Free The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb Page B

beginning at the breastbone, was spreading outward over his chest.
    “Think of it as revenge for you calling me up onstage that day. Besides, I’m taking you out tonight so I can do what I want.”
    “Can you now,” he said in a low voice.
    But instead of answering him, she merely kept chewing while studying his face for a long moment.
    “You have a sensual upper lip,” she said, “but a real pleasure-denying lower one. And you have, Mr. Billings, a pronounced filtrum.”
    The filtrum, or groove between the base of the nose and lips, was one of the classic tells of sexual desire—as she well knew. He stared at her while a wave of confused heat roiled through his head even as, outwardly, he gave no sign of his discomfiture in the least and continued to cut his meat with small composed sawing motions.
    “Are you flirting with me?” he asked.
    “I’m not sure,” she said, and laughed an open laugh, one of the most open laughs he’d ever heard from this tactically brilliant girl, “but if I decide to, I’ll let you know.”
    She had a beautiful head of newly cut and dyed short blond hair, which was parted on one side like a boy, and put into fresh relief the deep, symmetrical sensuality of her features. From these, in regular bursts, fusillades of saucy mischievous looks were flying in his direction.
    “Let’s return,” he said, clearing his throat lengthily, “to your previous question about how I got my start. I’m not sure if there was a single event, but when I think back on it, I can remember that my parents knew this couple who they would have over every once in a while for dinner. I might have been only a kid at the time, but I could still see plain as day that the wife hated the weakness of the husband, and that the husband was grossed out by the loudness of the wife, and that below the polite party chatter there was this sound track of dark, muffled sounds the two of them made at each other, which was the way they really felt. I could see it, and I could hear it too, those sounds, like dying animals make, beneath the polite conversation. The thing was, I thought everyone else did too. I thought everyone heard the secret sound track. I thought that everyone saw how people form a little mask to protect themselves, and a little story in which they’re the hero, and how the mask rides the story like a horse into the sunset of their own minds.”
    He realized that in his concentrated effort at recall, he had been addressing what face readers called the lateral catch, that is, that space right below her right eye. He raised his eyes to hers.
    “On the other hand,” he said, “no one is a devil if you listen to them for long enough.”
    Her finger was lazily circling the rim of her wineglass.
    “Then what?” she asked.
    “How do you mean?”
    “How did you get from there”—she stabbed a long polished fingernail onto the linen tablecloth and drew it toward her with the rising rasp of a zipper opening—“to here?”
    The science of touch is called haptics. He’d always been particularly sensitive to touch, even a touch that was entirely implied like the one he’d just witnessed of her finger on the tablecloth. He could feel something, an aroused signal moving through yards of sluggish abdominal flesh.
    “Practice,” he said with a wink, and before she could even respond, he added, abruptly, “Follow my elbow, please.”
    “What?”
    He relished her confusion as he reached up to deliberately scratch his nose.
    “My elbow,” he said. “Are you following where it’s pointing?
    “Yes.”
    “Do you see that woman?”
    “In the blue pantsuit, whose back is toward us?”
    “Yes. We passed directly in front of her while walking in and we even crossed glances with her, the two of us.”
    “I remember, yes.”
    “Read her, please.”
    She made a laughing, outraged sound of disbelief, but when she saw he was serious, she grew serious as well. She shut her eyes, spread her hands on the table,