“I hear that,” Alice agreed softly, laughing and vehement at once.
Her amusement was contagious. It touched him in spite of himself, invited him to chuckle with her, at himself, at the grand and petty wonders of the universe. It felt good, released him. He listened to Alice’s laughter trail into a comfortable sigh.
“For a man who doesn’t like himself much you’re pretty funny,” she said.
“For a woman who seems to think she’s nothing special,” he retorted, “you’re something else.” He peered around the corner of the window at her shape in the darkness and thought he could almost see the color rise along her throat and up into her cheeks. Her face would be warm, soft to touch, the bones of her jaw firm, her chin stubborn, her mouth...
He shut his eyes and tasted it again in his imagination.
Her mouth would never leave a man wanting.
“Don’t.” He felt rather than heard her say it, thickly, and with a shudder. “It’s the night, nothing else. It’s only the night.”
He opened his eyes and knew she was pale now, tense.
“What is?”
“Your imagination. Mine. Don’t imagine me, us. Don’t—” she stopped and he heard her swallow. “—feel. Let it go. I don’t
—
I
can’t
let imagination run away....”
“Imagination isn’t real, Alice.” It didn’t even occur to him to find it unusual that she somehow knew what he’d been thinking.
“Yes,” she whispered positively, “it is. Didn’t think so, either, before this morning, but now I know. Anything I can imagine might come real, and I can’t let you—”
“It’ll only be real if we do something about it, Alice. And that’s not in the plan.”
“We’re talking. We’ve already
done.
Oh, you don’t understand.” She slid off the picnic table and turned her back on him, fists tight at her sides. “How could you. Nobody explained it to you, either.”
“Explained what to me?” He didn’t know what else to say, but he wondered if statisticians might find confusion an effective weapon in the war on overpopulation and sexually transmitted diseases. Or at least a distracting one. “Tell me what I don’t understand.”
Alice faced the window. “I’m sorry, it probably sounds stupid, but do you see? You, Skip, my family—my daughters... I mean, they’ve been my life. That’s the way it is and I don’t mind, but now...” She laughed. ‘‘I’m not doing this very well, am I? But it’s... See, my father had his first heart attack the morning I turned fourteen. The doctors didn’t think he’d live long, even if he recovered, but he had a goal. He wanted to see all seven of his daughters get through school, maybe settled. He died two months before Grace graduated.”
She gestured passionately, inadequately at him. “Last week, I saw my daughters graduate, and it’s not enough. I’m not ready to die now. I want more. I’ve been living for someone else since my junior year in high school.
My
life is finally beginning. I want to stay alive and see what I can make of it on my own. Find out what happens next. You, you’re like a shock to the system. This morning, you were mortality knocking. Tonight, flirting with you is exciting and scary and kind of fun and
temporary.
I don’t want to risk what I haven’t done yet on a game. Do you see?”
Oddly enough he did. Not in words, but in some deeper part of himself where memory and experience counted more, he understood completely. “Yes.” He nodded. “You’ve let a lot of your life happen to you by accident and you don’t want to do that anymore.
You
want to be in charge of it now.
You
want to take control. You want to choose what happens next.”
“Yes.” She was positive. “That’s it.”
It was too easy, but he couldn’t quite resist trying to skewer her as she’d skewered him before. “So what happens next?” he asked quietly. “What do you choose?”
She was better equipped to handle the question than he’d thought. “If I figure it out before you leave, you’ll be the second to know.”
He heard the grin in her voice and he grinned back. “Gee, thanks. Just what I’ve always wanted to be, second.”
“Beats being third.”
“Or fourth.”
Alice moved toward the side of the house. “G’night, Gabriel. “
“Hey, listen. If you come with an operator’s manual, would you mind dropping a copy of it outside my door?”
No answer. Down along the side of the house, he heard a door slam, then the click of her bedroom door. His ears strained to hear her movements as she got ready for bed, for the creak of her bedsprings as she settled into the cozy spot where she would sleep.
“Good night, Alice,” he said softly and climbed back into his own bed, where he lay awake for a long time smiling.
*
She wasn’t ready for morning when it got there.
Sleep clung to her eyes, refusing to release her, instead pulling her just beneath its surface again and again to the place where dreams lay in wait. Just below consciousness, her hands clenched and released to the sting of night sweat and salt in her blistered palms. In the clinging shadows of repose where she couldn’t control what happened,
he
lay beside her, touched her skin, slid a hand over the soft cotton nightshirt covering her breasts, slipped his fingers between the open buttons....
Restlessly she struggled with the vision, the sensations, turning over and twisting herself in the sheets, knocking her pillow aside.
He
turned with her, refusing to dissolve; his mouth tasted where she moved, tormented and roused and claimed. She flung the covers aside to escape him, to get nearer—it was hard to tell which. His breath was warm and gentle; his hands knew all of her. He raised himself to look down at her. His eyes were shadowed at first, then light claimed them, showed them to her. One was aqua, cold, intense, impersonal and unreal. The other was brown, warm and revealing, fathomless and real.
