She gestured toward the door with her shoulder. “I brought a suitcase with me.”

Michael looked over her thigh to see a black rectangular shape set off against the neon under the door.

She queried him. “What do you want me to pull out of it? What aphrodisiac will do the trick?”

“Are you a magician, too?”

“With a man like you, I have to seduce your mind before you will let me anywhere near your body.”

“With something you would pull out of a suitcase?”

“Or not.”

He was confused.

She explained, “Sometimes only imagination is needed.”

He quibbled in a roundabout. “But I don’t want to lose her.”

“Her…?” The prostitute’s shadowy look was one of derision. “You’re afraid you’re going to lose your ideal?”

“Emma,” he said. “Her name is Emma.”

“Do you intend to confess your feelings to this Emma?”

He mumbled in the direction of a reply.

She broadened the scope of the inquiry. “Can you picture yourself having sex with her, then?”

“When I’m around her, that isn’t in my mind, necessarily.”

Amber skirted it. “But you do think of her when you’re by yourself? When the lights are out?”

“No more pop psychology,” he demanded.

The prostitute was determined. “Why don’t you think about her? Is it because you feel you don’t deserve her? Even in your private thoughts?” Her voice narrowed in. “Who do you think about when the lights are out?”

The man’s responses were pared down to inaudible head nods.

“Have you been thinking about me lately?” she volunteered. “Isn’t that the real reason why you called?”

He was at once motionless under her.

She assessed his push-pull. “I think maybe you are exactly where you want to be in all this.”

He did not take the bait.

“The ‘Golden Means’ you mentioned before,” she continued. “In this regard, none exists. There are two irreconcilable women in your head: one you see in the clouds, and another you call out from under your bed at night. I dare say you’re not eager to give up either one. You’ve grown too comfortable in age with your mental constructs.”

He frowned. “Mental constructs?”

She sighed with exasperation. “You had me going with all your talk of shyness. But I suspect your timidity not only spares you from the possibility of being rejected, but also from the inconvenience of not being rejected. There is virtue if not passion in knowing precisely what you want; and safety if not salvation in knowing it is too precise to be had.”

“And now you’re a philosopher.”

“No.” She was curt. “I just want to get you off.”

“I don’t want to be a test case for your new profession.”

“Like I said, you’re not a client.”

“If it’s not business, then it’s personal?”

“I’m offering you more than handholding and candy hearts, Michael. I’m offering to be whoever you want in this dark room.”

“But it’s more than that, too—if it’s personal?”

Amber was now the one being evasive.

Michael pushed down on her knees, prompting her to release him from the nylon net. He rose against the headboard to buttress himself.

The prostitute backed away to the footboard. “Why are you so scared?”

The man climbed off the bed and fled to the bathroom. As he stood at the sink, splashing cold water in his face, the squeaking bedsprings in the next room sounded as if they were trying to burrow their way through the wall. Throat-ripping screams of lovers clattered in a connecting vent. The whole building resembled a rumbling machine. He attempted to drown it out with the tap, but the throes jumped over his shoulder and out into the room behind him. Startled, he turned back to hear the couple’s cries pouring from the buzzing speaker of the television. The screen spilled its sickly colors over the narrow mattress, while expletives chased stuttering shadows up onto the wall.

He yelled over the burr. “What are you doing?”

Amber hugged the dark door; her features nearly emerged out of the sparks of the whirligig.

A piece of the vivisection-in-progress was glimpsed from bathroom doorway. The flaccid bottom of a man dominated the TV screen, and was too much like the jowls of a toothless grandfather gumming gruel with each heave.

The prostitute finally strolled up to the side of the television after a few more seconds of her curious torture, minding to stay out of the light’s backwash, and clicked it off. “What scares you,” she began in the instructional silence, “is relinquishing control.”

He circled around her, chiming dissonantly in a creaking chair as he laced up his shoes.

“As I said in Chicago,” she continued, “what is needed in love is faith.”

“Trust, you mean?”

“Yes. Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?”

“If this is about trust, then tell me about your escort service?”

“I don’t work for them anymore.”

