“I—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Don’t say anything.”
I nodded, sat quietly, my hand still under hers on the table.
“You are very special to me,” she said. “More so than I would like. I’ve made it for years, since my divorce, without any special entanglement. There have been men in my life, but nothing serious. It’s been kind of a rule with me. It keeps me from doing something stupid like I did when I married that jerk who tried to beat on me. You could be the exception to that rule. It scares me.”
She sat quietly then, her eyes fixed on my face. “J.D.,” I said, “I’ve only been in love once in my life. To the woman I married. I messed that one up about as much as your husband did your marriage. She left me and then she died. You’ve stirred feelings in me that I thought were gone for good. But I’m not sure that I’m man enough to live up to your expectations, to be the man you deserve.”
“You remember in the Bahamas I said I couldn’t just accept friskiness as a reason for sex?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I was wrong.”
My heart did that little jig that J.D. seems to be able to trigger. I smiled. “Where does that leave us then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to go home with me?”
“Yes. But I won’t. Not tonight anyway.”
I was actually a little relieved. I felt that we had achieved some sort of delicate balance in our relationship, an equilibrium that was more than friendship, but not quite that of lovers. Maybe it was best to keep it that way for a while.
I raised my mug of beer and in my best Bogart imitation said, “Here’s looking at you kid.”
She laughed, that wonderful laugh that made my heart want to jump out of my chest and run around the patio in pure joy. “Man,” she said, “you’ve got to work on that some.”
I smiled. Yes, we had a number of things to work on and we had the long months in the sun stretching before us to figure it all out. There was a hint of romance floating on the air coming off the bay, and there was no better place than our small island to let it develop at its own pace. J.D. and I would be fine, and perhaps soon, we would be better than fine.
Collateral Damage Page 33
