how it’s done. Kind of hard to rewire yourself after that.”
“Maybe you could talk to Sam,” Zoл suggested, laying her hand on Lucy’s tense arm. “Sometimes if you bring something out into the open—”
“No. I promised myself I wouldn’t try to change him or fix him. Sam’s responsible for his own problems. And I’m responsible for mine.” Lucy wasn’t aware of the tears that had slid down her cheeks until Justine handed her a napkin. Sniffling, sighing, she blew her nose and told them about having been awarded the art center grant.
“You’re going to take it, right?” Justine asked.
“Yes. I’m leaving a few days after Alice’s wedding.”
“When are you going to tell Sam?”
“Not until the last minute. I want to make the most of the time we have left. And when I tell him, he’ll say I should go, and that he’ll miss me … but inside he’ll be incredibly relieved. Because he can feel it too, this …
“Why?” Zoл asked softly.
“Because Sam and I both know that he’ll hurt me. He’ll never be able to say ‘I love you’ and surrender his heart to someone.” She blew her nose again. “That last step is a doozy. It leads to a place he has no intention of going.”
“I’m sorry, Lucy,” Justine muttered. “I never would have encouraged you to get together with Sam if I’d known it would make you unhappy. I thought you needed some fun.”
“It has been fun,” Lucy said earnestly, wiping her eyes.
“I can see that,” Justine said, and Lucy gave a watery giggle.
As Lucy worked in her studio later that afternoon, she was interrupted by a knock at the door. Setting aside her glass-cutting tools, she reached up to tighten her ponytail as she went to see the visitor.
Sam stood there with a mixed bouquet of flowers, including orange roses, yellow lilies, pink asters, and gerbera daisies.
Lucy’s gaze went from his inscrutable face to the vivid bouquet. “Guilt flowers?” she asked, trying to bite back a smile.
“Also guilt candy.” Sam gave her a rectangular satin box, weighted with what had to be at least two pounds of premium chocolate. “Along with a sincere apology.” Encouraged by her expression, he continued. “It wasn’t your fault that I slept with you. And after thinking about it, I’ve realized I wasn’t actually harmed by the experience. I’m actually glad it happened, because it was the only way I could ever have found out how beautiful you are in the morning.”
Lucy laughed, a tide of pink rising over her face. “You give great apologies, Sam.”
“Can I take you out to dinner?”
“I would like that. But…”
“But?”
“I’ve been doing some thinking. And I was wondering if we could just have the friendship without the ‘benefits.’ At least for a few days.”
“Of course,” Sam said, his gaze searching. Quietly he added, “Can I ask why?”
Lucy went to set the flowers and chocolate on a table. “I just have a few things I’m trying to work out. I need a little personal space. If that changes your mind about dinner, I understand.”
For some reason that seemed to annoy him. “No, it does not change my mind about dinner. I”—he paused, casting about for the right words—“want you for more than just sex.”
Lucy smiled as she returned to him, a warm and unforced smile that seemed to bemuse him. “Thank you.”
They stood facing each other, not quite touching. Lucy suspected they were both grappling with the puzzling contradiction that something was wrong between them, and something was equally right.
Sam stared down at her intently, his gaze causing the hairs on the back of her neck to lift. His features were austere, still, except for the twitch of a muscle in his cheek. The silence became acute, and Lucy fidgeted as she tried to think of a way to break it.
“I want to hold you,” Sam said, his voice low.
Flustered, aware of her light blush deepening to crimson, Lucy gave a nervous catch of laughter. But Sam wasn’t smiling.
They had shared the most intimate sexual acts possible, had seen each other in every possible stage of dress and undress … but at this moment, the simple matter of a casual embrace was positively unnerving. She stepped forward. His arms went around her slowly, as if any sudden move might frighten her. They drew together in cautious increments, curves molding against hard places, limbs fitting just so, her head finding its natural resting spot on his shoulder.
Relaxing fully, Lucy felt every breath, thought, heartbeat adjust to his, a current opening between them. If it was possible for love to be expressed purely between bodies, not in a sexual union but in something equally true and whole, then it was this. Here. Now.
She lost track of time, standing there with him. In fact, it seemed as if they had slipped outside of time altogether, lost in each other, in this mysterious quintessence they had become together. But eventually Sam pulled away and said something about picking her up at dinnertime. Lucy nodded blindly, gripping the door frame to keep herself upright. Sam left without looking back, walking along the path with the slightly overdone caution of a man who wasn’t quite certain on his feet.
* * *
When Lucy called Alan Spellman to tell him that she would accept the art center grant, she asked him to delay the announcement until the end of August. By that time, Alice and Kevin would be married, and Lucy would have finished all of her current projects.
She set aside a portion of each day to work on the stained-glass window for the house at Rainshadow Vineyard. It was a complicated and ambitious piece, demanding all her technical skills. Lucy was possessed by the urgency to get every detail right. All her feelings for Sam seemed to pour into the glass as she cut and arranged the pieces in a visual poem. The colors were all natural shades of earth, tree, sky, and moon, glass fused and layered to give it a three-dimensional quality.
After the glass had been shaped, Lucy stretched the lead came using a vise and pliers. She assembled the window carefully, inserting glass pieces into lead channels, then cutting and fitting the lead around them. Once all the interior leading was completed, she would use the U-shaped perimeter came to finish all the outside edges. Next would come the soldering, and the application of cement for waterproofing.
As the window took shape on her worktable, Lucy was aware of a peculiar warmth in the glass, a glow that had nothing to do with heat transferred from soldered metal. One evening as Lucy was closing up shop, she happened to glance at the unfinished window, lying flat on the worktable. The glass glowed with its own incandescence.
Her relationship with Sam had remained platonic since the night he’d slept with her at the condo. Platonic, but not asexual. Sam had done his utmost to seduce her, with sweltering kisses and passionate interludes that made them both feverish with unsatisfied desire. But Lucy was afraid of the very real possibility that if she were to have sex with him now, she would blurt out how much she loved him. The words were there, in her mind, on her lips, most of the time, desperate to be said. Only her sense of self-preservation gave her the strength to refuse Sam. And although he had received her refusals with good grace at first, he was obviously finding it more difficult to stop now.
“When?” Sam had asked after their last session, his breath hot against her mouth, a dangerous flare of heat in his eyes.
“I don’t know,” Lucy had said weakly, shivering as his hands stroked her back and hips. “Not until I can be sure of myself.”
