White lies

Her fingers glided over his arm, giving him what comfort she could. She didn’t waste her breath mouthing platitudes because she sensed they would only make him furious. As it was, he had already used up his small store of energy with the questions he had asked her, and he lay there in silence for several minutes, his chest rising and falling too quickly. Finally the rhythm of his breathing slowed, and he muttered, "I’m tired."

"You’ve pushed yourself too far. It’s only been three weeks, you know."

"Jay."

"What?"

"Stay with me."

"I will. You know I will."

"It’s… strange. I can’t even picture your face in my mind, but part of me knows you. Maybe biblical knowledge goes deeper than mere memory."

His harsh voice gave rough edges to the words, but Jay felt as if an electrical charge had hit her body, making her skin tingle. Her mind filled with images, but not those of memory; her imagination manufactured new ones–of this man with his harder soul and ruined voice, bending over her, taking her in his arms, moving between her legs in a more complete possession than she had ever known before. Her own breath shortened as her breasts grew tight and achy, and her insides turned liquid. Another tingle jolted her, making her feel as if she were on the verge of physical ecstasy, and merely from his words, his voice. The violence of her response shocked her, scared her, and she jerked away from his bed before she could control the motion.

"Jay?" He was concerned, even a little alarmed, as he felt her move away from him.

"Go to sleep," she managed to say, her voice almost under control. "You need the rest. I’ll be here when you wake up."

He lifted his bandaged hand. "How about holding my hand?"

"I can’t do that. It would hurt you."

"It would blend in with all the other pain," he said groggily. He was losing strength rapidly. "Just touch me until I go to sleep, all right?"

Jay felt his request go straight through her heart. That he should ask anything of her still staggered her, but his need to be touched was almost more than she could bear. She stepped back to the bed, folding her hand over his arm. At the first touch she felt him begin to relax, and within two minutes he was asleep.

She stepped outside, feeling the need to escape, though she wasn’t certain exactly what she was escaping from. It was Steve, and yet it was something else, something inside her that was growing more and more powerful. It scared her; she didn’t want it, yet she was helpless to stop it. She had never responded to him like that before, not even in the first wild, heady days of their marriage. It’s just the situation, she told herself, trying to find comfort in the thought. It was just her tendency to throw herself wholly into something, concentrating on it too intensely, that made her feel like this. But comfort eluded her and despair welled in her heart, because analyzing her emotions didn’t change them. God help her, she was falling in love with him again, with even less reason than she’d had the first time. For most of the past three weeks he’d been little more than a mummy, incapable of movement or speech, yet she had felt drawn to him, tied to him; and loving him now was much more dangerous than it had been before. He was a different, stronger, harder man. Even when he’d been unconscious, she had felt his fierce inner power, and her need to know what had happened to him to cause that change was so strong it almost hurt.

A nurse, the one who had first noticed Steve’s unconscious reaction to Jay’s presence, stopped beside her. "How is he? He refused his pain medication this morning."

"He’s asleep now. He tires very easily."

The nurse nodded, her bright blue eyes meeting Jay’s darker ones. "He has the most incredible constitution I’ve ever seen. He’s still in a great deal of pain, but he just seems to ignore it. Normally it would be at least another week before we began tapering off the pain medication." Admiration filled her voice. "Did the coffee upset his stomach?"

Jay had to laugh. "No. He was rather smug about it."

"He was certainly determined to get that coffee. Maybe we can start him on a soft diet tomorrow, so he can begin regaining his strength."

"Do you know when he’ll be transferred out of intensive care?"

"I really don’t know. Major Lunning will have to make that decision." The nurse smiled as she took her leave, returning to the central station.

Jay walked to the visitors’ lounge to buy a soft drink, and she took advantage of the room’s emptiness to give herself some much-needed privacy. She was filled with a vague uneasiness, and she couldn’t pinpoint the reason. Or reasons, she thought. Part of it was Steve, of course, and her own unruly emotional response to him. She didn’t want to love him again, but she didn’t know how to fight it, only that she had to. She could not love him again. It was too risky. She knew that, fiercely told herself over and over that she wouldn’t allow it to happen, even as she acknowledged that it might already be too late.

The other part of her uneasiness was also tied to Steve, but she wasn’t certain why. That aggravating sense of having missed something kept nagging at her, something that she should have seen but hadn’t. Perhaps Steve sensed it too, judging by all the questions he’d asked; he didn’t quite trust Frank, though she supposed that was to be expected, given Steve’s situation. But Jay knew that she would trust Frank with her life, and with Steve’s. So why did she keep feeling that she should know more than she did? Was Steve in danger because of what he had witnessed? Had Steve actually been involved in the deal? She would have had to be naive not to realize that the vast majority of the facts had been kept from her, but she didn’t expect Frank to spout out everything he knew. No, it wasn’t that. It was something that she should have seen, something that was obvious, and she’d missed it entirely. It was some little detail that didn’t fit, and until she could pinpoint what it was, she wouldn’t be able to get rid of that nagging uneasiness.