Mirror Image

It was dark now, however, and the blossoms had closed for the night. The courtyard was illumined by spotlights placed in the ground among the plants. They cast tall, spindly shadows upon the white stucco walls of the house.

“What are you doing out here?” Eddy asked.

The loner, slouched in a patio lounger, answered curtly. “Thinking.”

He was thinking about Carole—about how her face had looked reflected in the mirror when he had entered her room. It had been incandescent. Her dark eyes had glowed as though his arrival signified something special to her. He decided it was quite an act. For an insane moment or two, he’d even fallen for it. What an idiot.

If he had just walked out, never touched her, never tasted her, never wished that things were different, he wouldn’t be snarling at his friend now, nursing a bottle of scotch and fighting a losing battle with an erection that wouldn’t subside. Aggravated with himself, he reached for the bottle of Chivas Regal again and splashed some over the melting ice in the bottom of his tumbler.

Eddy sat down in a lounge chair close to Tate’s and eyed him with concern. Tate, catching his friend’s candidly critical gaze, said, “If you don’t like what you see, look at something else.”

“My, my. Cranky, aren’t we?”

He was horny and lusting for an unfaithful wife. The unfaithfulness he might forgive, eventually, but not the other. Never the other.

“Did you see Carole?” Eddy asked, guessing the source of Tate’s dark mood.

“Yes.”

“Did you give her the statement to read?”

“Yes. Know what she did?”

“Told you to shove it?”

“Essentially. She tore it in half.”

“I wrote it for her own good.”

“Tell that to her yourself.”

“The last time I told her something for her own good, she called me an asshole.”

“She fell just short of spelling that out tonight.”

“Whether she believes it or not, meeting the press for the first time since the crash is going to be a bitch, even on somebody as tough as Carole. Their curiosity alone will have them whipped into a frenzy.”

“I told her that, but she resents getting unasked-for advice and having words put in her mouth.”

“Well,” Eddy said, rubbing his neck tiredly, “don’t worry about it until you have to. She’ll probably do fine.”

“She seems confident that she will.” Tate took a sip of his drink, then rolled the tumbler between his palms as he watched a moth making suicidal dives toward one of the spotlights in the shrubbery. “She’s…”

Eddy leaned forward. “She’s what?”

“Hell, I don’t know.” Tate sighed. “Different.”

“How so?”

For starters, she tasted different, but he didn’t tell his friend that. “She’s more subdued. Congenial.”

“Congenial? Sounds to me like she pitched a temper tantrum tonight.”

“Yeah, but this is the first one. The crash and everything she’s been through since then have sobered her up, I think. She looks younger, but she acts more mature.”

“I’ve noticed that. Understandable, though, isn’t it? Carole’s suddenly realized that she’s mortal.” Eddy stared at the terrazzo tiles between his widespread feet. “How, uh, how are personal things between the two of you?” Tate shot him a hot, fierce glance. “If it’s none of my business, just say so.”

“It’s none of your business.”