Page 44 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

32 Jack Fritscher

up around her, pulling her down on to him. “We two.” He needed
to hold her, just hold her.
She let him embrace her sweetly.
She relaxed across the full length of his body. She rose and fell
with his breathing as he drifted off to sleep. She felt his unshaven
face chafe against her cheek. Some things she sometimes accepted.
She was not sleepy in her vigil, holding him, protecting him, but she
could not afford to look too long at his face. Maybe he wasn’t the
best man in the world, but he was the best who had yet come along.
Everyone thought they were a great couple. They were charmed,
emerging from the burden of their pasts. He was as handsome as
she was attractive, and, lord knows, something in the very look of
him warmed the cold Curtis had left deep inside her when his dose
had killed her fertility. Someday when Cameron was ready, when
she was ready, when she could afford the astonished look in his face,
when she could chance his disappointment might not drive him
away, she promised herself to tell him why, really why, she didn’t
want, couldn’t have, children.
God! His radiant heat made her eyes burn. She closed them,
in self-defense, closed them tight against his seductive, engaging
brightness that was like the beautiful blinding brightness of San
Francisco itself when tour boats pull away from the Embarcadero
at noon into the windswept cross-currents of the Bay.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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