Tyler Bradshaw raised his glass and looked directly at Zoe. “Drink to me only with thine eyes.”
Zoe wasn’t sure if he meant that as a joke or not. The line was such a cliché she thought it had to be. In which case a laugh or some smartass remark might be the best response. That’s how she would have responded if Alex had ever said anything so corny. On the other hand, Bradshaw looked as if he was perfectly serious, and she had learned it wasn’t a good idea to seem to be mocking him. Instead she simply smiled, raised her glass with two hands and gave him what she hoped was a seductive look over the rim. “Sadly, Tyler,” she said, “with my hands cuffed like this, my eyes are about the only things I can drink to you with. At least without spilling your thousand-dollar wine all over myself. Do you think you might take them off?”
“Point taken. If I take off the cuffs do you promise to be good?”
“Of course. I promise. I’ll be very, very good.” She added a smile, “In every way.”
As she said it she once again asked herself if she was overplaying her role. Overacting? Sounding phony? The entire dialogue felt to her like the two of them were mouthing lines out of a script from Fifty Shades of Whatever. Or one of those bodice-ripper romances with hunky guys with bare chests on the covers. She’d never played in any soap operas but mustn’t “very, very good . . . in every way” sound as ridiculous to him as it did to her?
Apparently not. His only expression seemed to be one of eager anticipation. Looking forward no doubt to the sexual frolics he had planned for after they finished their wine.
Bradshaw got up, took her glass, put it on the small table next to his chair. Instead of removing the cuffs, he moved closer, pulled her to her feet, and began kissing her on the lips. A soft but sensual kiss. The kind of kiss that might have turned her on if only the guy kissing her was a normal human being and not some bat-shit crazy kidnapper, rapist and murderer.
She returned the kiss. Softly. Delicately. Seductively.
As she did, he started nibbling her lower lip. Then stopping long enough to murmur “That death’s unnatural that kills for loving./Alas why gnaw you so your nether lip?”
She decided not to point out that it was Bradshaw who was gnawing her nether lip and not the other way around. Instead she recited the rest of Desdemona’s words from the speech, whispering them softly into his ear.
She looked directly into his eyes. “A little later Desdemona asks Othello about her death. A guiltless death I die. I’m sure you remember that line. Is that what you have planned for me?” she asked. “A guiltless death?”
“Guiltless?”
“What else but guiltless?”
“Hardly guiltless,” he said with a creepy smile. “After all I saw you just last night coming on to not one but two men in plain view on the sidewalk just days after breaking up with your doctor friend.”
Two men? What two men? Could he be referring to the innocent kisses she shared with Luke Nichols and Randall Carter? She supposed he must have been hanging around out of sight as she walked out with Carter and then followed her from the theater to the Toad. And the comment about breaking up with Alex added to her certainty that he’d been stalking her for a while. At least for weeks. Had he also been peering in her windows from his apartment in the building on the corner across the street? Or maybe from the roof? She was usually pretty careful about keeping the shades pulled. But was she always? Could anyone make out the shadows of bodies behind them? It was a disturbing thought. So was the idea of how much time he might have spent in her apartment while she was lying there helpless, taped and wrapped in her own Navajo rug. Had he gone through her private things? Searched through her computer? She didn’t think there was all that much to hide. Still, it was disturbing.
“It seems you’ve been spying on me.” She spoke the words lightly. Almost as if spying was a harmless and silly thing to do. “Still, those kisses you mentioned were innocent. Not in any way sexual.”
She sensed his body stiffen as she spoke. Had she made him angry? If so, it was an anger too easily induced. “And, I should remind you, I kissed those men before I had even met you.”
He seemed to relax as he considered that. “True,” he said. “But we both know you’re not as guiltless as Desdemona. And I think that makes you, how shall I put it? A bad girl who should be punished.”
She forced a deep-throated sexy laugh. “Punished how?”
“What would you suggest?”
She tried to think of something that would amuse him. “Perhaps a spanking?” she said.
“A spanking? I’ve never tried that. It might be fun. But not nearly as much fun as smothering you on stage would have been. Have you pray’d to-night, Desdemona?”
Othello’s lines from the play. Spoken just before he’d killed her. Was that what was going to happen now? Was he ready to kill her? It seemed far too soon for any final curtain.
“Ay, my lord,” she responded.
“If you bethink yourself of any crime,” he said, “Unreconciled as yet to heaven and grace,/Solicit for it straight.”
