Obsessed Read Online Free

booming.”
    â€œAnd tonight?”
    â€œBusy. How about tomorrow night? I’ll be hungry by then.”
    â€œI’m hungry now and we don’t even have to have dinner,” I said.
    â€œHold that thought. How about dinner at my place? Eight o’clock?”
    â€œYou’re going to cook?”
    â€œDid I say that? I was thinking Chinese take-out. Or pizza.”
    I didn’t care what we had to eat. “I’ll bring the beer,” I said. I’d been strictly a wine drinker before Annie educated me to the finer points of beer. I made a mental note to pick up some flowers, too.
    I hung up. I’d never given Annie flowers. I smiled, remembering the daisies she brought me after I mangled my ankle tackling a man who turned out to be a murderer. It was much too long after the daisies that we finally made love. That had been months ago, but I could still feel my groin tightening and a grin tugging at the edges of my mouth at the memory.
    After Kate was killed all my passions seemed to dry up. Food had no taste. I gave up Bordeaux for bourbon. I buried myself in work. It had taken nearly two years for me to start feeling again.
    I was still getting used to what I was feeling now. Lust. I savored it.

3
    W HEN I got up to my office, there was a piece of notepaper stuck to the door. “Appointment with Mr. B at 11,” it said. It was signed “E.” The note had printed at the top: FREUDIAN SLIPS . Cute.
    A little past eleven, I entered the observation room and took a seat. Through one-way glass I could see a room the same size as the small one I was in. The room was anonymous but pleasant with its table lamps and eye candy impressionist landscape print. A vase of artificial irises and daffodils stood on the coffee table, and among the flowers was a microphone which connected to speakers on my side of the wall. We weren’t trying to hide the microphone, just make it inconspicuous. Mr. Black had given his permission to be observed back when he’d started treatment.
    I sat in the dark with the lights off and shades drawn. Emily was in the therapy room on the other side of the one-way glass. She sat in an armchair, legs crossed, light streaming in through the window behind her.
    Facing her was Mr. Black. The middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a face and stomach that had gone to paunch was scribbling in a notebook he had balanced across his lap.
    â€œYou know, you won’t be able to do that if you go ahead with the operation,” she said.
    He lifted the pen and looked at his arm. “I’ll learn to write with the other hand.”
    â€œWhat are you writing?”
    â€œJust a note to remind myself of a bunch of things I need to do—find my passport, get a Spanish phrase book.” He closed the notebook. “I’m waiting to hear when they can take me. Sometimes they get a cancellation and you’ve got to get down there right away.” I suspected they had quite a few last-minute cancellations—patients who fantasized about having a limb amputated and then, when the moment of truth came, backed out. “This is going to save my life.”
    â€œIt’s a very big step.”
    â€œDon’t you think I know that? It’s not like it’s a sudden decision,” he said, setting the notebook down alongside his chair. “It’s like I said, this is about becoming whole, not becoming disabled.” He looked at his arm as if it were a piece of meat past its expiration date. “I feel like I’ve got this…this alien object attached to me.”
    â€œAnd what if something happens and the operation falls through?”
    He gave a sly smile. “Don’t worry. I won’t lie down on a railroad track.”
    It was a brutal thought, but I remembered reading about a man who’d been obsessed with amputating his legs. Unable to find a doctor to do the job, he’d lain on a railroad track and let