The Feminine Touch

by V. J. Chambers

  When he went back to school in the fall, for his senior year, things were different. He wasn’t popular, not exactly, but he was comfortable in his own skin in a way that he hadn’t been. There was a girl named Nadia who always wanted a caramel soy latte, and he asked her out one day—just on a whim, almost carelessly, as if he was actually good at that kind of thing.

  She said yes.

  Nadia became his first serious girlfriend. It was so serious that they went to college together. That was where they lost their virginity to each other, on the top bunk of Nash’s dorm room while his roommate was at his night class.

  He and Nadia didn’t last, and they ended up going their separate ways in his sophomore year of college. There were other girls and there were other experiences. Siobhan faded out into the periphery of his mind. He always thought of her fondly—his first big crush, his first kiss, but he rarely gave her more than a passing thought.

  When he thought of her, he remembered the time that they’d spent together. He remembered those hours of kisses in the bedroom at Pike’s party. And he remembered one other night. It was the night of graduation, and he was at a big graduation party at Arthur’s house.

  Siobhan was there, but he didn’t talk to her.

  He noticed her, though, because she was hard to miss. Siobhan got wasted that night, and she was loud and stumbling and loose.

  Arthur had a pool. Some people were swimming.

  But it was May, and it was one of those humid nights in the late spring when thunderstorms rolled in out of nowhere.

  One second it was clear and warm, the next it was pouring down the rain.

  People were climbing out of the pool, running into the house.

  Siobhan didn’t run. She stood out in the pounding rain, getting soaked. Nash remembered that someone went out after her. Maybe it was Arthur. Maybe it was a different guy. He couldn’t remember. This guy tried to pull Siobhan onto the porch, where there was a roof—shelter against the rain.

  But Siobhan just giggled and shoved him away. She stumbled backwards and fell into the pool.

  Everyone was watching, and it was as if everyone held a collective breath, worried that she wouldn’t resurface.

  But she did, and she was laughing. She climbed out of the pool, and now she was really soaked. Her long hair was streaming water, and her clothes were sticking to her skin.

  She peeled them off so that she was in her bra and underwear. And then she held up her arms and threw back her head, basking in the pounding rain.

  And everyone stared at her.

  That was Nash’s last image of Siobhan. Crazy, drunk, soaking wet, and half-naked in the thunderstorm.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The next day, Nash tried calling Siobhan, but she didn’t pick up her phone.

  He figured she wouldn’t, and he didn’t bother trying her that way. He didn’t leave messages or texts. He drove back to Edward Carston’s house instead, parked far enough away that he could keep an eye on the place, but not so far that he’d be noticed.

  Around 8:30 that morning, she drove away alone in a blue coupe. He followed her at a safe distance.

  She went to a gym.

  He parked in the parking lot too, and followed her in. He kept far enough back that she wouldn’t see him.

  When he went in the door, he could see that she was heading up a set of stairs. The building opened onto a foyer with a set of steps ascending to the upper level. There was a man behind the desk wearing a black polo shirt with the name of the gym embroidered on the upper right hand side.

  “Hi there,” the man said brightly.

  “Hi,” said Nash, starting toward the stairs.

  “Can I see your card?” said the man.

  Nash stopped. “Card?”

  “This is a members-only gym,” said the man.

  Nash sighed. How much was membership? Judging from the look of the place, more than Nash was going to want to shell out. “Do you sell day passes?”

  “Nope,” said the man, grinning cheerfully.

  Nash left. He went back to his car and waited until she left the gym.

  When he saw her come out of the door, he got out of his car and went to where her car was parked. He was leaning against the hood when she got there.

  She saw him. She jumped. She put a fluttering hand to her chest. She was wearing a tight tank top and loose-fitting pants. A bag was slung over her shoulder. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, but wisps of it were escaping. “Jesus, Nash. You about gave me a heart attack.”

  He liked the way she looked. He was beginning to think that she was even more beautiful now than she’d been in high school, as if she had almost grown into herself. Her features seemed even more feminine now, and her curves had more definition. “I want to talk to you.”

  “You could have called.”

  “I tried that. You didn’t answer.”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk to you,” she said.

  He stopped leaning against her car and stood up straight. “I’m sorry about the things I said last night. I was being immature. Seeing you, it reminded me of being a teenager, but I’m not a kid anymore. And none of that ancient history matters.”

  She folded her arms over her chest. “Really?”

  “Well, maybe some of it,” he said. “There is a thing I want to ask you. It doesn’t have to be on the record. If you want, I can promise never to air your answer. But I think I need to know for me.”

  “Is this going to be that question you almost asked last night? The one that I interrupted you about?”

  He was confused. “What question?”

  “About Pike. You said that you and Pike had me in common, but not really. I assume you wanted to know why I slept with him, but not you.”

  He shifted on his feet, feeling uncomfortable, as if the ground had moved beneath him, and he wasn’t so sure of his balance anymore. Had she known bringing that up again would have this affect on him? “That’s not the question I was going to ask you.”