He tipped his head one way, and she was frightened, empty, lost; then the other way, and she was safe, whole, home. It was like looking at two men in one face; at two faces on one man. Unnerving. She scrunched herself into a ball and bit down hard on a knuckle hoping pain would
wake her, bring escape.
The muted clang of aluminum pans, the smell of fresh coffee, warm yeast and cinnamon permeated the house. Disconcerted, Alice woke to sound and smell slowly, dragging her fingers across her eyes and down her cheeks, trying to remember what it was about yesterday, last night, the dreams from this morning, that she seemed to have forgotten. A confusing sense of unease, and paradoxically of accomplishment, lurked underneath her waking memory when she sat up and looked at her pulled-apart bed. She was not a fretful sleeper by nature
,
even when she dreamed.
She sat on the edge of the bed, yawning, clutching blessed fog around her for security.
Rising finally, she dressed for her sisters and the bridal boutique fitters, presentably conservative but comfortable, then stumbled through the house to the kitchen. Gabriel gave her an uncertain smile and dried a mixing bowl, then put it away in the cupboard above the refrigerator. Alice stared at him, recognizing the brown-eyed face of the man of her dreams. She colored slightly
. N
ow she remembered.
Talking to him.
L
istening to him.
F
eeling for him.
Bringing him home. Knowing him.
Self-consciously she straightened her peach sweatshirt, watching him take her in and assess her by daylight, non-plussed by those truth-telling brown, brown eyes in the impassive high-boned face. The mental picture of those eyes was the one she’d willingly gone to bed with, slept with, but the startling aqua contacts fit her daylight image of him better. Aqua went with the brazen arrogance she imagined undercover agents had to be born with; brown eyes did not.
Aqua eyes belonged in a book:
You wear a red carnation in your lapel, I’ll be the one with the turquoise eyes...
Brown eyes belonged in front of a crackling fire with a bottle of wine and zip-together sleeping bags.
She bit down on the inside of her lip and ducked away from Gabriel’s gaze, half-embarrassed, half-amused by the thought.
Recklessly, her
gaze
slipped his way again, surprising him in what must have been a similar unguarded thought. She’d said things to him, she remembered, implied things, revealing things about herself; about the physical wants of her body, the deliberate inhibition of her thoughts. He’d been more reticent, less verbal, yet equally informative about himself, equally expressive, equally lustful.
They studied one another awkwardly for a moment, caught between who they’d been last night, who they’d told themselves to be by day, wondering if the base they’d begun to establish between themselves could bear the weight of light. The air vibrated with embarrassment and desire, words they wanted to snatch back from the night and bury where no one would find them. Gabriel turned away first and lifted a “Mom” mug from one of the hooks beneath the dish cupboards, poured her a cup of coffee and handed it to her with verbal amenities.
“Good morning,” he said. “Sleep well? Have a seat. Cinnamon rolls will be out of the oven in three minutes. It’s an old family recipe, passed down for generations and baked only for special occasions. I hope you like raisins?”
“Not really. You catch crooks and bake, too?” Lifted from reverie, Alice stared around the normally less-spotless kitchen, feeling disadvantaged in her own home. Only the impolite guest rose and snooped through unfamiliar terrain to make breakfast before the host had a chance to get her bearings. But then, she reminded herself, he wasn’t really a guest, was he? No, he was her—
“Your mother called.”
—lover. Alice choked, and scalding coffee went down the wrong pipes with the thought and Gabriel’s statement. A
bout of uncontrolled coughing brought the coffee misting back up again to spray the kitchen floor and dribble down the front of her pale peach sweatshirt with the picture of the pale porcelain clown that, until this moment, had looked
silly but
fairly nice with her pale peach rose-shaped coral earrings that the girls had given her for her birthday. Gabriel gave her one hard
thwack
in the middle of her back, grabbed a towel and began mopping her up
.
“You okay?”
“My—” Glaring at him, Alice snatched the towel and cleared her throat to find her voice. Who was it had said no good deed went unpunished? “My mother called?” she whispered hoarsely, mortified at being caught like a teenager with a boy in the living room. “You answered the phone?”
Gabriel forced back a grin. Alice was thirty-five years old and still guilty as hell about sins she’d barely thought about committing. “You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.” Didn’t trust himself to wake her would have been closer to the truth. “She asked if I came with references, welcomed me to the family and said there’s a problem with—” he picked a red sticky note off one of the cupboards and looked at it “—Aunt Kate and Uncle Delbert. Their hotel reservations were canceled and they need a place to—”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“—stay until Sunday.”
“She’s sending them to chaperone me.”
“She also said she regrets inconveniencing us, but that they’ll need your bed and a board under the mattress because of their bad backs.” His mouth continued its losing battle with a grin. “If it helps, I think I understand you better now that I’ve, er, met your mother.”