Free Accompanying Alice by Terese Ramin

companionably, accompanied by the staccato strains of rain on the roof. Alice finished cutting Gabriel’s hair, carefully matter of fact about touching him sensing that he was just as carefully matter of fact about feeling her touch . Afterwards she put their interrupted lunch on the table.
    She wasn’t good at being uncomfortable around people.
    When her eyes cautiously strayed from her food and met Gabriel’s cautiously straying from his for the tenth time, she laughed hard, suddenly finding the humor in the whole ridiculous situation. Unable to resist her laughter, Gabriel chuckled too, trading gibes across the table with her about the day, about the tangled web of lies they’d woven and about the situation they’d cornered themselves in, relaxing for the first time in years.
    While Alice put a few more pearls on Grace’s veil, Gabriel put a seal on the drippy faucet in the kitchen sink and told her a little more about his case, thinking aloud, trying to tie the ends of it together in a way that suited him while feeling that all he’d managed to accomplish was buying a few seconds’ peace in the eye of that particular storm.
    The rain petered out toward evening.
    Gabriel called his forensics expert to find out about serial numbers and ballistics tests, and Alice sat in the living room with the veil trying not to listen to his side of the conversation, because it bothered her. She felt responsible for him. For his life. And...
    Trying to convince herself that whatever happened to him now was out of her hands, she bound more pearls into the handmade lace, jabbing the needle in, through, out and around again and again, wanting to hypnotize herself with the movement so she wouldn’t think. About anything. The ploy didn’t work. However briefly, she had a stake in Gabriel’s life now, and no matter what, she’d care what happened to him. She liked him.
    Restlessly she opened another bag of pearls and thought about her girls in order to stop worrying about Gabriel.
    When those worries backed her into another corner she tried thinking only about Grace and her veil, but wound up imagining how Grace would look as a bride, and how she glowed
whenever she looked at Phil, about the look that Phil gave her back, making Alice feel as though she should leave the room, leave them privacy in an emotion that was too uncomfortable for her to share.
    She looked across the room at Gabriel, and the veil’s magic worked on her, gave her the same fleeting sense of longing for a man of her own that holding her sister Twink’s new baby gave her for a new infant of her own. The feeling never lasted. She always reminded herself of Matthew and his parents, of the negative side of caring for infant twins alone so that she’d stop wishing for what she didn’t have—and couldn’t bring herself to find.
    The sun came out in time to go down.
    Red and brilliant, it crowded the tiny house with shadow and illusion, fresh awareness and knowledge Alice didn’t want to possess. Needle poised inside a seed pearl, she raised her head to study Gabriel again.
    Unlike her first impression of him this morning, she now saw an innate peacefulness about him, something at odds with the violence of his profession, a quality he must have grown up with rather than one he’d developed later. Something—she chose the word helplessly —good, a sense of patience and repose, a quality to trust and rely on. A subtle man who, underneath an explosive surface, knew what was important in life and how to get it without grabbing.
    Still waters, she warned herself silently. Watch out for deep holes. But she couldn’t stop staring at him. Couldn’t stop herself from wanting him to turn around and see her, cross the room to her, touch her....
    As though he felt the weight of her eyes, her fantasy on him, Gabriel cradled the phone and turned. The patterned shadows hiding his eyes seemed to change, to darken, to intensify as he returned her study. Alice’s lungs