“Alas, my lord, what do you mean by that?”
“Well, do it, and be brief; I will walk by;/I would not kill thy unprepared spirit;/
No; heaven forfend! I would not kill thy soul.”
“Talk you of killing?” she asked.
“Ay, I do.”
Zoe lowered her head and spoke Desdemona’s next line: “Then heaven/Have mercy on me!”
Tyler raised his right hand as if to strike her. She lowered herself to her knees, sat back on her heels, closed her eyes and waited for the blow. It didn’t come. A minute passed. And still the hand hadn’t struck. What was he waiting for? She opened her eyes and looked up into his face, which wore a commanding smile.
“For two weeks now I’ve dreamt of nothing so much as playing the Moor to your Desdemona. So no, I’m not really going to kill you. I love you far too much for that. Though in the end I just may have to. After all, that’s the way the play always ends, isn’t it?”
“Since you know the play, you also know that Desdemona was never faithless. She never cheated on Othello. It was only the lies and jealousy of Iago that made it seem so. Her death was nothing less than the death of innocence.”
“Sadly, my love, in this house, on this stage, none of us are innocent. Now let me remove your handcuffs so we can enjoy our wine.”
“Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die?”
“Something like that. But probably not tomorrow.”
Tyler removed a nasty-looking knife from his pocket and unfolded a black carbon steel blade. She wondered for a moment if this was how it would end.
“Hold your hands out,” he said.
She obeyed, and he turned the knife so the sharp edge faced up. He touched the blade against her throat. He seemed to be debating something. Was he fantasizing about gutting her with the damned thing? She stood frozen in place, feeling the point of the blade on her neck. Just as frightening as the knife was his expression. His face had taken on that strange, lost intensity she’d first seen when she’d looked at him across the room at the Laughing Toad.
“Tyler? Are you all right?” she said, managing to hold in the terror that had begun to overtake her.
He didn’t answer.
“Tell me. What’s the matter?”
Again no answer. Was this the way it was going to end? The way the curtain would come down on her life? She held her breath and waited, her heart beating, her brain frozen, not knowing what he was going to do with the damned thing.
Finally his face relaxed. His smile returned. He pulled the tip of the blade from her throat, slid it between her hands and pushed up against the plastic. The razor-sharp steel sliced through the flex cuffs as if they weren’t even there. The plastic pieces dropped to the floor. “You know you’re even more beautiful when you’re frightened?” he said.
And you’re even sicker than I imagined, she thought. I’m going to have to kill you sooner rather than later if I’m to have any chance of survival.
She watched closely as Tyler refolded the knife and slipped it back into the right side pocket of his pants. She dared to glance down for a split second at the bulge it made and then looked quickly away. Was the knife her best way out of this? If she could somehow get her hands on it, she knew she could do serious damage. Maybe even finish him off. But, big as he was, the only way she would be able to do that was to catch him in an unguarded moment of sexual eagerness. She pictured herself slipping down onto her knees. Unzipping his trousers. Taking him in her mouth and giving him the best blow job in American history. And while she was busily keeping him in the throes of ecstasy, would it be possible to pull the knife from his side pocket?
Open it. Push it into his gut. And slice it upward as hard as she could. Totally eviscerate him if possible. Do it now, she told herself. Reach for the zipper now before he decides to kill you. But before she could move he smiled at her in a way that made her wonder if he loved her as he claimed or merely loved the idea of cutting her throat.
Tyler walked back toward his chair to the right of the fireplace and sat down, his eyes never leaving hers.
Her hands freed from the cuffs, she followed him, took the chair to the left of the fireplace. Picked up the glass from the table next to her. She took a sip of her wine and waited. He took his glass in his hands but didn’t drink right away. Instead he closed his eyes, his face squeezing in on itself just as it had done—could it have only been last night?—for those few moments at the Toad. Then his face relaxed and she could hear him taking long, slow breaths. Trying to calm an anger? Or control his lust? Or silence voices in his head? Perhaps it was the voice of jealousy? The voice of the vengeful Iago? Had she said or done something to set off some kind of seizure? If so, she had to figure out how to keep that from happening again.
It suddenly occurred to her that by giving him what he wanted sexually, had she then become, in his eyes, a slut? A deceiver? Someone he’d want to kill? The virgin and the whore. He seemed to want it both ways. And that was a problem.