The last words held a wealth of meaning. Luke met her eyes and was lost in the whirling gold sparks, like stars in a velvet-dark sky. He didn’t want her sympathy, but he could not make himself turn away as if her concern did not matter, as if she were only a complication and not an obsession.
But he did break away at last, as the last branch he had fed into the flames caught and smoldered.
“I’ve answered your question, Joey,” he said. It didn’t come with quite the evenness he would have preferred. With deliberate care, he relaxed every tense muscle and stretched until the bones cracked. “Now it’s your turn to answer some of mine.”
She started. Her finely molded nostrils flared, the supple lines of her body hidden under bulky and practical clothing froze into stillness. Composure came back to her slowly, and with it the familiar, defiant tilt of her chin. “What do you want to know?”
He considered for a long moment. It came to him how little he really knew of her and had never needed to know, even now, where she had come from, what she had been before, seemed almost unimportant. If there had been some hope of a future—but there wasn’t. In spite of that knowledge, the question that came to him now rose unbidden from the very compulsion he had tried so hard to deny.
“You said once,” he began with deliberate casualness, “that you were married. Richard, I believe his name was.” Watching as she reacted to his question, he felt his own anticipation like an unwanted hunger.
“Yes.” Joey’s voice was small. “I was married. I met him while I was still in college—he was a successful architect, a guest lecturer at the school. I was very young then.” Her breath caught, and she bit her lip. He could almost see the inner debate as it tightened the lines in the soft oval of her face, wondering if he had revealed so much. “At the time he seemed to give me things I thought I wanted. The security—the stability—I needed.
“For a while it worked well enough. Life was comfortable with Richard. Predictable. Safe. Passionless.
Nothing dramatic happened to end it. One day I came to realize—” Her eyes opened again. “That it wasn’t fair. Not to either one of us. It was a kind of trap.” Her choice of words made Luke focus on her so intently that she dropped her gaze before he could read her meaning.
“It isn’t important what happened. We agreed, eventually, that we had different needs. I’d come to realize then that there were things, things that I…” Breaking off, Joey stared into the fire, the glitter of unshed tears fractured the reflection of it into embers that burned at the tips of her dark lashes. “None of that matters anymore. We parted friends.” She lapsed into silence.
Luke almost stopped then, in respect to her distress. But the prick of the compulsion drove him to demand more of her. “And before Richard?”
Joey met his eyes, her lips curved up into something approaching a smile. “There were no others. I didn’t have time or space for them before Richard. Or after. I didn’t even have space for him.”
The rush of triumph that transfixed Luke then was not rational. “Jealousy” was only a word, too paltry to define what he had felt imagining Joey with other men. Ordinary men. But long practice kept the reaction away from his face where Joey could guess at its source.
He felt no need to ask more. There was relief in her, as well, when she realized she had satisfied him with with those few revelations. The tautness of her face relaxed, her lips resumed their usual calm curve. Luke looked away and listened to the night’s language, to the cries of night-hunting owls and the rustling of small animals hidden in the brush. But he was drawn back to her again and again. With every heartbeat he lost ground he had little desire to regain.
For the first time in many years he wished for more than the ability to read the language of the body, the nuances of movement and expression that had always sufficed with the others, and with the townsfolk who shunned him. In the silence, he gazed at Joey and wanted to understand the thoughts that passed behind her composed, delicate features, the motivations behind her sudden bursts of temper, and why she responded to him in ways that tore at his resolve, why even now the primitive needs of her body called to his in ways that her cool rationality denied. He wanted to know, desperately, why she was the one.