Free Barbara Samuel by A Piece of Heaven Page B

chatter.
    A tangle of nerves eased. Very interesting.
    Okay, then, what else? Both intrigued and bemused, she dug a little deeper. What else might she say?
Please don’t tell me about your love life. It makes me lonely and it makes me worry.
Even better. The roar really started subsiding. Was there more? Luna thought about it, remembering to breathe deeply as she walked. Sweat started trickling down the back of her neck, and she reached up to tie her hair in a knot around itself.
    A new thought came up, and she said it out loud. “Jean, please stop drinking so much. You’re going to take home the wrong guy one of these nights and get hurt or worse, you’ll end up drowned in a ditch. In fact, I really wish you’d stop picking up strangers. It’s dangerous.”
    Nearly every bit of the urge to smoke was swept away. Luna didn’t know if it was the walking or the talking, but either way, it was a relief to lose it. Swinging her arms hard to loosen the muscles of her shoulders and neck, she wondered why some people could keeptheir thoughts to themselves without resorting to smoking or drinking, while she had used both. What was she so afraid of?
    And how weird was it that she was headed into middle age—okay, it had arrived—with a master’s degree in psychology, and had spent ten years as a therapist without ever knowing this about herself?
    Best Friend Barbie, who wore jean shorts and a halter top and her dark hair in a ponytail, said,
Well, you always had your shields in place before now, right?
    Good point. Cigarettes had been doing a lot of work. Maybe, she thought with a frown, she didn’t really want to give them up when there was so much she needed to do right with Joy. Maybe some people just needed the chemical barrier in order to manage the world.
    Oh, please
, said Barbie,
addict as delicate flower?
    “Thank you,” she said aloud, smiling a little in spite of herself and the heat and the scritching annoyance on her nerves. Funny how the tapes all played the same way. Addicted to nicotine, addicted to alcohol, addicted to overeating … the voices calling you back all said the same things:
You aren’t like everybody else. You’re special. You’re different, you need this.
    Barbie licked an ice-cream cone and dangled her feet in a small green stream. The only sensible action for such a hot morning.
You’re gonna make it, Lu.
    Yeah. A breeze washed down from the mountains, cool as dawn. It rattled cottonwood leaves, swept over her hot neck. She thought of Jean again, of her skein of boyfriends—one loser after another, all of them tortured
artistes
without a penny, and nothing to offer but egocentric pain. But what did Luna know, really? It wasn’t like she’d made great choices in men, either. Maybe Jean’s focus on lots of great sex was better than tryingto do everything by the rules. Either way, there were bound to be broken hearts.
    And wasn’t Luna just a little bit … well,
jealous?
Sex had not exactly been in plentiful supply the past couple of years. She didn’t get out a lot. And even when she did, there was that problem of the man situation in Taos. There weren’t that many worth sleeping with. It got to be too much trouble—pretending to be interested in his novel or his sculptures or his rambling tale of finding himself—to come to Taos just to get laid.
    As if her thoughts of sex were written in a bubble over her head, a low whistle rang into the bright yellow day. Luna raised her head, sure the whistle was for someone else, but there wasn’t anyone else but her on the road.
    Except the whistlers—an adobe crew sitting in the shadows before an ancient, rambling farmhouse that had probably cost well into six figures with the water rights. There were four or five men in the shade of a giant cottonwood, the younger ones shirtless and tanned the color of rawhide, their jeans smeared with mud. She smiled distractedly to show her appreciation and kept walking.
    The whistle rang out again.