Fletchina Archer - Psychic Detective

Ronda turned over on her stomach and lifted her hips so she could rotate them around the bunched-up fingers of her left hand thrust between her labia into her cunt as she manipulated her clitoris with her right hand.

A montage of images of Angela flooded her mind, each overlaying the other as Ronda fucked her fingers and stroked her clit.

Angela’s head between Ronda’s legs, going down on her. Ronda opening her legs to receive Ronda’s hand on her mons. A faceless man fucking Angela from behind as Angela played with her own clit. Angela spanking Ronda’s ass. Ronda licking Angela’s anus and darting her tongue through the wrinkled tissue and into her asshole. Ronda playing with herself as Angela looked on in approval.

Not wishing to prolong the build-up, Ronda thrust down on her fingers as she began to come and the images of Angela became more vivid, more intense, and then faded into blackness as she heard herself sob with a deep intake of breath and then cry out as her orgasm overtook her whole body and she fell to her left side to sleep.

She dreamed that Jeff came into the bedroom to find her naked on the bed, hot and musty and slippery with come as she was now. Overcome with desire, he took off his clothes, throwing them on the floor in his haste, and fucked her hard and fast. She dreamed of lifting her hips to meet his every thrust and taking his hard cock deep into her until his passion burst through and he filled her with his hot come.

When she woke it was five-thirty and Jeff wanted her ready by six. She walked briskly into the bathroom and this time walked into the shower for a quick rinse, then sat in front of the mirror to put on sparse makeup. In the bedroom, she sat on the bed and pulled on one stocking imagining that her hands were Jeff’s as she smoothed it up her thigh. Then the other. She stood and pulled the dress over her head and stepped into her black six-inch fuck-me pumps.

She walked-maybe strode is a better word for her hips-forward gait-into the closet to scrutinize the effect. No lines. Before she started getting waxed, this dress even showed her pubic hair if she didn’t wear panties. The contours of her nipples showed through the drape of the top. She turned to look at her butt. She leaned in front of the mirror and looked to see just how far she would have to lean for someone to see down to her nipples. It was as she remembered, about one-third of the way would offer a view as the scalloped neck of the dress gaped open to any eyes that cared to see. Suggestive but unobtrusive unless she made it so. It was up to her. That was the way she wanted it.

Six o’clock.

She sat in the armchair beside the bed to read the book of women’s fantasies she had taken out from the library. Incest. She felt her stomach turn. Yuck. Rape. Even worse. Multiple partners. She began to read with interest. Fantasies. Nothing dangerous here. Just what other women think about when they masturbate. The mental pictures they make. Hers were pretty tame, she concluded as she read more.

When she looked at the clock again she had finished the book, at least all of the parts she was interested in, and there was no sign of Jeff. She knew his cell phone would be off. If he wanted her to know where he was, he’d let her know. Otherwise it was useless to try to find out.

She turned on the television and began to click through the channels. Blithering news commentators. Frantic newscasters. Calm weather forecasters. Inarticulate urban kids standing around yakking at each other. Cops looking for bad guys. Bad guys robbing a bank.

Finally the phone rang.

“They called it off. I’ll be a couple of hours late.”

“Late?” she heard herself almost shouting. “You’re already a couple of hours late. What the fuck do you mean late?”

“I’m sorry, honey, I was in a meeting, sweetie. I couldn’t get out of it.”

“You couldn’t pick up a fucking phone and tell me they’d canceled your precious dinner?”

“I’ll be home around ten.”

“Don’t bother.”

Still in her high heels, she marched into the kitchen. She felt the smooth fabric of the dress against her breasts, pubis, and butt as she reached up to the wine rack to take down a bottle of very expensive Pinot Noir from the rack.

She was aware that the fabric of her dress didn’t have its usual erotic effect. She slammed open a drawer and fumbled among the garlic presses, cheese planes, peelers, and ginger graters for a corkscrew. Not exactly a corkscrew. She hated them. They screwed violently into the cork and pulled it out against its will. This thing worked with the cork, penetrated it and puffed air into the bottle to pop the cork out of its own accord.

