Riptide

up in less than a second. He wanted to leap on her, close his
    hands around her skinny neck, and perhaps strangle her.
    "Yeah, right, sure," Tyler said. "A guy like that? Gay? I don't believe
    it for a minute. You should stay with me and Sam, to be on the
    safe side."
    She said very gently, "No, you know I couldn't do that, Tyler."
    Even after that, it took her another couple of minutes to get
    Tyler out of the house. She was locking the door when he said
    from behind her, "I'm not a sexist."
    She turned around to grin at him. "Aha! So you were eavesdropping.
    I thought you were probably lurking back there. I

was afraid that you were going to try to throw Tyler out of the
    house."
    "Maybe I would have if you hadn't finally gotten a grip and
    pushed him out. I wasn't a bully or a know-it-all, either, when I
    was growing up. I never tortured you."
    "Don't become part of your own script, Adam. I can also write
    whatever I want to on that script, since it involves me."
    "I'm not gay, either."
    She just laughed at him.
    He grabbed her by the shoulders, jerked her against him, and
    kissed her fast and hard. He said against her mouth, "I'm not gay,
    damn you."
    She pulled away from him, stood stock-still, and stared at him.
    She wiped the back of her hand over her mouth.
    He streaked his fingers through his hair, standing it on end. "I'm
    sorry. I don't know why I did that. I didn't mean to do that. I'm
    not gay."
    She started shaking her head, then, just as suddenly, unexpectedly,
    she threw back her head and laughed and laughed, wrapping
    her arms around herself.
    It was a nice sound. He bet she hadn't laughed much lately. She
    hiccuped. "You're forgiven for trying to enforce your manhood.
    Got you on that one, hmmm?"
    He realized he'd leapt for the bait. How could that have happened?
    He looked down at his fingernails, then buffed them lightly
    against his shirtsleeve. "Actually, what I should have said is I'm not
    at all certain yet that I'm gay. I'm still thinking about it. Kissing you
    was a test. Yeah, I'm still not certain one way or the other. You
    didn't give me much data." Not much of a return hit, but it was
    something.
    She walked past him into the kitchen. She started measuring out

coffee. When she finished, she turned the machine on and stood
    there, staring at the coffee dripping into the pot. Finally she turned
    and said, "I want to know who you are. Now. Don't lie to me. I
    can't take any more lies. Really, I just can't."
    "All right. Pour me that coffee and I'll tell you who I am and
    what I'm doing here."
    While she poured, he said, leaning back in his chair, balancing it
    on its two back legs, "Because you're an amateur I looked at the
    problem very differently. But like I already told you, you didn't do
    badly. Your only really big mistake was your try at misdirection
    with the flight from Dulles to Boston, then another flight on to
    Portland. Another thing: I reviewed all your credit card invoices.
    The only airline you use is United. Since you're an amateur, it
    wouldn't occur to you to change."
    She said, "Trying another airline flicked through my brain, but I
    wanted out as fast as I could get out and I feel comfortable dealing
    with United. I never thought, never realized--"
    "I know. It makes excellent sense, just not in this sort of situation.
    I didn't even bother checking any of the other airlines."
    "However did you get ahold of my credit card invoices?"
    "No problem. Access to any private records is a piece of cake, for
    anyone. Thankfully, law enforcement has to convince judges to get
    warrants and that takes time, a good thing for you. Also, I've got a
    dynamite staff who are so fast and creative that it sometimes surprises
    even me.
    "No, don't stiffen up like a poker. We're talking absolute discretion
    here. Now, there were only sixty-eight tickets issued to
    women traveling alone within six hours of the flight you took to
    Washington, DC. I believed it would be three hours, but we all
    wanted to be thorough. It turned out you called the airline to
    make reservations only two hours and fifty-four minutes before the

flight, as a matter of fact. You moved very quickly once you made
    up your mind to get the hell out of Dodge. Then you had to buy a
    ticket to Boston, then on to Portland, Maine, when you arrived at
    Dulles in Washington, D.C.You didn't want to buy it in New York,
    for obvious reasons. You ran up to the ticket counter, knowing full
    well that the next flight to Boston was