Free Lovers and Strangers by Candace Schuler

leave from the paper at the moment."
    "So you're not working on something for your paper now?" she said, referring to whatever was causing him to spend so much time hunched over the typewriter on his dining room table. She'd asked the question before, earlier, but maybe he'd answer it this time.
    "No," he said shortly, closing off that avenue of discussion. He set his teacup down with a sharp click. "I'm not."
    Faith pushed a dumpling around on her plate. She really should let it drop, she thought. It was obvious he didn't like to talk about himself or his work. Especially whatever he was working on now. But she was unbearably curious about him and his life. She wanted to know everything there was to know about him.
    "Would I have read anything you've written?" she asked shyly, diffident but determined. "From before, I mean," she added quickly, before he could take offense, "from when you were writing for your paper?"
    "In Pine Hollow, Georgia?" he said, lifting his eyebrow at her again.
    Faith decided that she loved that eyebrow. It was endlessly fascinating, the way he used it to convey so many different moods and emotions. Right now it was teasing her.
    "We have newspapers in Pine Hollow," she told him primly, pretending insult. "Some of our more high-tone residents even subscribe to the big city Atlanta papers. And the library usually has back copies of the New York Times and the Washington Post for those of us who can read them. I read all about the Gulf War. And Somalia. Bosnia. Haiti." Her voice lowered. Saddened. The playful light faded from her eyes. "Rwanda."
    "You shouldn't have," Jack said harshly, his eyes suddenly gone cold and hard. "Someone like you should never have to read about things like that."
    "No one should have to," Faith said softly, wishing she dared to reach out and touch him. He looked so alone, suddenly. So stern and aloof and... just alone. It was if he'd abruptly shut himself off behind a glass wall. "Were you in all those places?" she asked, compelled by something inside her to ask. "All the—" What was the term she'd heard used? "All the hot spots of the world?"
    Jack nodded and reached for his tea cup again. "Starting all the way back in Vietnam."
    "Vietnam? But that was so many years ago! Surely, you couldn't have been old enough for—"
    "I was eighteen," Jack interrupted. "That was plenty old enough."
    She didn't make the obvious statement about him not looking his age. Because when she looked into his eyes, he did. "It must have been awful for you."
    He lifted his shoulders, shrugging it off. "Not as awful as it was for most of the guys who went," he said, absently turning his half-empty cup round and round against the table with his long, elegant fingers. "I knew my way around a newsroom because of the free-lance work I'd done for a couple of underground rags here in L.A., so I got hooked up with the Stars and Stripes even before I made it out of boot camp. That's the military's version of a newspaper," he told her. "As a reporter, nobody ever expected me to charge up some godforsaken hill with a rifle in my hands while the enemy lobbed artillery shells at my head."
    "But you make it sound as if it were easy," she objected. "Reporters get shot at, too. They even get killed. I've seen it on the news."
    His eyebrow lifted, conveying fatalism and wry humor in a single gesture. "Not on a regular basis."
    Faith stared at him, unable to believe he could really be so cavalier about the risk of getting shot at. Or worse.
    "It's just part of the job," Jack said, attempting to explain it to her. "You don't think about it. You can't." He lifted the cup to his lips and drained it. "Not if you want to get the story."
    "And the story's important enough to risk your life for?"
    "Sometimes it is. Most of the time." At least, he used to think so. "The thing is, you usually don't know what you've got until after you've got it, so you go after every story as if it's the story. And, anyway..." he shrugged