“I see it.”

“I knew it wouldn’t take long. To make a bruise. I bruise real easily. Maybe that’s why I don’t do pain very well.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a crybaby about pain so I stay away from it.” She touched a spot where the scoop neck of the T-shirt met skin. “Dylan feels nothing, I mean, he’s like stone. When I tied him up, he kept saying tighter, he wanted to feel it.”

“Pain?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Not his neck at first, just his legs and arms. But even that hurts when you go tight enough, right? But he kept telling me tighter, tighter. Finally I screamed at him, I’m doing it as tight as I can.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “He just laid there. Then he smiled and said maybe you should do my neck the same way.”

“Dylan has a death wish?”

“Dylan’s a freak...it was freaky up there, dark, cold, this emptiness in the air. You could hear things crawling around.” She hugged herself. “I said this is too weird, maybe it wasn’t a good idea.”

“What did Dylan say?”

“He just laid there with his head to the side.” She closed her eyes and demonstrated. Let her mouth grow slack and showed a half inch of pointed, pink tongue. “Pretending to be dead, you know? I said, ‘Cut it out, that’s gross,’ but he refused to talk or move and finally it got to me. I rolled over to him and touched his head and he just flopped, you know?”

“Method acting,” I said.

Puzzled stare.

“It’s when you live a role completely, Michaela.”

Her eyes were somewhere else. “Whatever...”

“How soon into the exercise did you tie him up?”

“Second night, it was all the second night. He was okay before that, then he started punking me. I was letting him because I was scared. The whole thing...I was so, so stupid.”

She folded wings of golden hair forward, masking her face. I thought of a show spaniel in the ring. Handlers manipulating the ears over the nose to offer the judge a choice view of the skull.

“Dylan scared you.”

“He didn’t move for a long time,” she said.

“Were you worried you’d tied him too tight?”

She released the hair but kept her gaze low. “Honestly, I can’t tell you, even now what his motivation was. Maybe he really was unconscious, maybe he was punking me a hundred percent. He’s...it was really his idea, Doctor. I promise.”

“Dylan thought the whole thing up?”

“Everything. Like getting rope and where to go.”

“How’d he pick Latigo Canyon?”

“He said he hiked there, he likes to hike by himself, it helps him get in character.” The tongue tip glided across her lower lip, left behind a snail-trail of moisture.