"What are you reading about over there?"

"I'm reading about — things. Fetishism."

"Are you starting to see the appeal?"

"Not really. Far-flung sexual perversion is something I can understand, but some of this is hard to imagine ordinary people actually doing. Would you ever — sit on a guy's face if he asked you to?"

Long afternoon, on his lover's couch with her typed drafts surrounding him and her long legs hooked across him. Holden's head is swimming, thick with smoke; Debbie's languid hand is working in his lap, following the outline of his hard-on through his slacks and dropping little flecks of ash. His embarrassment should dampen the glow they're in, but it can't cut through the haze.

"Sure, that sounds sexy." There's a laugh in her voice, but her head is bowed, as if his low-level arousal is suddenly fascinating.

"Really?"

"Yeah, really." Debbie looks him in the face; there is a guarded curiosity there, and a candor too that he doesn't like.

"It doesn't seem safe. Hard to breathe," Holden says. He is feeling a little strain already.

"You know where it's safest to mess around, don't you? In your head."

"I don't know if that's any safer."

Debbie taps his temple with a lacquered fingernail the color of dried blood. He doesn't know if he's noticed her with a manicure before — he tries to picture her painting her nails, but all he can see in his mind is that little silver nail file digging into the hollow of his throat. Holden pictures himself down on his knees, down on the tile bathroom floor. He pictures himself on his back, on the bed.

"That's where most of sex happens, in your head. Don't you ever wonder what I'm thinking about when we're having sex?

Holden shifts back against the cushions uneasily. The couch springs sag. "I assumed it was mostly about us. Was I wrong?"

"You know, I think I have a book for you." Debbie takes a pull on her joint. She exhales sweet curls of smoke against Holden's mouth, making him blink. "This journalist went and interviewed a couple hundred women about their sexual fantasies — well-adjusted women from the general population, not incarcerated women or perpetrators of violent crime. You might find it helpful." She sounds just like Dr. Carr if Dr. Carr smoked grass. "The face-sitting isn't really about genital contact. It's a mindfuck. Are you coming over tomorrow night?"

Holden breathes her smoke and watches her red mouth. "Why wouldn't I?"

"Good. I've got a little something I want to see you in."

*

Night, in a bedroom that is not his own.

"What are we gonna do with you, Agent Ford?"

It's an open-ended question. The belt of her robe swings from both hands, like a striptease dancer — the light falls across her body just right to cast it half in shadow.

Holden has never been particularly attuned to his own body. He's a lifelong student of the body language of others, as he's strained to understand the unspoken rules that motivate men and women, but he's never known whatever it is that Debbie knows without effort. He's studied under her to understand the cant of a hip or the turning of a glance. But here and now, he is exposed — his body speaks, the naked skin of his throat and his chest and the chilly sharpness of all his bones through the skin.

Something catches the light, a flash of silver. There is a flicker of fear in his chest, where he sits waiting for her — he's waited so long now for her to come, long minutes of anticipation that might as well have been hours, and the fear has been a steady tug like a thread at the pit of his groin. Now it's a throb of confused arousal.

Like any victim, waiting for the fantasy to crystallize into reality, he waits for a pattern to be enacted on his body. Helpless, surprised. Dressed for bed — like any woman dresses for bed. Debbie's nightgown still smells like her when he wears it. He can feel the phantom shape of her body where the material hugs across his chest, and in the way it slinks down just not far enough.

"Off. Off the bed, get on your knees."

When the order comes Holden slips down as lightly as he can, feeling the cool air lick down his body. The hem of Debbie's slip tugs up to expose the soft swell of him, heavy with blood. From below, Debbie herself is wearing black nylons and a black garter belt; the garments hug her figure easily, cutting out the shape of her in dark and lean lines, and her breasts are bare. Her face is a stranger's, cold and malicious, and her mouth is painted an incredible red. Bare breasts and silk robe, and her long slim legs as she steps over to straddle him. Holden's heart stops. She is wearing the shoes — those shoes.

"You can touch," she says, when he'd like nothing more — Holden raises his hand to graze the inside of her leg, where the smooth nylon hugs the joint of her knee. The sleekness of it under his hand gives him a fetishistic thrill — his hands and fingers make a survey of her, seeking out the warm heat of the flesh beneath the stocking.

She has a knife in her hand. Between his legs presses the cruel jut of one high-heeled shoe — the shine of patent leather, and the dagger edge as she lifts her foot to press down into the meat of his bare thigh.

"Caught off guard, Agent Ford. I don't see a badge anywhere." The hard spike of her heel rubs a line against him, pressing lazily.

Holden raises his head. The line of his neck is exposed to her, and he can feel the blood pounding.

"What are you going to do to me?"

Nothing he isn't asking for. She presses the flat of the knife to his cheek — it's cold enough to make his eye prickle, and the smell of metal cuts through the warm womanly smell of her bare hands, the thin perfume of dope-smoke that clings to her robe. She slides the blade down to the corner of his jaw, letting it tug at the freshly-shaven skin of his cheek — there's sufficient grain there to make the sharp edge drag a little, and to send a tight squirming coil of arousal right to the pit of him.

