Stephen White - Blinded

She thought about his proposal overnight. Excitement overcame fear, fear became excitement, and she e-mailed a simple lowercased yes.

It had been a Saturday afternoon in September a year before. Notre Dame was playing Michigan in Ann Arbor. The date for the date was Holly’s idea. The university campus would be empty. The students and faculty and staff who weren’t in Michigan for the football game would be holed up watching the annual tussle anyplace that had a big screen and plenty of beer.

One-thirty to two-fifteen. That was the window she’d given him. She’d be there by one-thirty. She’d leave by two-fifteen. They had to be gone before Saturday afternoon confessions began.

In between? For Holly, the sweetest of all aphrodisiacs: anticipation.

“What are you going to do while you’re waiting for me?” he asked in one of his e-mails.

He knew all about anticipation. She’d figured he would.

“Pray,” she’d responded.

Some secular universities have chapels; some Catholic universities have elaborate churches. Notre Dame University has a basilica.

Holly was waiting for Sterling opposite the Chapel of the Reliquaries in the vaulting nave of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Ten minutes before two o’clock he knelt in the pew that was right behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach. He was the church mouse.

“Don’t turn around,” he whispered. “No, don’t.”

Her lungs felt bottomless. She was breathing so deeply that she had to open her mouth to get enough air.

She already knew from experience that the fire of anticipation consumed immense quantities of oxygen.

She hadn’t spent the time praying. No, she’d been counting the other people in the church. Currently, there were thirteen. One lovely woman in a dreadful purple suit was only a few feet from her in the Chapel of the Reliquaries. Thirteen was just right. Not too many, not too few. Just right.

“Sex in churches shouldn’t be reserved for priests,” he whispered to her in an over-the-top Irish brogue. “Should it, now?”

She’d been thinking that they’d use the confined space of the confessional for their tryst, but she wasn’t so sure she wanted to be in the dark with him.

Fear? No. That wasn’t it. Not at all.

She wanted to be able to see him.

Without a word Holly stood, walked down the length of the nave, and climbed the stairs toward the pipe organ. Her idea.

A few minutes later he followed.

She knew he would. They always did.

As his footfalls brushed the stairs, one by one, she knew that what she’d been thinking about, fantasizing about, since she was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl was about to happen.

Holly didn’t actually see his face until they were finished. Until anticipation was nothing but sweat on the cold church floor. When she finally turned toward him and saw the white slash of his Roman collar and the ruby light from the stained glass that limned his profile, his physical beauty almost took her breath away again. She thought, Mark would have vetoed him for sure.

For sure.

Carmen and I left Holly’s house before I had a chance to meet Artie. That disappointed me.

We were out the door and all the way down the porch steps when I thought of something else, told Carmen to go ahead and get in the car, and returned to the screen door. Zach was playing with a pile of those oversized fat Legos in the living room, making something that looked like Frankenstein’s dog.

“Holly,” I said, calling her back to the door. “I’m sorry, one more thing.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You’re not frightened of him? Of Sterling?”

“No, I’m not.”

“The other women he’s suspected of murdering? They don’t-”

“I’m not convinced. Far from it.”

Her expression changed just enough that I guessed that whatever came next was going to be at a different level of intimacy than what had come before. I found myself struggling to tune my antennae.

“Listen,” she told me, “I e-mailed him again a couple of weeks ago. I asked him if he was interested in going to church with me again sometime. That’s how not-frightened of him I am.”

“You would see him again?”

“Before this week and all the news in the papers? Before you and Detective Loves-Kids-Lacks-Social-Graces started trying to scare the bejesus out of me? I would have seen him, yes. We had a great time together.”

Sometimes people ask me why I’m a cop. I don’t usually answer with the public service/public welfare refrain. I answer with the truth: People are endlessly interesting.

Holly Malone was a damn good example.

“Did Sterling respond to your e-mail?”

She shook her head convincingly. Even a little ruefully, I thought.

“I gave you my cell phone number, right? Just in case? You’ll call if you see him around here, or even if you get a feeling?”

“Yes, Detective. You did. And I will.”

I reached into my pocket and handed Holly the crappy photo of Brian Miles. “Him too. Keep it. Call if you see him.”

“You’re not going to tell me who he is, are you?”

“His name is Brian Miles. He’s somebody you should avoid.”

She held the picture loosely in her hand. “I told you, I’m careful. No matter what you think about my lifestyle, I don’t take chances with my safety. You haven’t convinced me that Sterling’s a killer, but you’ve convinced me that seeing him might involve taking an unnecessary risk.”

“Might?”

She smiled at me in a way that seemed full of understanding and wisdom. The wisdom was bearded with just the slightest tease. I found it all quite disarming. Me and women? What a frigging mess.

With my thumb and index finger I spread my mustache away from the center of my lip. Holly was watching me carefully, waiting to see where I was heading next; I thought she knew that I hadn’t come back to her door to ask her about Sterling and Brian Miles and to make sure she had my phone number.

Holly probably knew things about men that I wouldn’t know for the rest of my life.

In the grand scheme that was probably an okay thing.

I said, “You and your husband, you and Mark? Did your, what did you call it before, your ‘imaginative’ sex life-that’s right? I got that? Did it include, you know, other people, other couples? Sexually, I mean. I don’t know if I’m asking that exactly right. But what I’m wanting to know is… well…”

My voice disappeared like stormwater down an open manhole. Swooosh.

“Is this a professional inquiry?”

“Actually, no, no, it’s not. It’s, um,… it’s personal. It’s something I’m struggling with… myself.”

I watched muscles change in her face. Her mouth softened, and the tendons along her jaw slackened. Fine lines erupted alongside her eyes. She said, “Yes, it did. It included other people sometimes. We were active swingers long before we were married.”

“And it didn’t…” Some questions are harder to ask than others. Those seemed to be the only kind I was asking. Or trying to ask. I wasn’t doing a bang-up job.

“Didn’t what?”

“Cause problems? For the two of you? In your marriage? Fidelity, and trust, you know? Feelings weren’t hurt?”

She shook her head. “Far from it. This may sound funny, but it was all about trust for us. Mark knew every man I was involved with sexually, and vice versa. We each had total veto power over the other’s partners. What we did enriched us.” She glanced back to make sure Zach was still engaged with his Legos. “This is a hard thing to explain. Sex with other people brought us closer.”