Lexington Connection (35 page)

When the shadow fell across her corner of the table, she didn’t even look up. The last thing she wanted to do was be friendly and pleasant to friends and co-workers. That was why she was sitting off in the corner all by herself, hopeful everyone would take the hint. Maybe if she ignored them long enough, they would go away. When the shadow didn’t move and she finally did look up, there stood Jessie.

“We have to talk,” Jessie said in greeting. She stood there, looking down at Diana, and she didn’t look like she had a good night either. She looked reserved and closed off and hard to read—a cop.

Without a word, Diana indicated the chair across the table. She wasn’t sure she could speak, her heart was pounding so. Well, this was what she wanted, another chance to talk to Jessie. Just to see her again, one more time.

“You had quite a head of steam last night,” Jessie said as she pulled the chair out and sat down. She looked directly at Diana through narrowed eyes and for the first time, Diana could imagine the police uniform, a visible badge instead of the blue jeans, white shirt and jacket. It was a faintly disturbing thought. “Did you get it out of your system enough so we can have a decent conversation? Or are you going to get all ugly again?”

Diana’s chin went up. She had sat across too many tables lately explaining things to people like Jessie. “I told you a long time ago. I don’t like surprises. I don’t do well.” And all the time she was thinking
How the hell did you get here? What did you do? Tail me from my apartment? And why in hell do I have to explain anything to you?

“It wasn’t exactly the reception I was expecting when I dropped by to see an old friend,” Jessie went on. “Seems to me you were pretty pissed and it didn’t have a lot to do with being surprised.”

“No, it had a whole lot more with not hearing from you for the past three years.”
Three years of wondering what went wrong, if you even appreciated what I risked for you, if you even knew or cared what I did. If I even mattered. Wondering if it was all worth it.

“Did you expect to?” There was an edge in Jessie’s voice, a coldness Diana had never heard from her.

Yes, I expected.
All of Brenda’s questions from the night before came flooding back.
But that was my fantasy. Not you at all. I might as well admit that.
She caught hold of her temper. There was nothing to gain by getting angry. And she wanted to have a good last memory of Jessie, not an angry confrontational one.

“I thought it’d be nice,” she forced herself to say in a mild tone. “But that was my expectation, had nothing to do with you.” She paused. Apologies never came easy to her, especially apologies when she knew she was in the wrong. She did not like backing down, it went against every fiber in her. Even when there was nothing at risk. “I’m sorry I blew up last night. I was ugly and offensive. I apologize.”

Jessie drummed her fingers on her arm. Her eyes narrowed even more as if she were weighing Diana’s words. The minutes dragged on before she spoke and when she did, her voice was just as chilly as before. “You know I was quite tempted to go back to the motel, check out and drive on to Ocala. I really didn’t expect to be thrown out when I stopped in to see you.”

Diana said nothing. If Jessie didn’t want to accept her apology, there was nothing she could do. Explanations had never been part of her repertoire.
Accept it,
she prayed.
Accept it, and say whatever you came here to say so I can go back to dismantling the fantasy of you and get my head back into reality. And let you go.

Jessie waited a moment, still looking at Diana as if she wanted to dissect her. “You still never explain anything, do you?” she said finally.

Diana shook her head but she felt something within unbend. Jessie remembered that about her, acknowledged that much. Now she waited to see what Jessie might have to say.

“I must have spent over an hour on the phone with Nicki,” Jessie went on when she finally realized Diana wasn’t going to say anything. “She has the idea you wouldn’t be so mad if there was nothing there. She’s the one who convinced me we need to sit down and talk.”

Diana felt like her heart turned over. Did that mean there was something there for Jessie too? She clamped down on grasping for straws. She had been down that road far too often. “And what do we need to talk about?” She tried to make her tone as neutral as she could.

Jessie said nothing but she lost the narrowed gaze, some of the chilly demeanor went away. For Diana, the police image went away and just Jessie sat across from her. She could see the changes, the physical changes the years had delivered. There were lines around Jessie’s eyes, character lines from dealing with life. Her expression wasn’t so open, there was a harder set to the jaw, lips compressed. The reality clashed with Diana’s memory of a happy, eager-for-life Jessie, but she found the image just as endearing, just as enticing.

