Michael Hemmingson - Seven Women - An Erotic Private Investigation

“Oh?” Sheila raises a brow. “Watching?”

Tasha had watched me and Veronica.

“He didn’t stop us, didn’t interrupt,” Amelia goes on. “He just stood in the dark and watched us do it. I didn’t know. I was so caught up in the good sex. I needed the sex. And when we were done we were there on the floor for a bit and Nick finally came out and said, ‘Well, I guess hello and greetings are out of order.’”

“You’re joking,” Cara says.

“I’m not! He really said that! Scared the hell out of me! I jumped up and grabbed my clothes, like he was a stranger, like he’d never seen me naked before, and began to put my clothes on, even the leather jacket. David, however, didn’t react — he was just casual and cool about it. He sat up and said, ‘Hey, what’s up?’”

Sheila laughs.

Amelia says, “I was frantic. I started putting it together that Nick knew, that he’d been watching.”

“Interesting,” from Sheila.

“I asked him how long he’d been there and he said the whole time and I just couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘You watched?!’ and David seemed amused by it all.”

“I would have been, too,” Sheila says.

“But Nick was acting as if David wasn’t even there. He looked at me and said, ‘Where’d you get that jacket?’ and I told him it was mine and he said, ‘You don’t have a jacket like that,’ and I said, ‘I do now.’ Then David said, ‘She stole it.’ I could’ve killed him. But I admitted it, I told Nick I did steal it. Nick said, ‘Who is this guy?’ but he didn’t look at David. He was looking at the floor, then at me, not angry but very confused. ‘I don’t want this to turn into a scene,’ I said to him, and then I told David to get dressed because he looked stupid sitting on the floor in the buff. Cute and desirable, but given the circumstances — stupid.”

“This sounds surreal,” Lisa says.

“It was,” Amelia says. “So David said to him, ‘Hey did you really watch us?’ as he got dressed and I said to Nick, ‘If you did, you’re a sicko,’ but I didn’t know what I meant by that. I mean, well — Nick said it himself, he said, ‘I don’t believe this! You go out and see this guy and you bring him back here, where we live, and you have sex with him, here, with me here.’”

“I guess you could say that was a little rude,” Sheila says, drinking, eyes glinting.

“Nick asked why we didn’t go to his place and I said, ‘We couldn’t.’ ‘Bad idea,’ David said. I said, ‘We couldn’t because his wife is there.’ I wanted to be fully honest, out in the open. What was there to hide? I was sick of secrets.

Nick looked at David and said, ‘You’re married?’ David nodded and said, ‘Married two years.’ Nick said to me, ‘You fucked a married man?’ and David said, ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds,’ and I said, ‘It’s just something that happened,’ because what more can you say? I wasn’t in the mood to philosophize about morality.

‘It’s not like we see each other all the time,’ David said to Nick, ‘in fact I’m as surprised about this as you are. Amelia and I haven’t seen each other in a long time.’ Nick said rather calmly to David, ‘Normally, I would probably kill you, but this isn’t normal and I’ve never been in a situation like this.’ He really said that, and it shocked me — I’d never heard Nick talk like that, examining himself in that way, because I was expecting any moment for Nick to attack David and fight with him, and Nick had more muscles, was more Neanderthal in a way, so I was afraid of a scene and wanted to get David out of there as fast as possible, with little or no conflict.

“I told Nick again that I did not want a scene to erupt. David was dressed by then and he said, ‘I’m not in the mood for anything harsh.’ ‘Normally I would,’ Nick kept saying, ‘I’d just kill you. But it just doesn’t seem to be in me. There’s no rage, no anger. Only — a numb feeling. I feel hollow. I don’t like this feeling, I don’t like this at all.’ ‘You have no frame of reference for it, no way to really process it,’ David said. I looked at them both.” Her voice lowers. “Something snapped in me. I had this perverse fantasy of having sex with them both. I’ve never had sex with more than one man, but I could see myself making love to them both, and then the two of them killing each other afterwards. I felt really weird. Nick said to me, ‘Amelia, I just want to know why.’

“Then something else snapped in my head,” Amelia says. “I don’t know what it was. I began ranting, raving, a monologue from hell. I paced around the room. My mouth was just going and it made no sense. I was thinking of my dead dog. I said to Nick — I said to them both, ‘Why? I’ll tell you something, I’ll tell you both something! The week before I moved out of my parents’ house and got this apartment, my old dog died. I was jogging and she was with me. She took off somewhere else as I was jogging, just went off in this different direction. It was dark out. She’d done it before, a while back, but she always came back home. This time she didn’t, though, and I started to get worried.

“The pound called me the next morning. My dog had been found in the street. Hit by a car, Her tag had my phone number on it. I went down there, to the pound. She was a mess — she was stiff, in an odd shape because her backbone had been broken. I kept wondering how it had happened. The area they found her in — a lot of people jog there. Her eyesight had gone bad and it was dark and I imagined she saw some jogger and thought it was me so ran across the street and that’s how she got run over.

“I’d had this dog for years, since my teens. When I was lonely, she was always there. Now I was alone, and even more alone, because she was gone. I cried when I saw her, and touched her body. I hadn’t cried in a long time over anything. I had to go down to the pound by myself and pick up her dead body, her stiff and broken dead body and what I really needed then and there was someone to hold me. A man, a boyfriend, someone close. Strong arms and a chest to hold me. But I had no boyfriend at the time, I had no one, so I had to hold myself, and that’s a horrible thing. I cried into myself. Never — never had I felt so alone in my life, ever, but then I told myself: This isn’t really all that bad — because being alone meant having no obligations, no one to answer to.’”

“But I wasn’t really sure what I meant by all that,” Amelia says, finishing her beer.

“So what happened then?” Cara asks. “Did Nick start a fight?”

“No. He just stood there, like a statue. And David and I left.”

“Just like that?” Tasha asks. “Nothing else? Nothing bad happened?”

“No. I had to take David back to his car. We didn’t say anything much on the way. He asked if I would be okay and I said yes. We promised to get together soon, but it seemed meaningless — as if we never would, as if this would be the end of it. He got into his car and went back home to his wife.”

“Was it the end of it?” Lisa says.

“No, no, there’s always more,” Amelia says. “Things don’t end as neatly as they do in TV shows. But anyway — that was it, that’s what started it all, that’s how I came to meet The Astronaut. I couldn’t go back to the apartment. I wanted to get away, I wanted to leave forever. I wasn’t thinking. I started to drive, I got on the freeway. I had to get as far away as possible because I knew right then and there that no matter how much I needed or wanted someone to be a part of my life, to be in my life, no matter what, maybe it was best that I just went it alone. The loner: moi. The drifter. The old maid. I didn’t care. All I knew was that I had to get the hell away, far away.