We picked up Langdon’s key cards and the front desk had his attaché case sent up. Langdon crooked his arm at the elbow and I slipped in my own much smaller, thinner arm.

We walked out onto West Fifty-Third and then hit Fifth Avenue, lit up with red and white Christmas lights. There were elaborate displays in every shop window—trains running through foam mountains draped with white felt, robot Santas sitting in rocking chairs, forever checking their endless lists, a quill to check off the naughty and the nice.

“I like the city this time of year,” Langdon said casually.

“You’ve been here before?” As it came spilling out of my mouth, I realized what a stupid question it was. Why did I ask that? I don’t get stupid around men, that’s not me.

“Yeah,” Langdon said, seeming to pay it no attention, “I come and go about once a year, actually. Always on business, though, never really have a chance just to enjoy myself. You must love being able to take it all in.”

Take it all in, I silently repeated. Was that a sexual reference, or am I just… obsessing on that?

I heard the violin before we finally spotted the street musician, a stout little man bundled up, only his fingertips poking out from his cut gloves. The melody was another of those jaunty Christmas songs I never liked, ones that repeated the same musical phrases over and over again, which seemed to be all of them. Whether the sleigh bells were jing-jing-jingling or the twelve days of Christmas were being counted down yet again, the sing-song melodies droned endlessly on, working their way into my brain.

But then the violinist transitioned seamlessly into a slower melody, more sweeping and every bit as memorable. The soft opening notes of Silent Night, instantly recognizable, had sweep and grandeur, and as the melody rose and fell, the notes that followed were ripe and round and filled with emotion and sentiment.

I couldn’t help pulling myself a little closer to Langdon, even resting my head on his shoulder as the familiar tune played on, the violin rising up to high-pitched perfection and striking the notes longer, more vibrato, that last phrase gently cascading to the snow-caked ground.

The crowd around him applauded, Langdon and I enthusiastically among them. I reached into my purse to pull out a ten and drop it in his violin case. Langdon looked at me with an impressed smile. “Alister must be paying you pretty well if you can throw yer money around like that.”

I could think of only one thing to say: the truth.

“Not really.”

Langdon chuckled and pulled out his wallet, dropping a hundred dollar bill into the violin case. “Rippah!”

We walked on, towards a pair of prostitutes walking down the sidewalk in the other direction. They wore fishnets and miniskirts and halter tops even out in the snow, and their brassy wigs were almost falling over their clown-painted faces. They looked Langdon over as we walked past.

“Hey, fella,” one said, “you lookin’ fer a date?”

“Already got one, ladies. Thanks.”

I turned to Langdon, offended without even thinking about it. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not one of them, not anything like that! I’m here to drive you around, that’s it. Are we clear?”

“Crystal,” Langdon said.

Unfortunately, the two whores overheard. The second one turned back to address Langdon. “You heard the little prude, you’re wide open.”

“Yeah,” her friend called back, “you ain’t datin’, you babysittin’!” The girls cackled with a mean, snickering laughter.

I couldn’t resist stepping up to them, chin out, shoulders back. “Maybe you’d like to babysit my foot up your ass!”

“Bring it, blondie!”

Langdon stepped between us, easing me back. “Alright, you ladies have a pleasant evening.”

“Come back once you put Peewee to bed!” They laughed as Langdon led me down the boulevard.

“Crikey,” Langdon said, “you really are something special, that’s London to a brick!” He caught my glare and corrected himself, “Someone special.”

I glanced back at the whores, who’d disappeared among the crowd. “I… I’m sorry about that. I don’t usually lose my temper, but… something about prostitutes really sets me off.”

“I understand that.”

“I mean, we all have to get by, and we all… compromise ourselves in one way or another. Men buy women gifts and meals and women loan them their bodies. None of us are strictly innocent. But to just offer nothing but sex for nothing but money, and to make it so cheap and ugly like that… I mean, we come down on men for the way they exploit women, but women like that are just exploitation in high heels.”

“They’re being exploited too,” Langdon said, “by their pimps, their landlords, their drug dealers.”

“Cry me a river. Women don’t want to be treated like whores, so we really shouldn’t become them.” After a few more steps in silence, I reflected, “I guess I just feel that beauty shouldn’t be exploited—either by those who desire it or by those who have it.”

Langdon gave it some thought. “Amen to that, sistah.”

We walked a bit further up and a mime stepped out from between two buildings. Wearing the classic white face and black beret, he started in with the glass wall routine. Langdon just stared hard at the mime, their faces only inches apart. The mime froze, then dropped the act and scurried back into the shadows.

Langdon turned to me. “For you it’s hookers. For me it’s mimes. Something about them really sets me off.”

“I understand that.”

We walked on, the winter chill inspiring me to cuddle even closer to Langdon. At least that was the excuse I was going with. We walked by an art gallery, appropriately entitled Abstractions.

Langdon and I stopped, glancing at the shapeless masses in the window that seemed to be passing for sculpture. He asked, “Shall we?”

“Just to get out of the cold,” I said.

We stepped inside the white-painted gallery. The counter, the statue bases, everything was white, including the patrons.

The artwork was all post-modern and abstract; geometric shapes in primary colors, misshaped blobs that looked like the contents of a lava lamp frozen in time. Langdon looked around, his face twitching with confusion and disgust as he glanced at the little cards with the titles and prices.

We stopped at one shiny ceramic shape and Langdon read the card. “The Dawn of Man.” He looked the statue over—it had a heavy round base sloping up to a narrower spherical shape at the top—and rendered his verdict. “Looks more like the shite of man.” I broke out in a little chuckle I couldn’t stifle. “All this stuff stinks, roight? Aht gallery? This place oughta be called a faht gallery!”

