The Stranger You Seek by Amanda Kyle Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

this, a chance meeting. What luck!
    The elevator door opened and I stepped out onto the fifth floor with him. He wagged a finger at me. “You never called.”
    We walked in our business suits down tiled halls and carpeted corridors, stopped by a concession stand the size of a closet, and ordered black coffee that came with cardboard sleeves. He was blathering about a promotion. He uses his hands when he talks, slim, manicured hands with a thick gold wedding band on the left ring finger, and he glanced at me to make sure I was listening. He wanted to know I was interested. I was.
Very
. He smiled. He liked the way I was looking at him. My cold aspirations validated and flattered him. I know the type. He too pays a lot of attention to what he wears. The pair of black John Lobbs on his feet must have cost twelve hundred dollars, a Fioravanti power suit in navy blue was probably another twelve grand. He also pays a dominatrix four hundred a month to text him degrading messages, step on his balls, and assault him with a dildo now and then.
    We made a date. Dinner. I think I will fuck him for a while before the point of my steel parts his flesh. How deep will it go before shallow David bleeds? I will keep you posted.
B
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    S unsets are dazzling in Atlanta and utterly counterfeit. Nearly five million people and their idling automobiles help stain the city air dusty-yellow on still summer days when ozone smog is so far out of federal compliance that even a big-money bank exec might raise an eyebrow, but at night when the late summer sun catches the chemical air just right, it turns the downtown sky to fire. Each evening, from my loft window on the tenth floor of the Georgian Terrace Hotel, I am treated to the show along with a million or so commuters stuck on the Downtown Connector, ribbons of rolling reds and whites from my perspective, miles of them.
    It was raining the first time I looked through this window. It was December and Peachtree Street was dressed up for the holidays. Lights from the Fox Theatre danced off glistening streets as the concert crowd left cafés with frozen breath and long coats to gather under the pale yellow lights of the big red marquee. I love my Peachtree Street neighborhood, where restaurants leave the back doors open to let out the heat and the delicious scents greet me each day, where fried chicken livers and pecan pie appear on the same menu with lobster risotto and fig brandy soufflé, where street vendors and street people take theirchances among the polished shoes of the rich, and windshield washers wait on corners with half-empty spray bottles.
    But Atlanta can be a hard city in summer, when the days are long and the unblinking sun sends temperatures soaring. Tempers flare. Steam billows from overheated engines, and stepping onto the street feels like stepping in front of a heat blower. Atlanta broils in its own anger. And now, because of what Rauser had told me, I knew another killer was roaming the streets.
    I heard a sound in the hall outside my loft and thought about Dan. Even now, a smell, a sound, the turning of a lock, can launch me back into what it felt like to share a life with someone, a home, the prosaic burdens of the everyday, waiting to see his blue eyes in the evening, hear his voice in my ear. It’s not like that with us anymore. Not even close. It’s work. It’s barely civil. It’s utterly fractured.
    White Trash, the cat I had rescued off Peachtree Street two years ago, came from the bedroom stretching and yawning and rammed her head into my ankle. I call her White Trash because she’s white and because I found her having dinner in a pile of trash. I don’t know what she calls me. I stroked her a few times and turned back to Peachtree Street feeling pouty and unloved, and I hadn’t eaten in hours.
    My phone went off. Rauser’s ringtone. I didn’t want to talk to him or to anyone, but I’m not always good at saying what I need. “Hey,” I answered