“My mother died a long time ago. When I was still a boy. This”—he gestured with a short, restrained motion at the corner table—”is what she left.” His absolute stillness except for the one brief movement forced Joey to shift in compensation. The smell of leather-bound books and woodsmoke mingled in her nostrils.
“I’m sorry.” They were inadequate words, but Joey felt them keenly. She felt them with all the pain of her own loss, when she herself had been hardly more than a girl. In the brief time she’d known him, Luke had never mentioned family. He had never mentioned his parents, and the subject had never seemed important. Now it had a powerful significance. It made him, in this small way, like her. And she knew now that the momentary softening in his expression had been very real.
The painful lump that rose in her throat was as much sympathy for his loss as memory of her own. It frightened her because it made her vulnerable when she could least afford to be, and yet it gave her a small advantage. Even Luke was not without the ties of emotion, and his past.
With a motion as abrupt as it was noiseless, Luke pushed away from the table and strode back to the fireside. Joey continued her circuit of the room as she reined in her emotions, coming at last to the place where she had begun earlier that evening. Her eyes scanned the titles a second time without really seeing them.
“I lost my parents, too,” she murmured, stroking the embossed cover of a volume of Donne’s poetry. It was only a reminder to herself, to conquer feelings by trapping them with words. She had done that many times in the past when she felt close to being overwhelmed.
“Yes. We have that in common.” Even in the quiet, Joey had not expected him to hear her whisper. She looked up where he stood by the fire, staring once again into the blazing light.
She found herself pulled by some irrational compulsion across the safe distance that separated them, stopping at the sofa, her fingers twisting into the blanket that lay tossed over the back. There was a shower of sparks in the hearth as Luke tossed a branch among the flames.
“Do you miss them?” she asked suddenly.
At first she thought Luke did not intend to answer, so long was the interval of silence. She clenched a fistful of blanket.
“I’ve been alone a long time,” he said at last. “It was a long time ago.” There was such an evenness to his tone that Joey knew it was not natural, any more than hers had been. But when she risked a glance at him, he was still staring, unmoved and unmoving, at the ever-shifting and indifferent face of the fire.
Joey found herself walking again, around the barrier of the sofa. She hesitated there, struggling with compulsions she did not understand. Her instinct was to comfort and be comforted—but her mind told her to be safe, to take no further risks. With a sigh she dropped onto the sofa and half-pulled the blanket around her, though it was almost too warm.
Her next words, when she broke the intervening silence, seemed to come from some other person. “My parents died in the crash when I was sixteen. Twelve years ago ” The lump in her throat seemed intent on impeding any further conversation. With a deliberate act of will she forced it back. “I’ve been waiting—all this time—to find them. I never got to say good-bye.”
She was horrified by the sudden break in her voice. The rush of words that wanted to emerge, that cried out to be said to someone who might understand, were stopped before they could betray her into tears. With rigid self-control, Joey composed her face into blankness and tried to pretend she had never spoken at all.
Like a flickering shadow, Luke was suddenly before her. He hovered there, blocking off the heat and light of the fire, balancing as if he had acted on an impulse he did not know how to carry through. Joey blinked and stared at his hands, wondering bleakly if he would try to touch her, and what she would feel if he did. Part of her wanted it desperately, to have even a man she hardly knew, a man as much opponent as friend or potential lover, make her feel less alone. But it would come out of weakness, not on her terms. She would lose the last threads of control.