“But who are they?” He stood up and pointed at the covered camera in the dark corner. “Who are the people you don’t want looking in?”

“This isn’t about them.”

“This is personal.”

“Since I fell in love with you—yes.”

Her easy confession was another broadside. “But I don’t even know you.”

“But you do.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I'm your ideal.”

“You keep saying that, too.”

“And how well do you know her? You’ve only been in Stonesthrow for a couple of days. You’ve known me for almost as long as you’ve known her. Isn’t that why you’re here? Because—like her—I'm an unknown quantity. Isn’t that what your ideal is all about? Something more in your mind and imagination than in your experience. Something that benefits from a lack of specifics. Isn’t that what you need to proceed? Isn’t that what you’ve always needed to proceed?”

He could only answer with, “You would be the first to say that the heart is illogical, Amber.”

She looked momentarily deflated, sinking to the edge of the bed. “You say that only because you’re thinking from here, not there. When you are there—when were are there, together—it will be an entirely different situation.”

Turning to the door, Michael’s hand lit on the doorknob, but did not turn it.

She smiled cautiously. “You’re the kind of man who can call a woman in the middle of the night and talk for hours without ever saying what he wants to say. But you and I have shared more truth in this dark room than you are ever likely to share with any woman in daylight.”

“I have never confessed my heart to a woman,” he muttered under his breath.

“But you have.”

He looked up.

“The drawing of a monster you gave me in Chicago. It had I love you written on it.”

“I gave you that drawing?” he gasped. “A drawing I made when I was a boy?”

“It was no accident.”

He was drawn back in. “Are you saying my ‘inner child’ is sending you crush notes behind my back?”

“More like your id sending me an SOS.”

He sighed, giving in a little. “I might be a lost cause at this point, Amber.”

“You mix a little hate in with your love in your art, Michael. You just need to learn how to do what you do at the easel in your real life.”

“You sound like Omar.”

“But it’s true.” She expanded on her suggestion. “Think of it like your ‘Golden Means’. You have to balance your affection for the opposite sex with a healthy measure of disaffection. Toss in a smidgen of antipathy in with your admiration. Sometimes the only way to save your soul is by giving the Devil his pound of flesh.”

“And you want to be the devil girl who pushes my buttons?”

“I do have a closet full of costumes.”

His eyes again fell on the doorknob under his fingers. “If you cure me, I may stop painting monsters. Maybe stop painting altogether.”

“Then it will be the art world’s loss and your gain.”

“But I love my monsters. Shouldn’t I suffer for them?”

“Isn’t it the other way round? They suffer for you and spare you the full brunt of your frailty and feeling. If you suffered more, I’m certain we would already be lovers.”

He was not sure which made him more uncomfortable: her straightforwardness or her insight.

“I have another client to meet,” she announced.

He was now more blocking the door than leading the way out.

Amber, seizing on his hesitation, strolled up to him and let her fingers trickle down to his wrist. “You didn’t come here for sex, did you?”

He was never sure what was in his mind, but believed what she said was more true than not. “I don’t…” he stammered hesitantly. “I don’t like you being with other men.”

Her warm breath pushed into him. “Jealousy is a good first step.”

He was just as quickly back in her echo chamber with nothing to say, but left her to make of the silence what she would. He stuck his free hand down in his jacket pocket in a fiddle, forgetting about the strand of the prostitute’s hair that was still there. She was both close and far away in that moment, but he could not figure out which aspect of her was which. He split the difference. “I’m allergic to some fragrances,” he admitted.

Amber was struck by the curious confession. “Do you not want me to wear perfume when we’re together?”

He called himself answering only the first part of the question. “No. I want you to wear it.”

She was tugging on his hand, attempting to coax it around her waist, but the unseen strand of hair, like a talisman, was keeping her at arm’s length. He straightened up, but blustered only weakly. “Who sent you, Amber? Who really sent you?”

“Jane Austen,” she whispered at his collar.

He looked her in the eye without blinking. Amber released his hand, and needing to escape darkness that so exposed him he turned to step out onto the landing.