Chapter Eight
It would have been so easy. She was giving off all the right signals, the cute little head-toss, bit of lower-lip action between the teeth, all carefully choreographed, of course, and I had to admit that she does it well. Almost unstudied, a kind of knowing innocence about her, like she doesn’t know how she’s doing it but she’s going to keep doing it until I go for it. But. And, oh yeah, there’s a big but here, something else kicked in. We were playing the whole ‘eye contact’ game and it was going so, so well, point to her, point to me, it only needed one of us to take advantage and . . . And then she looked right into me. Can’t describe it. It wasn’t like she changed, conversation kept right along the lines it had been but . . . yeah, there’s that word again. But. She asked me about my past. About what made me go into this mental whoring that I like to call ‘journalism’ as if that gives it any respectability, about what I am. A simple little question, nothing that anyone else couldn’t have asked anywhere along the line. Any of them. Any of those thoughtless, careless women who wanted me enough to let their eyes skim the surface without their brains even trying to get underneath. For all their smart ways, their great jobs, their intellectualism, not one of them ever asked me why I did it. They were all content to let the image rule. Like they didn’t want to know anything else, like they wanted me to be the man they thought I was, with nothing going on to break that image. Like they didn’t want me to be real, somehow. No shitty background, no identity crises, nothing nasty to ruin the view of me that they had, as some kind of black knight, in his designer jacket and jeans, riding in over the horizon to sweep them from their lives of boring mediocrity.
It hit me hard. Oh, I covered myself, the good old bait-and-switch. Distracted her attention and got it all back to where I could deal with it, put myself back in the driving seat and never let her know that she’d done something that no one has ever attempted before — got through my armour like a tungsten carbide round. And there I was, like one of those poor bastards on the war fields, too shocked to feel pain, with all my protection rendered useless.
And she never even knew what she’d done.