Not dissuaded by his reaction, Amber gestured toward the door. “I brought a suitcase with me.”

Michael looked over to see a black rectangular object set off against neon seeping in under the sill.

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.”

“What’s in the suitcase?” he asked pointblank.

A weighty pause preceded her reply. “Money.”

“Money?”

“Yours.”

“Mine…?” the man tittered. “What? So I can pay your fee?”

“Wouldn’t money change the dynamic between us? If you don’t feel you deserve me as a poor man, then maybe being a rich man would change everything.”

He quibbled with her caricature of male motives. “It isn’t that I don’t deserve you, but I don’t deserve her.”

“Her…?” The prostitute’s shadowy look was now 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 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 even deserve her 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 nods.

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

His blank expression melted into the headboard.

She assessed the 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 surmised. “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. “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 brusque. “I 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. She 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 bored through the wall; throat-ripping screams of lovers ricocheted in a connecting vent 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 now-vacated mattress. Expletives chased shadows up onto the wall.

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

Amber hugged the dark room door; her features nearly emerged out of the sparks of the whirligig. A piece of the vivisection-in-progress was glimpsed from the bathroom doorway. Amid snaps of excoriated flesh and clinch-lipped yelps, the flaccid bottom of a man dominated the TV screen. It was too much like the jowls of a toothless grandfather gumming gruel with each heave. Nothing of the woman could be seen beyond her spread legs and rope-bound wrists tied to the headboard. The prostitute, stepping halfway into the backwash, allowed her silhouette to gradate. She strolled up to the television to turn it off. “What scares you,” she began in the instructional silence, “is relinquishing control.”

He circled around her, chiming dissonantly in a creaking chair while he laced 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 won’t work for them anymore...”

“But who are they?” he snapped, pointing at the covered camera in the 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.”

The easy profession 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?” she argued. “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 than in your experience. Something that benefits from a lack of specifics. Isn’t that what you need to proceed?”

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

She looked momentarily deflated, sinking to the edge of the bed. “You say that because you’re thinking from here, not there. When you are there—when we 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.”

“We have shared no truth,” he countered.

“Perhaps not the truth of words.”

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

“But you have.”

Michael met her eyes.

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

“I gave you that drawing?” he gasped. “A drawing I made when I was a boy?” The artist could not imagine under what set of circumstances this drawing came to be in her possession..

“It was no accident,” she insisted.

“Are you saying my ‘inner child’ is sending you crush notes behind my back?”

“More like your id sending me an SOS.”

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

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

He feigned disinterest.

“And jewelry,” she added. “Scads of costume jewelry.”

He smiled in spite of himself. “I would have thought you could afford the real thing.”

“Would it matter?”

His gaze lit once more on the doorknob. “Would what matter?”

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

He was now more blocking than leading the way out. “If you cure me, Amber, 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.”

Her insight was as unsettling as her straightforwardness.

Amber, seizing on his hesitation, strolled up to let her fingers trickle down his forearm. “You didn’t come here for sex.”

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 close breath cleared the collar of his shirt. “Jealousy is a good first step.”

Michael turned toward her—his nose almost touching her forehead. There was enough light to sketch in general details, but it was a face more template than one personally known to him. “Why don’t you want me to see you?” he asked searchingly.

“Because you would be afraid.”

He was just as quickly back in her echo chamber with nothing to say, but left her to make of his 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. Rubbing it between his fingers, it was both close and far away in that moment, but he could not figure out which descriptive aspect of her was which. He split the difference. “I’m allergic to some fragrances,” he admitted.

“Do you want me not to wear perfume when we’re together?”

He called himself answering 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, kept her at arm’s length. He straightened up, but blustered weakly. “How can I trust you when you know so much more about me than I do about you.”

Amber released his hand.

His asking was meeker this time. “What’s in the suitcase?”

The woman knelt down to unclasp the lid, revealing an empty compartment. “Can you trust me now? I have nothing to hide.”

“What frightens me,” he muttered, “is your face is just as empty to me as the interior of that case. I cannot make out what it means.”

“Turn on the light, then,” she said. “If that will help.”

Needing to escape darkness that so exposed him, Michael turned toward the door and out onto the cold landing.