“My?” he said with a frown. Then he remembered. “Oh this,” he said, pointing at the fire escape floor’s pattern of elongated diamonds still imprinted on the side of his cheek. He laughed and thought fast, took grains of truth to concoct an untruth. “Scored a big sale yesterday. He wanted to celebrate with me. Those city dudes, they know how to drink, that’s all I can say. And I’m out of practice these days, thanks to you.”

“You know I’m supposed to sign you off today?”

“Yeah. You’ll be pleased to see the back of me, I’m sure.”

Spencer said it with a laugh. His laugh always seemed genuine, but she knew he was a salesman, as her father had been. He’d been able to go into a towering rage, reducing her mother to tears of fear, and then laugh through a work call like he was the most Garfunkel guy in Dayton. And Spencer was foreign to boot with that English thing going on, which was well-known to cloud an American woman’s judgment. He sounded a little like that actor who did all those romantic comedy movies. She loved those movies.

She looked up as he suddenly rose, walked round her desk, and stood behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders and gently squeezed as he nuzzled her neck. She thought she could smell alcohol behind mint.

“Just because it’s my last appointment doesn’t mean we can’t see each other.”

She pulled away from him. “Spencer, we still have to do assessment forms.”

“Yeah, we have to do them at the end of every session. Let’s just do what we normally do. I’ll sign them before I leave and, later, you can just tick whichever boxes you think should be ticked. I trust you, Lonnie.” He pulled her gently back to him, massaged her shoulders and lightly stroked her neck. “That’s twenty minutes that could be better spent doing . . . other things.”

Lonnie hated her body sometimes. She was a woman with an appetite. And her appetite for sex seemed higher now at thirty-six than it was when she was eighteen. She felt there was nothing wrong with having a high sex drive. What she hated was that it could so easily override what her brain was telling her about this arrangement. She actually liked this guy. But he’d been in her office a half dozen times, had been fucking her from the second appointment, and had fobbed off all her hints about getting together outside of the CPS building on Curtis Street. She was a little tired of being single, of being the only person on Tinder who was looking for love, and a little tired of having to change the date of her birthday on Facebook so her linked dating profiles still read “30.”