“Do what?”
“Both of us. Fuck Jeff.”
“Yes, but one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“He can’t have anal sex with either of us and then fuck us.”
“Yeah, he’d infect our vaginas. I know. But that’s the difference between reality and fantasy, isn’t it? I’m always fantasizing about stuff I wouldn’t or couldn’t do in reality.”
“You sure about this?”
“Yes.”
“Ronda Moore, I’d like you to meet some of the women who work with me as field operatives. They are all skilled, competent, well trained and bonded investigators.” Angela indicated five women standing in front of the bookcase in her office. “Marcella Ingles, Maria Cortez, Gudrun Jenssen, Stephanie Li and Joyce Sato. Among them they cover all the languages of Europe and most of the languages of Asia. They’re expensive, but they’re the best at what they do.”
The women smiled at Ronda, pleased at the compliment their employer had given them.
“What’s the job, boss?” Maria asked.
“Ronda thinks her husband is cheating. She wants you to find out.” Angela handed each woman a file that contained a photograph and information on their target.
“Do you have a read on him?” Joyce Sato shifted her weight.
“Indecisive.”
“You can usually get a pretty good fix on these guys. Or gals. What’s up with this one?” Gudrun Jenssen was the tallest of the women.
“Well… Let me put it this way. If Jeff were here with us, I think he’d be having a fantasy about fucking us all at once.”
“Not that bad an idea,” Stephanie said, “With apologies to you, ma’am.” She nodded at Ronda. “But we have rules about things like that.”
The other women waited until Ronda responded with a hesitant laugh before they joined in.
“Speaking of rules, what rules do we follow for the investigation?” Marcella studied the printed sheet in the file with the photograph.
Angela nodded to Ronda. “The floor is yours. You can tell them to only gather evidence that could stand up in court or you can tell them no holds barred.”
“No holds barred. This isn’t going to court. It’s going to me. Do anything you need to.”
“Sting?” Stephanie was eying the photograph.
“Sting?” Ronda looked puzzled.
Angela spoke in a schoolteacher voice. “Okay, suppose we have a reason to think that a person is ‘available’, but we can’t catch him in the act. We can test the idea of availability by having someone approach the guy and come on to him. Then we see how far she has to go before he is in the act. Sometimes they get to a room and he leaves. Sometimes the guy will cut it off way before then. And sometimes…”
“You find out he’s really available.” Ronda finished Angela’s sentence for her.
“Yeah. It’s not pretty, but we do it sometimes. Not our operatives. But they can set it up easily enough.”
“No, don’t do that. I want to know just what he’s up to when he says he’s at meetings and working late and traveling all over the planet on his job. I’d like to know who he travels with and who he rooms with on those trips. I’d like to know where he is when he says he’s staying late. Just that kind of stuff. If there’s something going on, then…”
“That’s where the limits come in. We can wire a place and get video and audio and photos. We’re pretty good at that and unless he has some pros working for him, he won’t know. But that’s very expensive because this isn’t local. It could be Tokyo or Beijing or Copenhagen or London as well as somewhere closer to Chicago. Are you up for that?” Angela looked at Ronda.
“Yes.”
“Okay, girls, let’s go. You divide it up among yourselves.”
The five women took their files and left.
“If he’s doing anything, they’ll find out about it and bring you photos.”
“Good. But when we first met, you said you wouldn’t be able to work for me. What’s changed?”
“What’s changed is that if you want to go through with your plan, I’m in it too now.”
“How’s that?”
“Think I want to fuck some guy whose been fucking everything that’s available? No thank you. So I want to know what’s going on too. I wasn’t able to learn much, and I’d like to know more. There’s that too. And I’m not so much working for you as I’m helping to connect you to these gals and they’re working for you. That’s a whole different invoicing procedure.”
“Okay, if you say so.”
“That’s if you’re still up for the plan we talked about.”
“The three of us? Sure, I’m all for that. Hell, you were right about that. I shouldn’t be keeping secrets from him. No matter what. I need to be the kind of person I want to be and not the kind of person he is. And I don’t want to be someone with secrets.”
“You do love him, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I wish I didn’t but…”
“He provides well for you. Are you sure you want to know this stuff?”
“I don’t give a shit about that. Like I said, I’d rather live in a trailer house and know where I stand than live in a mansion with a guy whose just trying to avoid me.”
“According to this, he should be in Copenhagen right now and return on Thursday. Want to have supper? Out? I don’t cook.”
“Sure, then we can go to my place?”
The two women smiled at each other as they walked to a nearby Thai restaurant.
“Would you like a Syrah? Or here’s a nice Cabernet.”
“Either one is fine with me.” Angela sat in one of the velvet armchairs in the living room while Ronda opened and poured the Cabernet.
“How did you ever start- I mean, I wanted to make love with a woman for a long time, but I never could. I was afraid that…” Ronda set the two glasses on the teak coffee table, sat in the other armchair, and lifted her glass to Angela.
Angela returned the salute. “Ah, that was a long time ago.”
“Can you tell me?”
“Sure. It started when I was a kid, I guess. It was all very innocent. I masturbated from the time I was in kindergarten at least. I didn’t know what it was, just that it felt good to touch myself down there. My mom told me that it was okay but that it was like going to the bathroom, something I should do by myself. She also warned me that nobody else should touch me there.”
“Sure, everyone masturbates, even if they don’t know it. I used to hump my stuffed animals. I was masturbating but didn’t know what I was doing. How did that become making love with women?”
“By the time I was twelve I was doing sleepovers with my best friend. She lived in the same neighborhood and we often slept at her place or mine. When we did that we’d sleep in the same bed. One night it was hot and we took off our pajamas. She asked me if I liked to touch myself ‘down there’. I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to do. But I said yes. She asked if I would touch her there. My mom had told me not to let others touch me, but never mentioned me touching someone else. So I did.”
“Did you have your psychic powers yet?”
“Not the same way I do now. They were just coming in, but I had enough to figure out what to do-what she enjoyed. She asked if I knew how to kiss. I didn’t. We had both seen people doing it in movies and on TV, but we didn’t know how. So we experimented and it wasn’t long ‘til we mastered that. We both liked it. I kept touching her with my fingers and she began to tremble the way I did when I was doing it to myself. I knew what she was experiencing and knew it was good. Then, in spite of what my mom told me, she did me. That was the first time.”
“What happened then?”
“We didn’t connect any of that to sex. But then we got our periods and we began to figure things out a little bit. The boy-girl thing. We got our boobs and boys were trying to kiss us and feel our boobs.”