“Excuse me.” Langdon and I turned to see a tall, lean man in a black tuxedo. He had a thick unkempt beard and his long hair was tied up in a man-bun. “I’m the creator of this piece.”

Langdon took another look at the card. “You’re… Hellacious P.?”

“That’s right, and I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

Langdon chuckled as he looked around. “Yer right about that, mate! I haven’t got a clue what any of this crap is about. Five grand for this glob of goo? Not a Buckley’s chance!”

“It’s art,” the artist said, his voice quivering with righteous indignation as other patrons began to gather around them. “It doesn’t need me to explain it to you. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

“I hope not,” Langdon said, once again glancing around the gallery. “Where are the ducks and the mountains? Where are the naked ladies? You think of yourselves as artists? This fake cubism crap was a trick Picasso did just for fun! Wound up changing the art world on a whim! It wasn’t meant to be art, it was meant to be satire! And you’re just the kind of people he was laughing at! And he was right!”

A very lovely young woman stepped up through the crowd, long chestnut hair falling over her creamy shoulders. “Excuse me, but I think it’s time you…” But she looked at Langdon and her words trailed off. “Are… are you Langford Cane?”

“Langdon,” he corrected her with a smile. He extended his hand. “One and the same.”

“Oh, well…” Her attitude had already changed, and she let him take her hand with demure sexuality. “Melanie Lloyd, Mr. Cane. If there’s anything I can do—”

But the artist said to her, “What’re you kissing his ass for? He’s one of them!”

“Now now, Hal, Mr. Cane and his… his guest are always welcome here.”

“Then I’m leaving.” Hellacious P. grabbed his sculpture and tried to shove his way through the crowd, but he slipped and the sculpture fell out of his arms to crash to the white polished floor. Shards of shattered ceramic flew across the floor, their red acrylic paint standing out like blood against the white tile.

In the echo of the crash, the room went silent. Hellacious P. turned to Langdon, fury in his eyes. “You made me do that.”

Langdon just put up his hands, palms flat, to calm the man. But it was the pretty gallery owner who turned to the artist.

“That wasn’t his fault, Hal.”

The other artists and patrons shook their heads and backed away. Hal was left standing alone with his beard and his man-bun and little else. He looked around in an increasing panic, then turned and ran out of the gallery.

Melanie said to Langdon, “I’m so sorry about that, Mr. Cane. You know how artists can be.”

“Sure I do,” Langdon said with a friendly shrug. Then he looked puzzled and glanced out the door. “But what’s his excuse?”

The room chuckled and we enjoyed some complimentary wine and conversation before hitting the streets again. We made it two blocks down before a flashing neon sign reading Narcissus twenty feet over our heads grabbed Langdon’s attention.

“What’s this?”

“Dance club, I think.”

“Let’s find out for sure.”

The place was dark but shot with bolts of colored lights, some blinking and some sweeping across the room like searchlights. The music was loud, almost ear-bleeding, and the pounding beat of a synthetic bass drum drove the stirring and swirling bodies on the dance floor.

Langdon led me into the gyrating crowd. He began dancing, and he did so with amazing fluidity. As his lean waist swung to the beat, his broad chest drew my eyes to his long and muscled arms, casual at his sides, hands large and ready and happily idle, at least for the time being.

Langdon’s long legs were splayed just enough to give him a strong footing, and my eyes were unable to resist following the length of his powerful thighs up to his crotch, bulging with his manhood. The more he swung those hips, the harder I found it to resist.

And his weren’t the only ones. All around us men and women danced with each other, with themselves. A cloud of sensuality hung over the dance floor; perfume and cologne, hair spray and stale cigarettes. Young, desirable women sloped their shoulders, arching them up in cooing sexuality, asses out, hips cocked, legs apart as they waggled their hips, bucking them forward in a wanton invitation which nobody could miss, much less resist.

My own body was quick to become entranced by the driving rhythm, the overflowing sexuality all around us. The music felt like it was wriggling its way into my body, my tissues, the beat synching up to the rhythm of my own heart. The synthetic snare snapped out the steady alternative to create the driving dance code we all instantly tuned in to. Keyboard pads filled the empty pockets, rattling percussive strikes punctuating a lone female voice droning in a voice half-sung, half-spoken: “This is now, this is now, this… is… now…”

My hips swung and my arms reached up to frame my head with my forearms over the top of my blonde hair. My breasts were proudly pushed forward. My body felt like the flame of some invisible candle, hot and getting hotter with every twitch, every flinch.

Langdon’s eyes were fixed on me. All his attention was directed at my body, my mind, my soul. I gyrated closer to him, and one of his legs was suddenly between both of mine. I ground my hips as my body seemed to be pulled magnetically toward his. The attraction was undeniable and irresistible. My hips ground down on his strong thigh, my dress hitched up, my crotch getting damp as his thigh proxied for some gargantuan cock, and I felt like I was making love to it right there in public, in front of everybody. But one look around told me that everyone there was engaged in their own public sex. It was a bacchanal with dozens of people who were only a few scraps of clothing, only a social stigma or two away from engaging in a full-on Roman orgy that would have made Caligula blush.

Is this really me, dancing and slutting it up like this, so animalistic and primal? This isn’t me.

But it was me, more of myself than I’d realized even existed. There was more to me than I’d known, and Langdon was the key to bringing it all out. Once it came out, who I’d be or what I’d be capable of remained to be seen, and even thinking about it sent shivers down my spine.

And other places.