The Season Of Love: Beloved

“Just…leave me alone, okay?” She choked, and darted past him and into the thick of the holiday crowd on the sidewalk. She couldn’t bear to let her weakness for him show. Every time he touched her, she felt vibrations all the way to her toes and she couldn’t hide it. Fortunately she was away before he noticed that it wasn’t revulsion that had torn her from his side. She was spared a little of her pride.

Simon watched her go with welling sadness. It could have been so different, he thought, if he’d been less judgmental, if he’d ever bothered to ask her side of her brief marriage. But he hadn’t. He’d condemned her on the spot, and kept pushing her away for years. How could he expect to get back on any sort of friendly footing with her easily? It was going to take a long time, and from what he’d just seen, his was an uphill climb all the way. He went back to his office so dejected that Mrs. Mack asked if he needed some aspirin.

Tira brushed off the chance meeting with Simon as a coincidence and was cheered by an unexpected call from an old friend, who offered her a ticket to Turandot, her favorite opera, the next evening.

She accepted with pure pleasure. It would do her good to get out of the house and do something she enjoyed.

She put on a pretty black designer dress with diamanté straps and covered it with her flashy velvet wrap. She didn’t look half bad for an old girl, she told her reflection in the mirror. But then, she had nobody to dress up for, so what did it matter?

She hired a cab to take her downtown because finding a parking space for the visiting opera performance would be a nightmare. She stepped out of the cab into a crowd of other music lovers and some of her painful loneliness drifted away in the excitement of the performance.

The seat she’d been given was in the dress circle. She remembered so many nights being here with Simon, but his reserved seat, thank God, was empty. If she’d thought there was a chance of his being here, she’d never have come. But she knew that Simon had taken Jill to see this performance already. It was unlikely that he’d want to sit through it again.

There was a drumroll. The theater went dark. The curtain started to rise. The orchestra began to play the overture. She relaxed with her small evening bag in her lap and smiled as she anticipated a joyful experience.

And then everything went suddenly wrong. There was a movement to her left and when she turned her head, there was Simon, dashing in dark evening clothes, sitting down right beside her.

He gave her a deliberately careless glance and a curt nod and then turned his attention back to the stage.

Tira’s hands clenched on the evening bag. Simon’s shoulder brushed against hers as he shifted in his seat and she felt the touch as if it were fire all the way down her body. It had never been so bad before. She’d walked with him, talked with him, shared seats at benefits and auctions and operas and plays with him, and even though his presence had been a bittersweet delight, it had never been so physically painful to her in the past. She wanted to turn and find his mouth with her lips, she wanted to press her body to his and feel his cheek against her own. The longing so was poignant that she shivered with it.

“Cold?” he whispered.

She clenched her jaw. “Not at all,” she muttered, sliding further into her velvet wrap.

His good arm went, unobtrusively, over the back of her seat and rested there. She froze in place, barely daring to move, to breathe. It was just like the afternoon in front of the toy store. Did he know that it was torture for her to be close to him? Probably he did. He’d found a new way to get to her, to make her pay for all the terrible things he thought she’d done. She closed her eyes and groaned silently.

The opera, beautiful as it was, was forgotten. She was so miserable that she sat stiffly and heard none of it. All she could think about was how to escape.

She started to get up and Simon’s big hand caught her shoulder a little too firmly.

“Stay where you are,” he said gruffly.

She hesitated, but only for an instant. She was desperate to escape now. “I have to go to the necessary room, if you don’t mind,” she bit off near his ear.

“Oh.”

He sighed heavily and moved his arm, turning to allow her to get past him. She apologized all the way down the row. Once she made it to the aisle, she felt safe. She didn’t look back as she made her way gracefully and quickly to the back of the theater and into the lobby.

It was easy to dart out the door and hail a cab. This time of night, they were always a few of them cruising nearby. She climbed into the first one that stopped, gave him her address, and sat back with a relieved sigh. She’d done it. She was safe.

She went home more miserable than ever, changed into her nightgown and a silky white robe and let her hair down with a long sigh. She couldn’t blame her friend, Sherry, for the fiasco. How could anyone have known that Simon would decide to see the opera a second time on this particular night? But it was a cruel blow of fate. Tira had looked forward to a performance that Simon’s presence had ruined for her.

She made coffee, despite the late hour, and was sitting down in the living room to drink it when the doorbell rang.

It might be Charles, she decided. She hadn’t heard from him today, and he could have stopped by to tell her about Gene. She went to the front door and opened it without thinking.

Simon was standing there with a furious expression on his face.

She tried to close the door, but one big well-shod foot was inside it before she could even move. He let himself in and closed the door behind him.

“Well, come in, then,” she said curtly, her green eyes sparkling with bad temper as she pulled her robe closer around her.

He stared at her with open curiosity. He’d never seen her in night clothing before. The white robe emphasized her creamy skin, and the lace of her gown came barely high enough to cover the soft mounds of her breasts. With her red-gold hair loose in a glorious tangle around her shoulders, she was a picture to take a man’s breath away.

“Why did you run?” he asked softly.

Her face colored gently. “I wasn’t expecting you to be there,” she said, and it came out almost as an accusation. “You’ve already seen the performance once.”

“Yes, with Jill,” he added deliberately, watching her face closely.

She averted her eyes. He looked so good in an evening jacket, she thought miserably. His dark, wavy hair was faintly damp, as if the threatening clouds had let some rain fall. His pale gray eyes were watchful, disturbing. He’d never looked at her this way before, like a predator with its prey. It made her nervous.

“Do you want some coffee?” she asked to break the tense silence.

“If you don’t put arsenic in it.”

She glanced at him. “Don’t tempt me.”

She led him into the kitchen, got down a cup and poured a cup of coffee for him. She didn’t offer cream and sugar, because she knew he took neither.

He turned a chair around and straddled it before he picked up the cup and sipped the hot coffee, staring at her disconcertingly over the rim.

With open curiosity, she glanced at the prosthesis hand, which was resting on the back of the chair.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

She shrugged and picked up her own cup. “You used to hate that.” She indicated the artificial arm.

“I hate pity even more,” he said flatly. “It looks real enough to keep people from staring.”

“Yes,” she said. “It does look real.”

He sipped coffee. “Even if it doesn’t feel it,” he murmured dryly. He glanced up at her face and saw it color from the faint insinuation in his deep voice. “Amazing, that you can still blush, at your age,” he remarked.

It wouldn’t have been if he knew how totally innocent she still was at her advanced age, but she wasn’t sharing her most closely guarded secret with the enemy. He thought she and Charles were lovers, and she was content to let him. But that insinuation about why he used the prosthesis was embarrassing and infuriating. She hated being jealous. She had to conceal it from him.

“I don’t care how it feels, or to whom,” she said stiffly. “In fact, I have no interest whatsoever in your personal life. Not anymore.”

He drew in a long breath and let it out. “Yes, I know.” He finished his coffee in two swallows. “I miss you,” he said simply. “Nothing is the same.”

Her heart jumped but she kept her eyes down so that he wouldn’t see how much pleasure the statement gave her. “We were friends. I’m sure you have plenty of others. Including Jill.”

His intake of breath was audible. “I didn’t realize how much you and Jill disliked each other.”

“What difference does it make?” She glanced at him with a mocking smile. “I’m not part of your life.”

“You were,” he returned solemnly. “I didn’t realize how much a part of it you were, until it was too late.”