Firefly (34 page)

Hungry, hot, and bone weary, Morgan climbed the stairs to his bedroom.  Johnny Cole's timely knock on the office door had put an end to the scene in the infirmary that afternoon, though it was hardly the end Morgan wished for.  Julie composed herself quickly, as he supposed she had done many, many times in the past.  It almost frightened him how easily she hid her feelings, and he wondered just how much more she had buried within.

Johnny's grandmother, old Mrs. Westerman, had had another attack, and Morgan grabbed his bag and followed the boy to the house on the other side of the Castle.  He ordered Julie home, insisting there was nothing she could do to help.  The truth was that he feared he'd be too distracted by her presence to render the elderly woman any assistance at all.  As it was, he could barely keep his mind on his work, though there was little he could do anyway.

Ev Cole's mother-in-law lingered through the early evening and into the night.  The old woman's daughter, Ev's wife Sarah, had to be sedated and was snoring peacefully when her mother died shortly after midnight.  Morgan couldn't help thinking how much stronger and more serenely beautiful Julie would have been helping him instead of the scatter-brained Sarah who couldn't face anything.

The thought stayed with him while he walked home, glancing toward Julie's house, dark now and silent.  His own was no different, and twice as lonely.  He peeled off sweaty clothes and dropped them to the floor carelessly, his mind still tangled.  He opened the window shutters to let in the breeze, but even the fresh scent of night air and the raucous chorus of coyotes did not penetrate the clouded barrier to his soul.

He didn't light the lamp, for he knew what he would see.  Amy.  Memory of her was the only thing to get through the silent wall, and he could not bear to look at her when thoughts of another woman tormented him.  As he lay on the bed, a sheet drawn over him against the chill of the breeze, he tried to force the pain away.  The bottle of scotch was still in the kitchen pantry, and he did not delude himself that he didn't consider getting it.  But it offered insufficient solace.

Exhaustion brought some relief, though the unconscious knowledge that he had only a few hours left in which to sleep seemed to keep his rest light and troubled.  Awake and yet asleep, he dreamed.  He never lost all touch with the reality of the darkened bedroom, the tangled sheets, the window open above his head, but wisps and fragments of fantasy joined him.

Julie, as he had never seen her and wished to see her, glided to his bedside.  Gowned in a shimmer of white, with her hair unbound and blown by a breeze, she seemed more than a mere mortal.  He wanted to touch her, but the lethargy of dreams held him motionless.  His arms lay limp and still at his sides, though he felt the bed sag where she sat down.  How warm she was, and how beautiful.  Though there was no moon, only stars, he could see her plainly.  Her eyes soft and warm and pleading.  Her lips, which he had tasted so briefly, smiling and parted with a hunger he ached to appease.  Where the formless gown draped from one shoulder to the other he could see the shadowed valley between her breasts, and the filmy fabric clung to aroused nipples.  He reached for her with hands that could not move, but he knew there was nothing to touch, nothing to hold.

He blinked, not to stop tears, for there were none, but to clear his head of the dream.  The image had been real, almost too real, and yet he knew it was only a phantom of his weary brain.  The hot pain, however, was very real.  His hand moved now, slowly because he was still not sure he had entirely left the land of dreams.

He groaned as his fingers encountered the tumescent organ.   The pain was exquisite, the desire a burning agony, and the joy terrified him, because he wanted Julie, no one else, and he dared not have her.

Chapter Twenty

The alarm wakened him to a glaringly bright morning.  The sun through the open shutters already heated the room uncomfortably.  After silencing the metallic nuisance beside his head, Morgan stretched and yawned and wished he could have lain abed another four or five hours at least.  Friday, however, was invariably busy, and any delay on his part in getting the office open only meant Julie would be stuck with the burden of explaining his tardiness to the patients waiting to see him.

Julie.  The very thought of her brought back the dreams--the nightmares--of yesterday and the night.  Sitting on the edge of the bed with the cool tiles on his bare feet to chase the last streamers of sleep from his groggy brain, Morgan held his head between his hands and tried to sort the real from the imaginary, the remembered from the dreamed.  Unfortunately, all the bad things were real, all the good things impossible.

He combed his fingers through his hair and then rubbed his unshaven chin while he yawned again.  Of all the horrible things he had thought of Wilhelm Hollstrom, nothing had come close to the truth.  Poor Julie, to have been forced to watch--to listen--while her father killed her lover.  Del shivered again at the thought.

It was no wonder, he told himself as he stood and stretched his still tired muscles, she felt so little enthusiasm for her upcoming marriage to Wallenmund.  One marriage had ended in disaster, and she probably could not get that out of her mind as she prepared for a second.

He turned to close the shutters against the blinding sun and the day's heat and then bent to pick up the sheet that had fallen from him when he stood up.  Remembering the way he had wakened from that eerily erotic dream, he sheepishly examined the bedclothes for evidence of nocturnal arousal.  He found no telltale stains.  Half angry, half relieved, half disappointed, he straightened the bed and sighed before he gathered clean clothes and headed for the kitchen to shave and fortify himself with coffee.

It must have been a dream, all of it.

And it was just as well.  The one reason he had allowed himself to be so honest and open with Julie was that he knew she was safe from him, whether she knew it or not.  He could not seduce her, though he admitted he was beginning to wish he could, but his disability gave him the opportunity to treat her much differently than most men would.  If last night's display of renewed virility had been real, he might have lost that candor with her and have changed more of his attitude.

