“Meaning?”
“I haven’t gotten up to go to work this early for weeks, maybe months. I can’t remember. You’re already a good influence on me.”
“Me? I hardly spoke to you.”
“Exactly, and as I said, I know why, so I woke up this morning and thought I’d win your approval as quickly as I could by turning over a new leaf. I intend to work harder today than my father or anyone else at the place.”
“One day doth not a life make,” I recited.
He laughed. “I know, I know. Anyone who uses multisyllabic words is no one who can be convinced of anything simply.”
“Why do it to please me? Why not do it to please your father? Or, more important, yourself?”
The soft smile withered on his face. “I’d rather do it to please you.”
“A stranger?”
“Anyone as beautiful as you are can’t be a stranger, at least to me,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said.
“What?”
“I can’t be convinced of anything simply, especially when prefaced with flattery.”
He laughed, like someone who understood that he was laughing at himself. “All right, all right, but I’m not using my well-tested pickup lines on you. I’m speaking from the heart. True blue,” he said, and pulled into the parking lot and into his parking space.
The rain slowed to a steady pour as the wind diminished. He shut off the engine and turned to me.
“So, Lorelei Patio, where are you from? What was the stroke of luck that dropped you into Quincy and then into my world?”
“I wasn’t driven here by luck,” I said. If he had tried to find out anything about me from his aunt, she had obviously resisted telling him any part of the story I had told her and Mrs. McGruder. At least, until now.
“Oh? What, then?”
“I’ve got to go in and get to work,” I said. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Hey!” he cried when I opened the door and stuck out the umbrella to open it for the walk to the front entrance. “I didn’t bring an umbrella. At least let me share yours.”
I looked back at him. For a moment, my mind went into rewind, and I recalled the first time I had met Buddy. Ava had taken me to a bar to practice flirtation while following our own special rules concerning what to do and what not to do with men. She had assured me that I would have no trouble being served alcohol there. Someone old enough would surely buy us drinks. It was a bar frequented by college men, and when we had approached the bar, Buddy had stepped forward, bowed like some medieval knight would bow to royalty, and presented us with the bar stools. Ava hadn’t given him more than a glance, but I’d thought immediately that he was different from the other young men around us. He had a sweeter, gentler face. Right from the moment of meeting him, I had trouble not being honest with him. There was something about him that cried out for sincerity.
Liam looked like that. Despite the bad-boy image he obviously had earned, I saw past it and saw that same vulnerability, that boyish innocence that every man wanted to keep safely and snugly tucked away in his heart to revisit when he felt it was safe to do so. Perhaps men were far less tolerant than women of any of that naiveté. It smelled and tasted too much of virginity and timidity. It threatened their manhood.
How complicated this was, especially for women, I thought. There was a part of us that was drawn to the gentleness and simplicity in a man. Maybe that was the mother in us that wanted to cuddle and soothe them and longed to feel that need in them, a need we also possessed. But there was also that raw lust in us that drew us to the aggressive, domineering, and demanding force in them. We wanted to be ravished and taken. For almost every woman, this was the conflict, the complication that made navigating in the sea of romance difficult and dangerous.
Suddenly, hesitating in Liam’s car and looking at him while all of this came rushing over me, I realized just what made my sisters so grateful for who and what they were. For us, the daughters of darkness, this conflict did not exist. That was why we weren’t supposed to fall in love. We were never to have the need to cuddle and soothe any man, and we were certainly never to surrender to any lust, only to use it as we would any other tool.
But this wasn’t true for me. I had fallen in love with Buddy, and what was drawing me to Liam right now were feelings and instincts supposedly deadened in my father’s daughters. But they weren’t deadened in me. If I didn’t belong with them, where did I belong? For I didn’t yet feel comfortable in this world to which I had fled.
Seeing the puzzled look on Liam Dolan’s face while I hesitated and pondered this, I realized also how difficult, if not impossible, it would be to start a relationship with him, with Jim Lamb, or with any man I would meet while I was there. This was a difficulty that none of them would understand. I was confident that they would all lose patience with me quickly, and the problem for me would dissipate like smoke.
“Of course I’ll share my umbrella,” I finally said.
I stepped out, closed the door, and hurried around the car with the umbrella opened. He got out and joined me by putting his arm around my waist and stepping under the umbrella, so close to me that our legs touched as we walked and the aroma of his aftershave floated around my face. Laughing at how awkward we were while trying to stay dry, we stepped into the lobby and shook off like two puppies. I glanced around for a place to put the wet umbrella. He took it from me.
“Here,” he said, and put it behind a counter.
Those who had already arrived for work all stopped whatever they were doing and looked at us. Some of the women nodded or shook their heads slightly. I was sure they were thinking, Didn’t take him long. Some of the men smiled licentiously, already way ahead in their fantasies, imagining Liam and I groping each other in some motel or his bedroom.