Still Waters

Four

Maddy saw that the smoky look was back in Zack's eyes and wondered if she'd gone too far. She couldn't imagine what had come over her, to use Bosley to flirt that way. Good heavens, a sensuous dragon! Who'd have thought she had it in her?

She didn't have it in her-not really. It was just the darn puppets. She was so accustomed to interacting through them in highly charged emotional situations that they sometimes took on personalities all their own. She glared accusingly at Bosley, but the dragon only returned her look of reproach with one of sleepy-eyed innocence. With a small noise of helpless dismay, Maddy plunked the puppet back onto its stand.

Now she felt naked and defenseless. Zack's presence in the huge, sunlit room made it seem too crowded, the air precious. Realizing that she was twisting her hands together in a childish manifestation of nervousness, she waved one in the general direction of the sofa and said, 'Um… won't you sit down? Ill go fix some coffee-unless you'd prefer iced tea.' She wondered for a moment if he needed something stronger after the shock of seeing Theresa, and was trying to remember whether she'd saved the bottle of rum Jody had brought to make eggnog last New Year's Day.

'Do you suppose,' Zack asked with a disarming flash of his famous smile, 'that I could have a glass of milk?'

A peculiar warmth flooded Maddy's chest. She found herself smiling back without her usual reserve. 'Oh. You really do drink milk!'

His smile slipped. 'Yeah… a habit that stayed with me.' His hand was resting flat against his belly, just above the waistband of his jeans. Through the thin knit of his white polo shirt Maddy could see the sculptured muscles. She had a sudden vivid recollection of that chest, smooth and tan and beaded with water droplets, and felt an unfamiliar squeezing sensation in her own midsection.

Belatedly realizing that she'd been staring at both the hand and the body beneath it for quite some time in tongue-tied silence, Maddy felt the heat from her chest surge upward into her cheeks. She didn't know what she mumbled as she turned and made a hasty retreat to the kitchen.

Coward, she thought as she groped in a cupboard to find a glass. Idiot, she moaned inwardly as she opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk. What was the matter with her? He was only a man, and a very nice one, at that. Okay, so he was Zack London, but he wasn't Aquaman, or any other superhero. He was a perfectly ordinary, human man.

Except that there wasn't any way her brain was ever going to convince the rest of her that this man was 'ordinary.' Even now, as she watched him through her kitchen's pass-through window, she could feel the rhythms of her body change in subtle but frightening ways. Not only her pulse and respiration, but all her senses and life forces had somehow intensified. Even from this distance she could see the way the hair grew on the back of his neck, longish, unruly, undisciplined. And for the space of one heartbeat, like a dream or a memory in which a whole range of events and emotions are telescoped into a single instant of awareness, she knew what it would feel like to weave her fingers through the crisp silk of that hair and touch the hard-muscled column of his neck. She could feel his skin, like warm satin beneath her fingertips; she could smell it, soap and sunshine and a faint tang of chlorine; she could taste it…

Amanda, for heaven's sake!

The sensual images collapsed under an avalanche of guilt. With a degree of care and concentration completely unwarranted by so simple a task, she poured a glass of milk and put the carton back in the refrigerator. Carrying the glass, and her body, like fragile crystal, she walked back into the cottage's main room.

Zack hadn't accepted Maddy's invitation to sit down. He was prowling the perimeters of the room, examining the puppets that filled and overflowed every shelf and tabletop.

'This is quite a hobby you have here,' he said, turning as she moved toward him. Though his eyes were in shadow, making it impossible to see the expression in them, something about the stillness of his body as he watched her made her terribly self-conscious.

'Oh, well,' she murmured with a little shrug as she handed him the glass of milk, 'it's actually a bit more than a hobby.'

His eyebrows lifted in surprise as he took the glass with an effortless grace Maddy envied. 'Really? Are you a professional entertainer?'