“We could talk about us. What happened. Where it went wrong.”

“What’s there to say?” Diana tried to just toss it off. She didn’t want to give in to her hope that was part of her fantasy. “We started out as a one-night stand. You were hung up on a lost love, and I didn’t want attachments. You wanted an itch scratched, and I wanted to touch someone.”

Jessie drew back at Diana’s bluntness. “I wouldn’t put it that crassly.” She looked positively offended.

“Why not?” Diana responded with a callousness she didn’t totally feel. Their encounters might have started out purely physical, two horny dykes indulging an instant attraction but it had changed as those encounters continued. “Wasn’t that the reality? You had a busy life and didn’t have time for a relationship. Cops have a twenty-four-hour a day job. And you had a family to take care of besides. Julie was a handy excuse, lost love, guilt over abandoning her. Made you quite the romantic figure, the strong silent type with the faint whiff of a tragic past. I’m sure everyone viewed you with the idea of being the one who could redeem you. Made the itch easier to scratch, didn’t it?”

Jessie leaned back in the chair. She looked at Diana with a slightly bewildered expression. “Is that how you saw it?” She frowned. “And you? You seem to have had my life figured out. What role did you see yourself in?”

Interesting that she doesn’t disagree.
“Mysterious stranger, mysterious background, probably money in the background, secretive. A lot of blanks for women to fill in any way they wanted to imagine. Here today, gone tomorrow.” She gave a faint smile. “Undercover work, spies, anyone could fill in whatever turned them on.”

“So what happened to change it?”

What indeed. How do you explain an attraction you don’t even understand?
Diana shrugged. She wasn’t sure when it changed, only knew it had. Somewhere, sometime, she had crossed the line and she had begun to care about Jessie as a person. “I kept coming back.”

“Why?”

Why indeed?
Diana mused. Maybe because Jessie treated her like a person. Maybe because she didn’t have a role to play, she could just be herself. “You touched me.”

She looked away from Jessie, looked off in the distance. She could finally say it. Jessie touched her in ways she said she would never be touched. It had been an awakening, and it had thrilled her as much as it had frightened her. “I tried to tell you that night we had the fight about Julie. I wanted you so much it wasn’t even reasonable any more. Even when I was away from you, I could feel you, like I was incomplete without you. I had to see you again. So I’d go back.” She could remember how strong the urge was to return to Lexington, even when she suspected it might be dangerous, when she was setting up a pattern someone else could see. Now she understood what Margaret worried about, feared for all those times Diana had forbidden her to come along.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Diana turned back to Jessie in annoyance. “Did you need it said, written to you in big bold black letters on the side of a building? Damn it, Jessie, why didn’t you see it?” That was something that always bugged her, why hadn’t Jessie realized Diana’s feelings? Why did it have to be said?

Jessie looked down at her lap, uncomfortable. Evidently it had bothered her too. “In the beginning you said you wanted it in the here and now. You gave every indication that if I questioned anything, wanted to know more, you’d be gone in a heartbeat. You never shared details of your life, anything, what you did, where you came from. Nothing.” She looked up at Diana, defensive, as if Diana was blaming her when she was only trying to follow the rules Diana had established. “Why should I have seen it? You never said anything to indicate conditions changed.”

That was true enough.
Diana couldn’t deny it. She might have been compelled to return to Lexington again and again but every time, she had the impulse to flee. It wouldn’t have taken much to have made her leave. But surely she had said something to tell Jessie how important she was. Even if she didn’t, why else would she have returned to Lexington so often?

Jessie pressed on, leaning against the table. She must have sensed Diana’s lack of defense or maybe she just thought it unfair Diana thought her so blind. “Even the night we had the fight over Julie. Do you remember what triggered it?”

Diana struggled to remember. She couldn’t exactly remember what had been said except Jessie had erupted when Diana said she was still holding on to Julie.

Jessie continued when Diana didn’t answer. “I asked if you were sorry about us always ending up in bed when you came to town, and you told me how wonderful you thought I was. And then I asked why we hadn’t done something about it.”

