Phantom Prey

bare branches of the winter oaks.
    “Hello? Hell-o-o-o?” Loren said. He walked in, wearing another new outfit, this one with a ruffle at his neck, with a green velvet coat that was cut long, as though he’d been traveling in the nineteenth century. He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it. His lips were cold and dry. Then he stepped back and, looking down, said, “Those shorts aren’t particularly becoming.”
    He was not trying to be offensive: he said it with the detached professional tone of a hairdresser about to suggest a change of style.
    “I’ve been moving furniture,” Fairy said.
    He cut her off: “Just an observation,” he said. He cocked his head and grinned, a practiced gesture that might have been made by a French fop in a romantic novel. But something caught in her throat, and she suspected he knew it. He was still holding her hand, and she could feel the edges of his fingernails in her palm, like claws. “Pale women have a problem with thighs,” he said. “Their paleness, which can be very attractive, also makes them look a little heavy. A soft dress, on the other hand, something in a cool green, or a mint, would be stunning. Black would be good, in the evenings; Ivory would be fine, too—but of course, you know all this.”
    “Now you’re a fashion maven?” Fairy asked.
    “I have an interest in costume,” Loren said, not quite dismissively. Before she could say anything else, he turned to the piano and hit a chord.
    “You talk about the piano, but you never play,” she said. “You do play?”
    “Yeah, sure. I’ve seen your sheet music here, the Moonlight . . .”
    With a glance at a wall mirror, to check his look, Loren settled on the piano bench and played a long run from the final movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, missed a few notes, shook his head, tried again, missed again, and banged out a few loud chords. “My problem has always been, I think about it—if you think about it, you can’t do it. . . . At least, I can’t.”
    “Stupidity, a piano method by Loren Doyle,” she said, pulling his last name from thin air, not knowing where it came from.
    “Doyle,” he said, looking over his shoulder at her, “It means ‘dark stranger.’ How about that?”
    “You certainly fit the name,” she said.
    Loren threw back his head and laughed, his longish hair flipping back to his shoulders. “One thing you’ve got to remember about Beethoven,” he said, picking out the theme of the Moonlight, “is that he’s dead. On the other hand, Bob Seger is still alive.”
    Loren launched into “Old Time Rock & Roll,” pounding it out, his right hand bouncing up and down the keyboard in a chord-claw, and Fairy began to laugh . . . and laugh.
    And Loren stopped playing, stood up, and gripped the hair at the base of her skull in his left hand, and turned her face to his and said, “I need somebody to laugh for me.” He kissed her on the mouth.
    She let go, closed her eyes, opened her lips. His tongue was cold and she shivered, but she let it go.
    Up and into the bedroom: sex came first. She hungered for it, needed it, hung on to him. He said, “I’m very cold.”
    “Please,” she said. “Please help me here.”
    “I was thinking . . . a hot shower?” One cool fingertip traced the line of her throat from chin to collarbone, then down, along the line of her blouse to the first button, popped it, and then another, and slipped inside to her breasts. He didn’t seem intrusive: but it did seem practiced.
    “All right,” she said, half turning away, not meeting his eye. “All right.”
    He always wanted heat, any way he could get it, from a shower, from her. Heat.
    "You have very nice breasts,” he said. The water coursed down her chest and across her stomach to her thighs. He traced it with his knuckles, between her breasts, her stomach, over her navel, then to the side, just inside the line of her hipbone, to her thigh. “The first night that I watched you—that’s the first thing I thought.”
    “I should shave my legs,” she said nervously, stretching for something prosaic to right herself. “I’m like barbed wire.”
    “Do I feel cold to you?”
    “Yes . . . but not so much as before.”
    “I don’t think it’s the water.”
    “No . . .”
    “I think it’s you . You bring me heat,” he said. “Would you like me to shave your legs?”
    “No, I’ll . . . I don’t . . .” Confused.
    “Here. Let me.” He stepped out of the shower,