Page 54 of The Trap by Catherine
It had to be a stranger, or it wouldn’t beitat all.
For a while, I had myself convinced that I just needed to get this thing out of my system, that it was merely a curiosity that, once sated, would disappear. I thought maybe I would hire a prostitute—Sorry, sex worker.Sex worker. One who was OK with things being a bit rough, who’d let you take it to the very edge before she made you stop. And then I thought about those parties and clubs and whatnot, the places where people who are into that sort of thing tend to go, but to be honest—and, yeah, thisisembarrassing—I hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about finding them and I didn’t want to risk asking the internet for help. I even considered traveling, flying far away to a country where monetizing foreigners’ dark desires was practically encouraged by the tourist board, but ultimately decided it would be too risky.
Because even though I was telling myself that what I wanted was thebeforebit, the bit that could—hopefully—masquerade as just a certain brand of sex, I worried, deep down, that in the heat of the moment, I might not be able to draw the line there. That thought stopped me doing anything about it for a long, long time.
And then came Niamh’s thirtieth birthday.
The worst night of my life and, also, the best one.
The start ofthislife.
Niamh is Amy’s sister. She was having a party in her house which, thanks to her architect husband—who is a bit of a dickhead, if I’m honest, but we don’t have to see them that much—is a collection of windows overlooking the sea in some no-name place on the Wexford coast.Amy had gone down the night before to help with the preparations and now I was driving there, having taken the afternoon off work.
It was mid-January and so dark by five o’clock. On all our previous visits, Amy had been behind the wheel and it had been daytime. I only made it a little ways past Enniscorthy before I somehow got myself lost.
After wandering aimlessly through a network of winding country roads, I pulled in and called my wife, who did her best to give me directions which I scribbled down on the only thing I had to hand: the masthead of a three-day-old copy of theIrish Independent. She was annoyed with me because I was already late, and I had our present for her sister—some designer bag Niamh had had her eye on and a big, beautiful bouquet of pinks and greens—and the birthday cake. I’d been entrusted to pick them up from various locations near our home in Dublin and bring them with me to Wexford. They were all on the back seat.
I tried to follow Amy’s instructions—I thought I had—but at least fifteen, twenty minutes went by and I was still on what felt like the same network of winding backroads, but now so deep in the countryside, I didn’t even have mobile phone service to call for help a second time. Eventually I found myself on a road with high hedgerows on either side, no lights whatsoever, and no other cars—
But thenher, in my headlights.
A young woman.
Red hair.
Dressed professionally in boots and a long coat.
She was an odd sight; it seemed like there was nowhere nearby she could’ve come from or anywhere close she could be headed to. She was walking toward me on the left-hand side of the road, with a handbag slung over her shoulder and the blue light from the phone she was holding illuminating her face.
When she looked up, I slowed down.
Genuinely, I was stopping to ask for directions. I know we’ve only just met, you and I, but I promise you I was. I swear.
And Idid.
I pulled in, embedding the car in the hedgerow she was maybe ten or fifteen feet from at that point. If she wanted to avoid me now, she would have to walk around the car on its driver’s side, out into the middle of the road. I put down the passenger window, leaned over so I could see her face—I think it was probably a little dim for her to really be able to see mine—and said, “I’m sorry—do you live around here, by any chance? I’m a bit lost.”
She asked where I was supposed to be.
I told her the truth: at my sister-in-law’s birthday party on the coast.I pointed toward the back seat. I saw her looking in there, clocking the cake box, the bag, the flowers.
“My wife gave me some instructions,” I said, picking up the paper I’d scribbled them on. I read them out to her. She made a noise likemmm, and then said, “IthinkI know where that is. Let me just double-check...”
As she started tapping at her phone’s screen, I got out of the car.
What were my intentions? I really don’t know.
Honestly, I don’t.
You see, when I do this, it’s not really me. Not in a cop-out way, a not-guilty-by-temporary-insanity way, or aSorry, sir, it was my dark passengerway. (Dexter Morgan. Amy loves that show, it surely won’t surprise you to learn. It’s like, on some unconscious level, shedoesknow.) It’s more like I switch gears or modes. Or that I’m kind of drunk. You know the way you do things when you’re drunk that you’d never do when you’re sober, but you’re still absolutely you? It’s just a more... let’s say,openversion of you. Unfiltered.
The societal shackles are, if not off, then certainly a little looser.
Whenheshows up, everything turns more primal. It’s the part of me—the core of me, I’d say—that holds much more ancient desires. That guy remembers what it was like to need to hunt and kill every day just to stay alive. He’s much more focused on wants than perhaps he should be. And he doesn’t really consider consequences; he just acts.
All I do is let him take the wheel.
That night, though, I had no idea that I was about to do that. And I swear I’m telling the truth when I say I don’t know at which point I knew any different. But the moment must have been one of the few between my getting out of the car and my smashing her head into the side of it.
