Chapter 17
Dirk
I am never impetuous. But I do it. I lean forwards and capture the fullness of Lucy’s lower lip, warm and sweet with her wine, and draw it between my own, as sparks and fireworks shoot through my body.
She breaks away and retrieves her glass. I want more.
The shadow of her touch on my scalp lingers, so intimate in this elegant room, so welcome. Nobody touches me like this. The broken kiss floats between us through too much distance. I want more.
Decades fall away, and memories return. Of the much younger Lucy, so much more glamorous than the nurses and doctors who’d been tending to my wound, though equally serious, equally professional in the too-bright room, brandishing her brushes and potions.
“I asked you out,” I say. “Before that interview, way back then. You never gave me an answer.”
Lucy busies herself at her dining table.
“You were amazing,” she says. “Such a star. Everyone wanted you to recover. You were quite the hero, Dirk O’Connell.
Do you know, I’m actually blushing. I had a crush on you.
So did half the State. And I would have gone out with you, but we had a code of conduct at the network.
And Bart, my ex-husband, had just cornered me for himself.
Codes of conduct never applied to him. Still don’t. Besides, you disappeared.”
“Soccer was never going to last forever. Too many injuries. So I went back to the books and got my medical degree.”
“Do you miss being a doctor? Will you start up another clinic?”
I shake my head. She’s waiting, but I won’t go there – all the sleepless nights, the never-ending need, the Christmases I had to leave my family’s table to tend to the injured; the senseless pain of people who repeated the same mistakes over and over.
I could never work hard enough to cure all the world’s ills.
I gave it my best, but every death felt like my failure.
“It’s a wonder Jamison and Dee want me anywhere nearby, that we have any kind of relationship at all. I knew what it was like to grow up with an absent father – his truck was his home – and I still went ahead and worked throughout most of Jamison and Dee’s childhoods.”
Lucy moves closer to me on the couch. She bridges the distance between us. Her hand hovers like a butterfly, pale against my forearm, but I warn her away with my eyes, and she leans away again.
“I’m sorry if my questions bother you,” she says.
“There’s no law against asking questions. Some say ‘the unexamined life’ is not worth living.”
She nods. “Socrates,” she says. “Friend of yours?” Her eyes dance, challenging me, laughing at me.
I want to grab her and pull her close. I want her fingers back in my hair, her hands all over me. But she’s a neighbor. So much could go wrong, and if it does, we’d still have to see each other every day.
So instead, I stand and hold out my hand for a formal shake. Even after all that champagne, I can trust my own self-discipline.
The dusk darkens to magenta and exits, and I must do the same.
“Excellent sunset you put on for me,” I say, attempting banter. It’s not very good.
“I expect you’d have seen it too,” she counters. “Or are you on the sunrise side?”
“Sunrise,” I say.
Her eyes dance over my face, her smile a question I won’t ask. I’m not offering anyone a sunrise. Not yet.
I place my empty glass on her windowsill. I stayed for just one – one bottle, I see – and it is high time I left. I’ve already leaned far too close to this flame. I won’t mention it to Jill.
“Take some blinis, Dirk,” she insists, and presses another full tray into my hands. “Can’t let them spoil.”
It’s only when I’m back in my own place that I realize what she’s done. I’ll have to return her silver tray. This Lucy is exactly the kind of woman Jill warned me about, a predator. But maybe I want to be caught.
Back inside my own apartment, it is too quiet, too neat; my furniture too perfect. Imagine Lucy remembering me from way back then, from that television interview, when my soccer career collapsed. I shake my head and touch my scar, flat now, and practically invisible.
Lucy already knows too much about me. What I regret is not asking her more about herself.