"Lie down on your stomach," she says, "slowly."

Holden lowers himself down, docile as a lamb — like an animal on the killing floor, led by the sound of her voice and the touch of her hand. He waits to see what she will do. The cool edge of the blade traces down the shape of him, down his shoulder, down his back. Debbie tugs his wrists up behind his back, one by one; the burr of a nylon stocking closes around his wrists, cinching into an elegant knot. Debbie's bare knee presses into the small of his back — he can feel the mammal heat of her naked skin, and the dark wet heat of her so close in proximity.

The blade of the knife presses against the small of his back, no longer cool as the air but warm and hot as flesh. A dull flicker of fear makes his balls tighten. Debbie understands control, yes, but knives slip, knots tighten. Things go wrong. Encounters escalate.

"What am I going to do with you, Holden?" (The silk of her sleeve grazes his hip; one cool hand slips in past the waistband of the panties he wears, caressing the gooseflesh. Holden makes an uncertain sound.) "I've been watching you a while now. Don't you know me? Don't you think you know me from somewhere?"

He shuts his eyes, and imagines a blindfold. He imagines pry-marks on window frames, broken glass, heavy breathing on the telephone line. Holden becomes aware that he has an erection.

He is frightened of his own pleasure, frightened and thrilled. For a moment he thinks of breaking the pretense outright — the crawling feeling of absurdity is at odds with the thrum of uneasy eroticism that runs through him from the top of his head to the pit of his crotch. But this is a script, like any other script they drill you on at Quantico. They are playing their parts.

They are strangers. This woman is a stranger to him, and she handles him with her cruel hands — hauling him back precariously onto his heels, now bound; bending him and pressing him into place on his knees.

Holden swallows; his throat is tight.

She guides him against her, pressing his head against the high crease of her leg where her lap would be. Her fingers hook sharply in his hair; Holden presses his face to the heat of her thighs and breathes in the salt-scent of her skin, the sharp ozone of synthetic fibers.

"I should dress you up like this more often, and show you off. You in a little pair of lacy panties — you would like that, wouldn't you?"

"What about high heels?" Holden says. His heart is beating, and every inch of him is sensitized.

"That I'd like to see." Debbie reaches between his legs to squeeze him and straightens up. In the low light, her polished shoes gleam. "I'm not going to let you go until you beg me for it. Do you understand?"

"I understand," Holden says; he swallows.

Debbie slinks back against the corner of the mattress and parts her legs in a rasp of nylons. She isn't wearing any panties; just the parallel slashes of her garters, carving down her soft thighs, and the dark glossy V of her pubic hair. Her fingers are spread against her inner thigh, with the knife in the crook of her thumb and forefinger, and her painted nails are the color of blood.

"I want to hear you say it. I want to hear you use those dirty words they teach you in the FBI."

"I'd like — I want — may I eat your pussy?"

"Attaboy."

Debbie brings him forward, digging in with her thumb at the corner of his jaw. Holden's heart is pounding in his chest, his shoulders ache. He is here on the carpet in his girlfriend's scanty nightgown — he is prey in the hands of a predator, all softness and permeability.

Debbie rides against him, lifting her hips to press the split of her sex against his mouth — until the salt woman-hot slit of her is pressed flush to his face, and he is breathing her, he is devouring and being devoured. Holden sucks her cunt, rocking against her breathlessly — Debbie murmurs vicious things to him, but he hardly hears them over the throbbing of the blood in his ears — he can feel his blood pounding all the way down in his cock.

She murmurs obscene things that make his balls tighten inside his panties and his blood pound — the lava-warmth of her inner thigh is against his cheek, and the ache in his shoulders is mirrored in his tight throat. He needs to bring himself off, needs to grind himself against her just to get enough friction to do the job, and he is certain that if he could only get his hands on his own dick enough to work his erection this would all be a lot easier.

Holden chafes his arms together behind his back, halfheartedly, but her knots hold tight. She must have brought a second pair of stockings just for this purpose. She must have walked into some department store and paid the saleswoman money for them, only to bring them home and turn them into a ligature for his benefit. She could have torn off his panties and gagged him with them — could have tied him with the cord of her own silk robe —

All these things she could have done swarm over him, as he worships her with his mouth. Holden is buried in her, the pressure of her and the heat of her blood. There are spots in front of his eyes, which means trouble, but his tongue and mouth works into the hot furrow of her. This is how to lose yourself — he is lost in the hot flutter of her cunt.

Debbie pulls him back by the hair, gasping. His upper lip is wet, and his mouth is aching. Her lacquered grip on his hair is hurting him, carving through the muzzy light-headedness of desire; Debbie hooks her fingers in his mouth, probing wetly through the salt-taste of her own sex, and Holden sucks at them.

"You did great, but I'm still not going to let you touch yourself. This is all about your brain, remember?"

"Yes," Holden says, "yes."