She filled a fragile long-stemmed glass with the dark wine and took the bottle with her into the living room. She set both glass and bottle down on the coffee table and put a k.d. lang CD into the player, turned the volume so it was just right and sat in her favorite leather armchair. She kicked off her pumps and curled up in the embracing chair as she began to sip the wine.

“What exactly do you think is going on?”

“I think the son of a bitch is cheating on me. That’s why I called you.”

“And you say that Michelle Anderson recommended my services?”

“She said you had helped her, yes. And she said you were good.”

“Did she tell you that I was expensive?”

“That doesn’t matter.” Mrs. Windborne sat bolt upright in the easy chair in Angela’s office, her purse set primly on the coffee table in front of her. There was a couch, the easy chair Mrs. Windborne occupied, and Angela’s club chair. There were abstract paintings on the walls but nothing figurative to distract clients from what they were here to say. She wanted her clients relaxed enough to open up, but alert enough to be able to hear her responses and focused on their business. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to achieve that delicate balance of relaxed, focused and alert.

A bookshelf occupied one end of the office and a desk the other. Angela never felt comfortable facing a client across a desk. She feared it might make visitors overly tense or guarded-remind them of some previous experience with a teacher or official. Such as a judge. During a divorce.

“Have you talked to him?”

“Talked? Have I talked to him? That’s all I’ve done. I’ve asked him point blank. He denies it. I’ve confronted him with his lies. He just tells more stories. Each one is more outrageous than the last until I finally give up, just glad that he’s back with me for a while.”

“Do you have any-”

“Evidence? What kind of evidence would prove anything?”

“Phone bills. Is he calling the same phone number on his cell phone all the time after hours?”

“He has his cell phone bill sent to his office.”

“I suppose that’s suspicious?”

“He says it’s a company phone because he uses it for company business.”

“Credit card charges? Canceled checks? E-mail messages?”

“Why are you grilling me? I’m not the one you’re supposed to investigate. I thought you were some kind of psychic or something. Can’t you just tell?”

The handsome woman in her late forties or early fifties fell to the back of her chair sobbing.

“It’s mostly old-time detective work. We have to find evidence if you want to be sure.” It was time for gentle words.

“Gumshoes following people around with cameras?” She started to laugh through her sobs at the image.

“To put it bluntly, yes. We have operatives we use when the time comes. When we have a good reason to believe someone is cheating, we do just that. We send someone with a camera.”

“Can you set up a sting?” She was bolt upright again.

“We can do that too.”

“How would that work?”

“One of our operatives-”

“Seduces the son of a bitch?”

“That’s essentially it, yes. Or the girl. We work for men, too, you know.”

“That’s like working for the other side.”

Angela saw Mrs. Windborne’s eyes perusing the books in their case and followed her thoughts. Psychoanalysis, Civilization and its Discontents, The Analysis of Dreams. Classic Freud. Jung, Adler, Erickson, Becker. Books on modern psychology, schools of therapy, and forensics. Doyle? Sherlock Holmes?

“You’d be surprised. Look, let’s go back to the beginning. Let me explain our process. What I can provide with my skills is an understanding of motives, but not actions.”

“Why not?”

“I can read what people want to do, what they plan to do, and what they have recently done, but beyond that, I never know whether something is what a person wants to do, wants to avoid, or has done. It’s all the same in the mind’s eye, and that’s what I can see.”

“Isn’t it enough to know that the asshole wants to cheat on me?”

“Is it? Then we don’t need to do anything else. You seem pretty convinced already. Why do you need me?”

“I want to know for sure.”

“Exactly.”

“But can’t there be different motives behind the same actions? I mean, what if someone does something without meaning to?”

“You mean like a one-night stand?”

“Um-hum,” Mrs. Windborne said, a smile playing across her lips as she wilted into her chair.

Angela knew that this was a time for silence. She saw the image of the man who was not Mr. Windborne flooding the woman’s mind as she reviewed the “mistake” that had fueled her imagination ever since. Angela saw Mrs. Windborne, overwhelmed with his praise and attention, eagerly undressing herself as the mystery man undressed and let his erection loose. She saw Mrs. Windborne kneel before the man, take his cock into her mouth…

“I mean, it could be something you didn’t intend, couldn’t it? Suppose you have too much to drink and it just happens. That wouldn’t be your fault, would it? Unless you planned it or did it again?”