But why not?
a voice inside him asked.  Staring at his face in the mirror, he listened to the voice repeat the question and he failed to come up with a suitable answer.

"I admit I don't want her to marry Wallenmund," he told his reflection as he slathered his cheeks and chin with shaving soap.  "But that doesn't mean I have to offer to marry her myself.  If I did try to court her, I'd have to be damn careful not to play into any of her fears." He let the warm lather soak his whiskers for a few moments and stropped the razor firmly, unemotionally.  "I can't say I'd be unhappy if she accepted me.  On a purely intellectual basis, she'd make a fine wife.  Whoever gets her ought to be damn thankful.  Lord knows she can cook, and she's so good with children, even that brat Willy, that she'll make a wonderful mother someday.  As far as helping me the way Amy did, I have a feeling, ashamed as I am to admit it, that Julie will be even better."

He scraped a cheek carefully, not forgetting the mornings his hand had been far from steady.  He looked closely at his reflection and decided it was almost time for another haircut, too.

He finished the right cheek and went on to his chin and throat.

Amy helped me, he thought, not daring to talk aloud for a few seconds, but Julie would take the work to herself.  She'd be a full partner in everything.  Amy used to listen to my gripes and my disappointments and she'd soothe them out of my system, but Julie would share them with me, and nothing would ever be as discouraging again if I had her to shoulder some of the burden with me.

"But could I ask her to do that?" he wondered, wiping the razor on the towel that hung around his neck.  "Lord knows I couldn't ask her to love me the way Amy did, and there'd never be any promise from me that I'd love her either.  Maybe that would be best, too, for both of us.  We could enter into a relationship with no emotional shackles to each other, a logical extension of what we already have."

The problem was that what he had with her right now wasn't enough.  He rediscovered that every time he got close to her, emotionally or physically.  Even in the bright light of day, when the phantasms of night were supposed to be vanquished, he felt that insane desire growing again.  He lifted the corners of the towel to wipe off the last traces of lather, but there was nothing to wipe away the seductive dream-image of Julie that lingered in his mind.

He covered his face with the towel and struggled against the power of that image.  He knew damn well what it was telling him, and he couldn't ignore what it was doing to his body.  Not all the dreams had been dreams; part of them had been very, very real, as this was real now.

*   *   *

Julie smoothed the new apron over her second best dress and stepped out the front door.  She smothered a yawn and tried to stretch a kink out of her neck.  Up half the night sewing the new apron and the other half trying to sort out the incredible tangle of conflicting emotions her discussion with Morgan had aroused, she had had trouble staying awake while she fixed breakfast and now could think of almost nothing but going back to bed.  But she had already seen Morgan walk up to the office, where the usual Friday morning crowd had gathered early, so she had no choice but to persevere.

If he noticed the new apron, he had no time to comment on it, and within minutes of her arrival, Julie forgot about the garment anyway.  It was one of those days when one absurdity seemed to lead right to another, and for that she was grateful.  Had it been a day of crises and tragedies, she was certain she could not have withstood the strain.  As it was, she actually found moments to smile.

When she first entered the surgery, she found Morgan already busy, peering into Lucas Carter's left eye from a distance of something less than two inches.

"That you, Julie? Hand me those tweezers over there." He pointed to the instrument just barely out of his reach.  "I've found the offending eyelash and don't want to lose it."

When he had the pale, curved hair out, he held it up for Lucas to examine.

Lucas returned the favor by squinting the other eye closed and aiming a stream of tobacco juice accurately at the brass spittoon.

"Amazin', ain't it, how a little whisker like that can hurt so damn much," Lucas said.  "I couldn't hardly see straight enough to spit."

No sooner had Lucas left and Julie was about to call the next patient in when Ada McCrory came screaming up the front stairs with her youngest child, two-year-old Bridget, in her arms.  The child, crying nearly as hysterically as her mother, wore a pair of sewing shears around her chubby little wrist.

"I can't get 'em off!" Ada wailed.  Julie led her into the surgery, where Del waited, the picture of masculine fortitude and patience.  "I was doing some mending when a customer came in, and I set all the needles and the scissors up where I didn't think she could reach anything.  When I come back, she was puttin' her hand through the handle, and now I can't get it out!"

"Don't worry, Ada, everything'll be fine.  What goes on will come off, believe me," Morgan assured her.  "Here, Julie, you take Bridget and sit up on the table.  Ada, help yourself to a shot of whisky there.  It's some of Horace's best imported stuff."

Julie took the child from her mother, which seemed to calm Bridget.  She really didn't seem bothered at all by her heavy bracelet and immediately began to investigate the long row of buttons down the front of Julie's blouse.

Morgan took a jar of petroleum jelly from the cabinet and opened it, then smeared a generous amount all over the adorned hand.  In a matter of seconds, the shears slid off.  Ada hadn't even swallowed her second whisky.

But those few seconds were enough for Morgan to see again how natural Julie looked with a child on her lap.

From then on the morning went more or less normally, although pulling a candle stub from Sid Ackerman's ear did provide mild amusement between extracting a couple of teeth and stitching a cut knee.  Sid claimed it was an accident, but the smell of cheap whisky was so strong on him even at ten o'clock in the morning that Morgan insisted afterwards the candle had probably been put there on a dare or as a bet in a card game.