'Professional, yes. Entertainer… not exactly.' Now her hands were empty again. To fill them, she picked up a little-girl puppet with round pink cheeks and a head full of bobbing, corkscrew curls. In a prominent place above one bright blue eye, there was a large Band-Aid. 'This is Didi,' Maddy explained as she settled the puppet, using her free hand to poke an errant curl into place. 'She's one of the puppets I use most often in my work.'

'Why does she have a Band-Aid?' Zack asked, smiling at Maddy as he touched it with a finger.

She gazed steadily at him and didn't return the smile. 'That's the first thing the children always ask too,' she said softly. 'It's amazing what an icebreaker it can be.'

'Icebreaker?'

'Yes. I use the puppets in my work with children like Theresa. Even very frightened and confused children will tell a puppet things they would never tell a strange adult.'

Zack stared at her for a moment in tense silence. Then he muttered, 'God,' under his breath and turned away from her to set his glass of milk, untasted, on the coffee table. Keeping his back to her and spacing his words with precision, he said, 'What I don't understand is how you can deal with this kind of thing all the time. I guess you must just get… hardened, huh?'

'No,' Maddy answered carefully. 'Not hardened. You never get hardened. But insulated… maybe.'

He turned back around. 'You learn not to care, is that it?'

Wincing a little, but realizing that the anger in his voice wasn't really directed at her, Maddy spoke instead to the pain in his eyes. 'Of course you care. But not… in a personal way.' She fussed for a moment with the puppet, while she tried to think of a way to make him understand. 'It's like a doctor,' she said finally, touching the Band-Aid on the puppet's fuzzy brow. 'Doctors care about their patients, but if they allowed themselves to become emotionally attached to them, they wouldn't be able to help them. They have to maintain a certain amount of distance- professional objectivity-in order to be effective. Do you understand? That's why doctors usually don't treat members of their own families.'

Zack didn't answer immediately. Instead he picked up a puppet-a dog with sad eyes and long, floppy ears-and fitted it over his hand and arm. He cocked the puppet's head and opened its mouth in an experimental way. Then, to Maddy's surprise and delight, he reached out and touched Didi's cheek with its shiny black nose. 'I'm sorry,' he murmured as the dog gazed soulfully at Didi. 'I had no right whatsoever to judge you like that.'

Zack's dog puppet gave Maddy's Didi puppet a gentle nudge under the chin, but his eyes were looking across the two fuzzy heads and directly into Maddy's eyes. She opened her mouth, then closed it again in confusion. The sensation in her stomach was something like a stampede of butterflies. She couldn't think, let alone talk!

In a kind of panic she tore her gaze from those smoky eyes and gave Didi's curly yellow head a shake.

'Oh, that's okay, I understand,' the puppet said in a sappy, little-girl voice. Manipulating the rod that operated Didi's right arm, Maddy made the puppet pat the dog's head. Then, in another one of those unexpected and dangerous impulses, Didi planted a quick puppet-kiss squarely on the dog's nose.

The dog gave a startled 'Wuf!' and actually seemed to look taken aback. Maddy jerked her gaze back to Zack's face, once again afraid she'd gone too far. There was a peculiar little half-smile on his lips.

'I understand too,' he said enigmatically, and, taking both his puppet and Maddy's, laid them carefully back on the shelf. Before she had any idea what he had in mind, he turned back to her, placed his hands on her shoulders, leaned across the space between them, and kissed her, oh, so gently, on the lips. And then again, softly, on the tip of her nose.

'I like it much better,' he said firmly, 'without go-betweens.'

He released her, but she could still feel the weight of his strong hands on her shoulders, still feel the imprint of his mouth on hers. He moved away to finally, belatedly, take his seat on the couch. As he reached to pick up his milk glass, Corry appeared from nowhere. The cat bumped his head once against Zack's elbow, then arranged himself like a feather boa along and over one lean thigh.

For a moment Maddy and the cat just blinked at each other. 'Yes… well, um…' Maddy cleared her throat and attempted an intelligent comment. Corry looked faintly disgusted. Maddy tried again. 'I-' She gave up and sat down