  “But you want to know the answer, don’t you?”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. “There’s an answer? I assumed it was like that party, where you took off all your clothes in the rain. You didn’t think, you just did what felt good.”

  “No,” she said, and she looked angry now. “No, it’s like I said before, you don’t understand. Fuck you, Nash Wilt. Leave me alone.” She started for the driver’s side door of her car.

  He caught her by the arm. “The girls that went missing in high school.”

  She tugged her arm out of his grasp. “What about them?”

  He held up both his hands, a hands-off gesture. “What happened to them?”

  “What makes you think I know?”

  “You do know.”

  She got her keys out of her bag. She surveyed the keys, moving the metal through her fingers. “Those girls are dead.”

  “Did you kill them?”

  She looked up at him, horror in her expression. “You don’t really think—”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t. But I need to know who did.”

  She pushed past him and opened the door to her car. “Go away, Nash. Just go away.”

  * * *

  Now, he was even worse off. No matter what he did, he just managed to piss her off. He needed to try something else. He needed to win her back. He needed to get her to agree to an interview.

  He didn’t know how to do any of that.

  Later that evening, he called her again. He didn’t expect her to pick up, but she did.

  “When we were in high school, you were never this aggressive, Classic Rock,” came her voice over the phone. She sounded airy and unfettered now, unlike that morning. “If you had been, maybe I would have screwed you.”

  And just like that, he was knocked out of balance again. He didn’t know how to respond to that. “Look, I’m not here because I’m trying to flirt with you, Siobhan,” he said, and his voice came out gravelly.
<
br />   She laughed, a bright tinkle. “Sure, you are. This is flirting, Nash.”

  “I’d like to talk about the podcast,” he said.

  “If I do your podcast, I’ll get caught and sent to jail,” she said. “No, thank you.”

  “Not necessarily. We won’t use your name. We’ll change everyone’s names, even the men you killed. It’ll all be anonymous.”

  “People will be able to piece it together. Right now, I work without any interference. I couldn’t if you did this.”

  “Well, maybe you should… hang it up, anyway.”

  “I’d like to,” she said. “I do try. Every time I go home to Charity, I tell myself that this time I’ll stay with her forever. And every time, eventually, I start getting antsy.” Now, her tone had changed. She sounded wistful and sad. “Can’t I convince you not to air my story?”

  “Siobhan, this is the story of a lifetime, and I’ve been working on it for—”

  “It wasn’t like you said with Pike. Or with any of those guys in high school. It wasn’t that things ‘felt good.’ It was just that I was very, very confused, and I wanted someone to love me, and I thought that if I made them happy, they would love me. But they didn’t. They just used me. And back then, I didn’t have an outlet for anything, so everything was still inside me, and it would come out, and I would scare them off. I was too intense.” And now, she only sounded young. Young and broken.

  “Oh, Siobhan,” he said quietly.

  “I would have slept with you, you know,” she said. “Back then, I was game for anything. But you didn’t really try. And I… stupid, naive girl that I was, I thought it meant you were different.”

  “It did,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know, maybe it did. I did love you, Siobhan. I… adored you.”

  “But then why didn’t you—”

  “Because I thought you didn’t want me,” he said. “Because every time I’d gotten close to you before, you’d push me away. Why did you always push me away?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “After the dance?”

  “I… I don’t even remember that.”

  “Seriously? We went to that dance and you did that stuff in the bathroom and then you told me to stay away from—”

  “Oh,” she said. “Right.”

  It was quiet.

  “Siobhan?” he said.

  “I liked you,” she said. “I liked you and that scared me, because every other time I ever liked a boy, he hurt me. I didn’t want to give you any… power over me.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You don’t understand. Things at home were…” She took a shaky breath.

  “I want to understand. Tell me about things at home. You know, Charity said something about your home life not being optimal, but I had no idea about that.”

  “I know,” she said. “For someone who paid so much attention to me, you were pretty oblivious.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was a kid. I was a dumb kid.”

  “Well, so was I,” she said. “I was a kid, but… someone—lots of someones—men—boys—they’d pushed me into doing things that I wasn’t ready for. I was a kid, but I was trying to deal with mature things. I wasn’t doing a very good job.”

  “We were all that way,” he said. “That’s what being a teenager is. As for people who took advantage of you…” He sucked in a breath. “Or, are you saying that was me, too? Was I one of those people?”

  “I don’t want to think that you were,” she said. “But you’re the only one who knows.”

  “No,” he said. “No, that’s not true. You’re the one who knows. I didn’t mean to hurt you, but if I did—”

  “It was always hard to tell with you, Nash. With other guys, they were straightforward. I could always get a read on what they were after, but with you, I never even was sure if you wanted to be more than friends.” She laughed again. “I can’t seem to get a read on you now, either. That must be why I keep picking up the phone when you call. Most men are so damned simple to figure out. But you…”

  Her words trailed off and hung between them.

  “I just wanted to make you happy,” he murmured. “I thought you hung the moon back then.”

