The Awakening of Dr. Brown

man, but Joanna? Joanna never had. Hell, no wonder she had doubts!

Laughter rippled through her. This might turn out to be more fun than I expected, Phoenix thought, shivering with a new delight. All the excitement of the first time, and none of the pain…

Her laughter had a curious effect on Ethan. It wafted through the car like a cool fresh breeze, stirring, diluting and finally dissipating the sultry heat, the smell and taste and tension of sex. Oh, the desire was still there, raging hot and heavy in his belly, but it came now with an edge of disappointment, an awareness of a moment forever lost to him. The laughter was rich and full of confidence-a delightful and contagious sound. But there was nothing vulnerable about it. And as he watched the lights and shadows cast by passing cars chase each other across her naked back, he realized that he’d liked her vulnerability, liked it very much. More than that. It had touched him deeply, and he missed it. At the same time, as someone raised by strong, bossy and independent women, Ethan wondered what that said about his character, and felt vaguely ashamed.

“You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to,” he said softly. His hand hovered near her shoulder, tingling with the pressure building in its muscles, nerves and tendons to touch. “I can go in and order take-out for both of us.” Fascinated, he watched her loop the bottom third of her braid into a knot.

She turned her head to look at him. The thick rope of her hair caressed her cheek, hiding her smile while her eyes sparkled at him like a maiden flirting over the edge of a fan. “But,” she purred in a voice rich with double meanings, “you don’t know what I like.”

Juices pooled at the back of his throat. “That’s true.”

“I’ll go in with you, and we can order take-out for both of us. You said your place is near here?”

He motioned with his head. “Just up the hill.”

“Sounds good to me.” She reached for the door handle while her braid slithered over her shoulder and dropped like a weighted mantle down her back.

Shaking his head to clear it of the cobwebs induced by her nearness-and remembering just in time to remove the keys from the ignition-Ethan opened his door and got out. She came around the car to join him, her eyes silvery in the artificial light, shining with excitement, and came against him so naturally he didn’t have time to be surprised. Her hip brushed his; her arm slid around his waist. His arm dropped across her shoulders as if it had been doing so all his life.

“Hey, Leroy.”

“Hey, Joanna.”

Laughter came like breath to them, blown back by a breeze of their own making as they crossed the parking lot, matching long, exuberant strides. Heads turned and eyes followed them, accompanied by smiles of envy, or perhaps simply vicarious enjoyment.

“Protective coloring,” Joanna said in a whisper that quivered with laughter, leaning close to his ear. “A handsome young couple out on the town…”

“That’s us,” Ethan murmured as he held the China Palace’s laquered red-and-gold door for her.

“Everybody looks, nobody sees…”

“Sounds like a song title.”

She threw him a sharp, bright look but didn’t reply.

Then for a while they were busy poring over the menu and arguing about each other’s choices like a couple of longstanding. Joanna insisted on the Szechuan items labeled on the menu with little warning tongues of flame; Ethan replied loftily that he wasn’t into pain with his food. Joanna scoffed at Ethan’s preference for the sweet-’n’- sour and honeyed entrees, dismissing them as “kid stuff.” Ethan had never tried dim sum; Joanna promised him he’d love it, but he wasn’t convinced.

In the end they ordered way more food than the two of them could possibly eat, and while it was being prepared, they walked around the shopping center looking in store windows. Most of the smaller shops were closed at that hour on a week night, but a grocery store and pharmacy down at the far end of the shopping center was doing a booming business, and a shop selling frozen yogurt and ice cream cones was crowded and noisy with teenagers. They paused outside the ice-cream shop and looked at each other with raised eyebrows: Shall we? What do you think? Then, smiled, shook their heads and moved on.

People were all around them, coming and going between the parking lot and the stores, paying them no attention, intent on their own business-all sorts of people, all ages and genders, races and descriptions, many in family groups, carrying small children, pushing babies in strollers. Confident in her “disguise,” Joanna moved among them as if they didn’t exist, and somehow Ethan felt himself included in the enchantment, wrapped up with her in her magic cloak of invisibility. A dangerous notion, he knew, and there would be hell to pay when the Service found out about this, but for tonight he was having a hard time caring.

“What?” Joanna said, giving his arm a little squeeze, and he realized only then that he’d stopped walking.

He said nothing for a second or two, then looked down at her. “Nothing, really. I was just thinking, it’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed myself this much.”

But if that’s true, Phoenix thought, then why isn’t he smiling? Why is there such sadness in his eyes?

Aloud, she said with a teasing laugh, “Is that because you’re out with me? Or because you’ve escaped without your bodyguards?”

His smile was off-center. “Both. Don’t you see, it’s the combination of the two that’s important.”

“Ah. Of course.”

They were standing in the shadowed doorway of a closed-up shop, arms linked, shoulders touching. It should have been an easy thing, Phoenix thought, to stretch up just a little bit and kiss him. But for some reason it seemed an impossibility. His eyes still held that sadness as he watched the flow of people to and from the parking lot. For the moment he’d gone somewhere far away from her, and the distance between them was too wide to bridge.

Jealous, she fought to bring him back. “It’s not so terrible, you know-being famous. I manage to actually enjoy life most of the time.”

He gave her a quick smile, the kind an indulgent parent might give an adorable but demanding child. “Yes, but it’s different for you. You chose that life. I didn’t.”

They were walking slowly now, back the way they’d come, no longer pretending to be Leroy and Joanna. No longer laughing. No longer touching.

After a while Phoenix said softly, “What do you miss, Doc? About your old life-before you-”

“Became First Son?” He raked a hand through his hair-a gesture that seemed to embarrass him, because he then jammed both hands between his arms and sides and drew a sharp breath. “Oh, man. So many things. Little things. Everyday things. You know?”

But she shook her head; she couldn’t remember anything different.

It was a while before he spoke again, and then it was in the same slow, self-deprecating way he’d told her about braiding the horse’s mane. “My first year at UCLA, I was pretty lost. Living in the dorm, homesick like you wouldn’t believe. I used to tool around campus on my bicycle, go down to Westwood, walk around the Village and mingle with the tourists. Second year was better. I had friends, I was learning my way around L.A. Even got brave enough to drive the freeways, which opened up all kinds of possibilities. On breaks we used to drive up to the mountains to go skiing, or we’d go to the beach, or maybe the desert. Third year was even better. We’d go to these little hole-in-the-wall clubs to listen to bands nobody’d ever heard of, or for the heck of it, maybe drive down to Venice Beach and wander among the weirdos. Los Angeles was like this great zoo of humanity, and it was all mine, to study or just…enjoy. And then…”

“Then,” Phoenix said with a little ripple of sympathetic laughter, “Papa Brown went to the White House.” But what she could see of his answering smile had no amusement in it.

“It started that summer, actually, right before the national convention. Before I even knew what was happening, these large, totally humorless men had taken charge of my life. I was taken to Dallas, where the convention was being held, to be with my dad and Dixie-I wasn’t asked, you understand, just more or less collected, like a stray piece of luggage. Later I found out it was because my sister, Lauren, had been kidnapped by some sort of militia organization trying to blackmail my dad into pulling out of the race, but at the time I was resentful as hell.”

“I can understand that,” Phoenix murmured.

He glanced at her as if he doubted it. “Anyway, the next couple of years were pretty grim. There’d been a lot of threats-I guess there always are, but it was worse because of Dad’s stand on gun control. So the Service was