lopsided one Charly had just been wearing; it was the way Mirabella affected people. “Sometimes it’s kind of hard to tell. She can be pretty intense.”
Charly chuckled in agreement, and there was a moment’s silence that seemed almost companionable.
The hospital with its cool corridors and beeping monitors and high drama seemed a long way off. They were the only occupants of the fast-food restaurant’s outside tables, since it hadn’t seemed fair to leave poor Bubba tethered to the Cherokee in the heat while they dined in air-conditioned comfort. The breeze Troy had had such hopes for earlier hadn’t lived up to its promise, and the day had the lazy feel of a long late afternoon not quite ready to turn itself over to evening. The insect hum and heat shimmer combined with a stomach full of cholesterol and too little sleep the night before was making Troy feel drowsy and relaxed. He wondered if they were affecting Charly the same way.
He was thinking about asking her if she wanted to go back to the motel and change her clothes, and thinking about the various possibilities of where that might lead, when she suddenly coughed and said, “Well, I hope she is.”
He said, “Pardon?” having completely lost the thread of the conversation.
She had picked up a french fry and was studying it minutely. “Bella. I hope she’s happy. She sure deserves to be.” She sounded gruff, almost angry.
“Doesn’t everybody?” Troy said cautiously.
She hitched a shoulder and popped the french fry into her mouth. “So they say.”
“I sure can’t think why she wouldn’t be happy,” he said after a moment, leaning forward on his elbows to steal one of her fries. “Seems to me she’s got it all-beautiful little baby girl, a good man who happens to think she’s the most wonderful woman ever born…”
“Oh, please.” She made a sound that was more cynicism than laughter and looked away. “Like all it takes to make a woman happy is to keep her barefoot and pregnant? That is just so…Southern.”
“Well, now,” Troy drawled, “last time I looked, women had the vote down here, too. We got women doctors, lawyers…hell, we even got women politicians.”
“Oh, Lord, don’t get insulted.” She laughed and shook back her hair, and he could see it was the physical part of an effort she was making to banish the darkness of her thoughts. “I’m just havin’ trouble picturing Bella living in the South, is all.”
“Lots of people do,” said Troy, with a little shrug to show he wasn’t arguing with her, or trying to convince her of anything. Which he wasn’t. “More an’ more all the time.”
“Well, anyway,” she said lightly, “she sure does think your brother walks on water. You ask me, the man sounds almost too good to be true.”
Troy had to look down to dilute his smile. “Well, I’m afraid he’s the genuine article. Yeah, she got herself a good man there-definitely the pick of the litter.”
“The pick of the
“What? Aw, hell no.” He squirmed in the hot plastic seat, all of a sudden feeling something he’d never felt before: self-consciousness, the back of his mind clicking away like an adding machine, totaling up the pluses and minuses of his character and looking for the first time in his life as if it might come up with a deficit. Nothing like a woman, he thought ruefully, to test a man’s confidence.
“Naw,” he said, brazening it out, “Jimmy Joe’s a whole lot smarter’n I am. Sweeter, too.” He grinned at her, showing all his teeth. “But I’m cuter.”
She laughed again, but this time he couldn’t hold her eyes. She looked away, reaching abruptly for her drink.
He watched her lips close around the straw, watched her throat move with her swallow, thinking of all the things he could have said then, all the things he wanted to say…wondering what was in her mind, and if it was anything like what was in his. Because he was thinking again of making love with her, not the way he already had, but the ways he’d like to.
And it occurred to him that in a way, having sex with somebody made it even harder to get to know them. Kind of like two different radio signals trying to come in on the same frequency. Sometimes it was tough to make sense out of either one.
“So,” said Charly, taking a breath, “you don’t know what you want to do? Now that you’re out of the navy, I mean. I thought the service was supposed to train you for something.”
“Oh,” Troy said dryly, struggling to get his thoughts back under control, “they trained me for a lot of things. Most of which aren’t much use in civilian life. It’s not like I was a mechanic, or a chef, or a computer engineer or a pilot or something. SEALs…” He let it trail off.
“You never did anything else?”
“Oh yeah, sure-for the last few years I’ve been training other SEALs. And for a while I was Master-at-Arms.” She raised her eyebrows. “Law enforcement,” he explained, and waved it off with a gesture. “Look, it’s not that there’s nothing I can do. It’s more a matter of finding something I
“And…?” She was giving him her undivided attention, her eyes sharp as sherry wine.
“Don’t know that yet.” He shrugged and shifted around in his chair, he was finding it unnerving, having all that passion and intensity focused on him for a change. “The navy-being a SEAL-that’s a tough act to follow. I don’t know how to explain it, except that there’s an edge…kind of a high you get, being in dangerous situations. You can get used to it, you know? Makes normal life seem pretty tame by comparison. Flat.” He was quiet for a moment, turning his paper iced-tea cup around and around, watching it make wet rings on the plastic tabletop. “I just don’t want to wind up like these guys you see-you know the ones I’m talkin’ about-they hit the high point of their life back in high school, making the winning touchdown in the big game, and nothing ever gets quite that good again.”
“Like Kelly Grace,” Charly said softly. “High school was undoubtedly the high point of her life. And Bobby Hanratty and Richie…”
He remembered now. There’d been the other one, the slender, sweet-looking boy wearing the band uniform. Colin, that was his name.
A little chill of intuition shivered down his spine.
“Anyway,” he said harshly, “I don’t want that to be me.” He got up, gathering trash. “You want to go back to the motel and change, or anything? Or you want to go straight back to the hospital?”
Charly got up, too. “I think I should get back to the hospital,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”
“No problem.”
Their gazes intersected as she came around the table, held for a moment and then parted almost like old friends. Troy wondered if he was imagining it, or if there was something new between them…something warmer, maybe. A little less edgy.
When they pulled into the hospital parking lot the sun was setting behind a black pile of thunderheads. The breeze had sprung back up, too, warm and brassy with the smell of distant rain.
Charly took hold of the door handle and turned to him, her face pale and tense in the twilight. “You can just let me out here, if you want to. No need for you to wait around.”
Okay, maybe he had imagined that things had changed a little bit between them, that she was finally starting to consider him a friend instead of just a kind stranger. He was surprised by how much it pained him, having her keep shutting him out again and again. What kind of person did she think he was, for God’s sake, that he’d just drop her off on the hospital steps, when for all either of them knew the worst possible news might be waiting for her inside?
Then he remembered her eyes, and the hopeful, lost little girl he’d seen locked away inside them. For a moment his throat seized up on him. “Oh,” he said, forcing words through so they sounded scratchy as burlap, “I b’lieve I’ll come on in with you for a while, if you don’t mind. Just let me get my dog squared away.”
She nodded, and he noticed she didn’t seem inclined to argue with him anymore about facing whatever was
