot by another cop? He didn’t recognize you?”
“All he saw was ‘black dude running.’ Good thing he’s a shit shot, or I’d be a dead man.”
“Fuck.”
She didn’t ask any stupid questions. Cyrus appreciated that. “Fuck” was the right response. At least she didn’t ask Did it hurt? like a lot of people did. Yeah, it hurt. Of course it hurt.
“Two weeks laid up in the hospital. Nobody but family came to see me. I had my phone. I let every girl on my list know their poor baby Cy had taken a bullet in the line of duty. I was waiting for my medal, waiting on some sympathy.”
“At least a sponge bath, right?”
“Not one of them showed up.”
“Not one?”
“They had me figured out.” Even as he said it, he remembered one person had shown up at the hospital to check on him, one of the girls on his list. Detective Katherine Naylor. She’d made the mistake of coming when his mom was there. He’d pretended like they were nothing but coworkers, and that had been the last of Katherine.
“Not even Paulina?”
“I hadn’t met her yet,” he said. “I did a couple weeks after I got out. I was staying with Mom while I was recovering. Her rule—you stay in her house, you go to Mass with her every Sunday.”
“Sounds like your mom and my mom went to the same Mom School.”
“Mom introduced me to Paulina at church. Love at first sight. For me. She looked at me like she’d been reading my internet search history.”
Nora laughed at that. She did have a good laugh. The kind of laugh that made a man stand up a little straighter in his seat.
“Took a long time to convince her to give me a chance. She’d heard enough horror stories from Mom in their prayer group to make me work for her. For three whole months I could only see Paulina at Mass. Lucky for me, she goes every day.”
“So you started going every day?”
“Every God damn day,” he said.
“Explains why your website says you only help out women and children. You’re doing penance.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe that’s what it is.”
“I think you’re more Catholic than I am.”
“Bad Catholic. Paulina was this close to joining the Ursulines in town.” He held up his hand, fingers a hair apart. “I stole her right out from under God’s nose. Might be going to hell for that.”
Nora said, “It’s okay. We’ll ride share.”