A Time of Torment by John Connolly Read Free Book Online Page B

you’d come over, in your own time.’
    He said all this without smiling. The words sounded flirty, but his manner was neutral. He wasn’t arrogant, she thought. He was simply commenting, as he might have done on a change in the weather.
    ‘Well, I’m here now.’
    ‘Yes, you are.’
    ‘Buy you a drink?’
    ‘Aren’t I supposed to ask you that?’
    ‘I don’t know. It’s the twenty-first century.’
    ‘So it is. Still, I figure that’s how this thing is supposed to go.’
    Corrie tried not to bristle. Did he figure her for a hooker?
    ‘What kind of thing?’ she asked, trying to keep the edge from her voice.
    He moved his gaze away from her for the first time. ‘Just a conversation between a man and a girl in a bar: man buys the girl a drink, they get to talking. I’ve seen it done before.’
    Again, she experienced a peculiar sense of disconnection, of this individual as a kind of observer of his own life. Perhaps she’d made a mistake in choosing him. For this thing of theirs to work, she needed lust, and a loss of inhibition. This one seemed too much in control of himself.
    But then he let his right hand drop to his thigh, brushing her leg as he did so, and she gently rubbed herself against it. After a moment, she felt his hand slide onto her jeans. No, she hadn’t made an error after all.
    ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
    ‘Henry.’ Which it wasn’t.
    ‘Like the king.’
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘Any of them.’
    ‘Yes, just like one of the kings.’
    ‘I’m Lise,’ she said, although he hadn’t asked, and it wasn’t her name either.
    ‘Hello, Lise.’
    ‘Hello, Henry.’
    ‘What can I get you?’
    ‘Bourbon and Coke,’ she said. ‘Easy on the ice.’
    ‘And the soda?’
    She sipped through her straw, draining the watery residue at the end of the glass she had so carefully nursed until now.
    ‘Easy on that, too.’
    The volume of the music rose. Dancing wasn’t permitted, but somehow they found themselves standing close to each other, and she thought she could feel the hardness of him against her. He wasn’t from around here, he told her, but she could have guessed that by the way he held himself apart from his surroundings. When she pressed him, he gave her only ‘south of here’, which wasn’t much. Given that they were just below Canada, most places were south. She was used to evasiveness, though, particularly from the married ones. Henry said that he wasn’t married, but a lot of them told her that. The ones who were honest often qualified their status with unflattering descriptions of their wives, or admitted just to being unhappy. A handful were genuinely sad and lonely, trapped in relationships because of kids, jobs, mortgages, or simply because they didn’t believe that anyone else would have them. She was always sorry for those ones, afterward.
    As for Henry, she couldn’t detect a mark on his ring finger, the little telltale band of white that spoke of a symbol set aside. She’d have spotted it easily in his case, because he had outdoor hands. He was here on business, he said. What kind? Stock acquisition. Corrie didn’t know what that meant, and Henry wasn’t interested in telling her. Corrie was smart enough to suppose that everyone, on some level, was engaged in stock acquisition. Only the job titles varied.
    ‘I like you, Henry’ she said. ‘I prefer slightly older men.’
    ‘And why is that?’
    ‘They know what they want. And they’re kinder than young men.’
    And she meant it.
    ‘Kinder, how? Like with money?’
    ‘Sometimes,’ she said, then added the lie: ‘But this isn’t about money.’
    ‘No?’
    His tone caused her to frown. Although this was all a game, and one that he was destined to lose, it annoyed her that after the couple of hours they had spent talking, he was still capable of making such an implication.
    ‘I’m not a hooker,’ she said.
    ‘I never said you were.’ He didn’t sound defensive, or even amused. There was only that