  She laughed a little. “Look, I don’t know if it was possible to make me happy then.”

  “What about now?”

  “Oh, Classic Rock.” She sighed.

  Damn, why had he said that? This wasn’t about making her happy. This was about getting a fucking interview, damn it. How did he get the conversation back to the point where he could ask her again?

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “What?” he said. “Wait, don’t hang up.”

  “I have to.”

  The phone went dead in his hand.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. He didn’t understand Siobhan Thorn. He didn’t understand her at all.

  * * *

  The phone rang, waking Nash from a deep sleep. He blinked and picked it up, noting that it was after three in the morning. It was Siobhan calling.

  “Hey,” he said in a sleep-ravaged voice. “You okay?”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He sat up in bed. “What’s going on?”

  “I just… talking to you, I got to thinking about high school, about how everything went wrong between us and we never even got to figure out what we were to each other. Maybe if we had… I wonder if things would have been different.”

  “They could have been.”

  Her voice was quiet. “I was lying in bed, trying to sleep, and I was thinking about…” She laughed a little.

  “What?”

  “About kissing you,” she whispered. “Do you ever think about that?”

  Nash sucked in a breath. The last vestiges of sleep were gone suddenly. He was wide awake. “Well, uh, you were my first kiss, so, yeah, of course.”

  “You know what you said earlier, about wanting to make me happy?”

  “Listen, when I said that, maybe I shouldn’t have—”

  “I don’t want you to do a podcast about me, Nash.”

  Shit. He rubbed his forehead. “You want me to drop it? Drop everything?”

  “There’s no chance in hell you’ll do that, is there? Maybe if it was high school, maybe if you still adored me—”

  “I can hide your identity.” He got out of the bed, started to pace. “I can make it so no one will be able to identify you.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Siobhan, trust me on this. I can keep you safe.”

  “I wish you were my first kiss too,” she said in a tiny voice. “I always liked the way you kissed. I liked the way it felt to be in your arms. You did make me feel safe.”

  Nash swallowed. He was starting to feel sweaty under his clothes. “What are you doing right now?” The bottom had gone out of his voice.

  “Talking to you.”

  “Come to my hotel.” He had issued the command before he knew it, and it sounded tinged with promise. He was propositioning her, and he hadn’t meant it.

  He didn’t think he’d meant it.

  This wasn’t about that.

  God damn it, he had not chased this woman halfway across the country simply because he wanted to remedy the fact that he hadn’t gotten in her pants in high school. She was a killer, for God’s sake. A murderer. He was not going to—

  “I can’t,” she said, but there was a breathlessness to her voice. “Eddie would notice if I left.”

  “Tell me you’re going to let me interview you.”

  “I can’t do that.” She paused. “Tell me that you’re going to drop this story.”

  He licked his lips.

  “I can’t get away tonight, but maybe tomorrow morning, instead of going to the gym, I could come by your room.” Her voice dropped sultrily. “If you were going to drop the story, I’d be very, very grateful, you know.”

  “Are you…?” He swallowed. Was she offering to have sex with
him in trade for his silence? He found he couldn’t even give the thought words. He wasn’t going to agree to that. But, to his horror, he was getting aroused. He should hang up. He didn’t want to hang up.

  “Am I what?”

  “Nothing,” he muttered. “Listen… would you let me interview you if I was implicated as well?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He was too hot. His body was throbbing. His pants were tight. “I could help you. With Carston. He deserves to die. And if I helped, then I’d make sure to keep you anonymous. No one would find you. Because if they found out, we’d both go down.”

  “Help me?” she repeated. “What an interesting idea.”

  It was harder and harder for him to breathe. “Say you’ll let me interview you. I want to interview you.”

  She laughed softly. “I bet you do.” A pause. “I want to know more about this idea of you helping me.”

  His breath caught. “I… don’t know why I even said that.”

  “If Eddie woke up right now and wrenched the phone away from me and heard your voice, he’d be so terribly angry. It’s funny, because he doesn’t even find grown women sexually attractive, but he’s got it in his head that I’m his personal property. Of course, that’s probably because I’ve said that to him. I tell him I belong to him. Men like hearing that. You ever have a woman say that to you, Nash?”

  “I should hang up.” His throat was tight.

  “I’m guessing that’s a no,” she said lightly. “No woman out there has looked deeply into your eyes and whispered, ‘I belong to Nash Steven Wilt.’”

  Nash’s body was like a coiled spring. He tried to speak and couldn’t.

  “That’s too bad,” she murmured. “You know, this idea of yours, that we could do it together, kill Eddie together, it’s kind of…” Her voice dropped in pitch. “Exciting.”

  He choked.

  “We should talk about it more,” she said. “I’ll come by your hotel tomorrow morning, like I said. Is that all right?”

  He should say no, he thought. He should pack up all his stuff and check out of the hotel, and come morning he could be halfway home, driving on the highway, in his car, away from her, as far away from her as he could possibly get.