Diana slowly nodded. She had been so full of anticipation when she had come to town. She just knew this was the weekend that was going to change things. When Jessie had asked the question why, Diana had thought …oh, hell, after this many years, what did it matter what she had thought? “And I said you were still holding on to Julie. It was like turning a fire hose on a campfire. Not even the embers survived.”

Jessie wouldn’t look at Diana. Maybe she also thought it was an opportunity missed. “I wasn’t exactly thinking of Julie at the time,” she admitted. “In fact, I had been thinking about Julie less and less. I thought you were using her as an excuse, you didn’t want me for anything more than just someone who would be there for you when you were in the area. Saved you from going out and having to find someone.”

Diana looked at her in disbelief, her jaw slightly dropping before she realized it. She closed her mouth, but Jessie went on without seeming to notice.

“And then,” Jessie plowed on, recounting the night according to her, “we tried going out to dinner. I tried to bring it up again and you still didn’t say anything about how you felt. In fact, you brought up that other woman, the one you loved but who was already committed. Everything you said just reinforced the idea I was only there to be on the side, good enough to sleep with when you were in town but nothing more.”

“Jessie,” Diana protested, “that other woman was you!”

Jessie looked up at her and came back with “I know that now but I didn’t realize it then. Everything you said just indicated to me why you wanted me on the side. I felt like I’d blown it, asked too many questions. It was going to be all over, and I’d just lost you completely. I wasn’t even going to have you part time.” She turned away as if she couldn’t face Diana with this admission. “I wanted you so much, I was even willing to accept that.”

Oh, my God, what an idiot I was.

“And then we went back to the hotel. Here I thought I was out the door and couldn’t believe you still wanted me that night.” Jessie shivered as she looked over the open field. “Nothing I’ve had since has ever matched that night. I felt for the first time, I really had you, you gave me everything you had. And everything I had feared about being a diversion for you, like I was just some toy for your amusement, got blown away. That night, I felt like you trusted me enough to show me all of you, that there was true openness between us. For the first time I felt I could lean on you, and you’d be there, you knew I’d be there for you. I felt like we were the only two people in the world and we mattered to each other.” Jessie’s words stopped, her expression changed, relaxed.

And the next morning…oh, God.

Abruptly Jessie turned back to Diana and she was brisk again. “And the next morning, you found my badge.”

Diana closed her eyes, remembering her fight-or-flight response, her sudden unreasonable panic. She couldn’t say anything. Even now, she could remember the shock. She forced herself to look at Jessie.

“I know now why you reacted the way you did,” Jessie went on. She avoided looking at Diana. “But I didn’t then. And you were—” she fumbled for the word “—strange for the rest of the weekend. I didn’t know what was going on. Then you were gone. I had no way of contacting you, knowing what happened. I didn’t know what scared you, and to be honest, your discovery of my being a cop wasn’t exactly at the top of the list.”

Really? Like what else could it be?
Diana’s curiosity got the best of her. “What did you think it was?”

Jessie gave a careless shrug. “Oh, I thought maybe you thought you were being unfaithful to that other woman. Maybe scared because we’d had such an intense night. Maybe you were afraid you went too far with me, exposed too much. Maybe because what I thought was trust, you saw as exposure.” She looked away. “You were gone so long. I didn’t think you were ever coming back.”

Diana took in Jessie’s explanations. Maybe there was a bit of truth in what Jessie had thought. That had been a fateful summer for Diana. She had been so far away, unable to reach Jessie, and she had learned how much she really wanted her, wanted a life with her. When Papa had said it was time to decide, she had pretty much made up her mind. All she had to do was to see if Jessie was willing. “And then Julie arrived back in town.”

Jessie nodded. She picked up the napkin from the table and absently began to shred it. “I was shattered. Vulnerable. Maybe if she hadn’t returned right then, I’d have done something different. But just the timing. I think I’m just a side dish, and then you.” She stopped and shook her head, then went on. “You made me feel like there was an
us
, there was something real between us. And then immediately you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t explain and then you’re gone. And then Julie’s there, apologizing, saying she’s still interested. I still feel like I abandoned her years ago. She’s attentive, she’s there, every day. I’d been using her as an excuse for so long, I felt like I was obligated.”