Free Accompanying Alice by Terese Ramin Page B

sensed her hesitation and lifted his head. Wounds, doubts, needs flitted openly through the shadows on her face and he recognized them for exactly what they were. If they touched one another now, there would be no going back. For either of them.
    He slipped a hand into her hair, drew the strands gently through his fingers, let them drop away. She wasn’t a woman he could bed once and leave. Somewhere deep inside himself he knew that, recognized it, accepted it—and gathered himself back into the box he’d labeled self-control because of it. He felt Alice’s sigh of regret, of relief, kiss his lips. Their breath mingled for an instant longer than their eyes held.
    And then they were apart, on opposite sides of the room, caged in their own emotions, imprisoned by the desire that clung to the air.
    It was a long night.
 
    Chapter Four
    U nable to sleep, Alice restlessly prowled the darkness long after she’d shown Gabriel to bed in the girls’ room.
    Convenient both when the girls had been tiny and again when they were older and out late and she could hear them from her bed, the room’s proximity now fed a mood, an itch she found
harder to ignore by the minute. She was an adult, she reminded herself. She didn’t have to scratch all her itches, satisfy all her urges. She was an adult, a mother, not an eighteen year old obsessed with the newness of her body who couldn’t see beyond the moment, and for whom every passion carried life or death weight. She was older. She had hindsight, she had history . S he understood consequences.
    She had learned from experience.
    But denial of its existence only made desire worse.
    The creak of bedsprings unthinkingly drew her to the crack in the sliding door to Allyn’s and Rebecca’s bedroom. Guiltily she peered in at Gabriel, listening to him breathe as she watched him sleep. It was an old habit, one she’d developed months before Allyn and Rebecca were born.
    For the few brief days they’d been together she’d loved watching Matthew sleep. Sleep was full of promises and dreams, the hopes of tomorrow. Just as they’d been full of promises and dreams....
    But they hadn’t been married long enough to meet any promises, fulfill any dreams.
    Though old, the memories of that time were still painful, still caused her to cringe every time she realized how blindly, gullibly, romantically In Love she’d been.
    Or perhaps the better term was In Lust, perception told her now .
    It had taken barely a month after she and Matt had eloped for his parents to find them in their fifty-dollar-a-week, one-room-over-a-garage apartment near the high school and get Alice’s marriage to their son annulled. It had been easy to dissolve the union as though it had never been. She’d been slightly underage, and he’d been a university football recruiter’s dream, his eyes full of stars, his legs all raw talent and potential. A lot of emotional weight had been carried into that brief hearing, a lot of names Alice had never dreamed anyone would call her. Slut. Money chasing skank. Whore.
    She’d come out of the judge’s chambers barely able to think, feeling dirtier than she’d ever felt, morally bankrupt, a corrupter of children, wishing she’d allowed her parents to accompany her. But Helen was right: they did come from a family of stubborn, overly independent women, and Alice remembered deciding at the time that, since she’d gone into marriage on her own, she’d come out on her own.
    Her father had been there afterward, anyway, waiting in the hall with tears in his eyes and a quick shoulder squeeze, and Alice never remembered feeling quite so loved or quite so alone.
    She pressed her fingers to her lips and eased away from the sliding door. Odd, the things you remembered, the times you remembered them.
    Though probably a wise move in the long run, the end of her marriage had been devastating at the time. To give him credit, Matt had wanted to “do right by her,” but he hadn’t known how,