The Professor seemed relaxed. More relaxed than Carlo had ever seen him, in fact. His hair was slightly tousled, indicating that he had just rolled out of bed. And why not? His penthouse was in the building just across the street in this ritzy neighborhood.
They were both a beautiful couple. More beautiful than anything he had ever seen, despite the gap between their ages.
“Oh my God,” Fiona gasped.
It was too late to take it back now.
“Yes. ‘Oh my God’ is right.”
He felt sick. And yet good. Sick and good in a complex psychological way that he didn’t fully comprehend.
15
Fiona wasn’t always a slut.
But she did like sex. She liked it when Tommy Garmond stuck his cock into her in ninth grade. She liked it so much that she did it again and again. That didn’t make her a slut, right? She only did it with Tommy, not his friends, who wanted to do her too.
But then, her stepfather, Jerry, found out. She was afraid he would tell her mother, but he didn’t. In fact, he had been looking at her kind of funny lately. She was one of those girls who developed fast physically. Her boobs were already outgrowing any girly bra her mother had bought her.
She had learned the power of those boobs and that body.
“Let’s say you and me . . . we cut a deal,” Jerry said to her.
“What deal?” she had asked innocently.
Oh boy, she had been innocent then.
Unfortunately, when Jerry held her down and raped her, her beauty was a power she didn’t want to have.
He threatened to tell her mother if she didn’t do what he wanted. And so she let him fuck her, Repeatedly. Until she was well into the eleventh grade. It was amazing how she kept her grades in school. But she had always been smart. She had a photographic memory. And a pussy boys wanted to climb into in more ways than one.
After a while, it was just about having sex and orgasms. Or maybe it was all about pain management. The orgasms helped to keep the pain at bay – to keep her from slitting her wrists.
And then Jerry died of a heart attack. It wasn’t even when he was fucking her. No. It happened when he was walking the dog. Funny how he managed to keep the veneer of the friendly neighborhood stepfather when their house was so full of secrets.
She was free.
Or was she really?
It didn’t matter, really, she told herself. She was young, she was smart and she had the world at her feet. Her beauty and body became weapons she honed to lure men in, especially when she didn’t really care for any of them. They used her as a tool. So, fine. She would use them as tools as well. She would let them fuck her until they could fuck Jerry out of her system.
Somehow, they never did.
There was some part of her which longed for closure. But there was a wound on her spirit that couldn’t be healed, no matter how many men she had and how hard she fucked them.
So life went on.
So she survived. She was a survivor. Wasn’t that what a psychologist like Rust O’Brien would have told her?
Fiona never really had a guy she couldn’t seduce. Even if she was damaged inside, at least she had her beauty and the power of her body. Imagine being fat like Michaela and her blushing cow of her best friend, Kate, the wallflower who could only make moon eyes in class at the Professor. Kate was a non-entity, unlike Carlo – who was smart and handsome and funny and someone to be reckoned with.
But Carlo wasn’t interested in girls his age. Besides, she had her sights set on a bigger prize – the Professor himself.
Rust O’Brien intrigued Fiona enormously, as he did everyone else. He had a face a movie star would die for and a body every bit as fit and trim as an athlete’s. And yet, he was a mystery where everyone was concerned. He had no wife or girlfriend or boyfriend that anyone knew about, and he didn’t speak about himself or hung photos of his family in his office.
He was obviously brilliant. Rumors abounded of old money, of him having a penthouse uptown. There were even rumors of him having been a psychiatrist in Bellevue once, when he was starting out – of having seen horrors no man had seen outside of an insane asylum. There were rumors that what he saw and experienced there had changed him so much that he was no longer the same man. And hence here was – aloof and an enigma.
Undecipherable.
The Bellevue rumors always struck a chord in Fiona. Maybe it was because she had come close to being criminally insane once. Hence, Rust O’Brien – and the things he had seen – always struck a chord with her.
So when she saw Rust O’Brien with Kate Penney, she was stupefied.
At first, she blinked her eyes to make sure she wasn’t seeing things. She had had a period of hallucination once when she was in the eleventh grade. Hallucinations of her killing her stepfather and her mother as well for being so fucking oblivious. But that period passed, and she didn’t go mad. She survived, and here she was.