Angels Fall

habit of it."
    "I love you. I'm in love with you."
    She heard absolutely nothing for ten full seconds. And when he did speak, she caught the faintest trace of fear mixed in with the annoyance.
    "Hell. No good deed goes unpunished."
    She laughed, rich and full and long. And the warmth of it soothed her raw throat, her raw nerves. "And that's why, I must be out of my mind. Don't worry about it, Brody." She turned now, noted he was staring at her with the cautious respect a man shows a ticking bomb.
    "Underneath all the neuroses, I'm a sensible, contemporary woman. You're not responsible for my feelings or under obligation to reciprocate. But when you've gone through what I've been through, you learn not to take things for granted. Time, people, feelings. My therapist is the one who started me keeping a journal." she continued as she packed what she'd need. "To get my feelings, my emotions—ones I just couldn't articulate—out on paper. It's helped me do just thai, and made it easier to articulate them. Like now. for instance."
    "You re mixing up trust, and a misplaced sense of gratitude, and the fact we've got heat."
    "My head may be screwed up, but my heart's fine. But if it scares you, I can call Linda-gail and stay with her until I figure out what to do next."
    "Just get what you need," he said abruptly. "Including whatever it takes to cook this stuff."

    SHE WASN'T in love with him. But having her  think  she was worried him. Here he was, trying to help her out—which was probably his first mistake—and now she was complicating everything, just like a woman, he thought, wrapping ribbons around everything.
    They were choking him.
    At least she wasn't talking about it now. Or making herself sick over what had happened in her apartment.
    As he'd known it would, the act of preparing a meal settled her down. Writing could do that for him, so he understood how it worked. You got sucked into the work, and sucked out of what was bothering you.
    But she was going to have to go back onto the boggy ground of what was happening. If his theory held any weight, she was in trouble.
    "You want some wine?" he asked her.
    "No. No, thanks. I'll stick with water." She arranged the dressed field greens, tossed with raw carrot  curls, on small plates. "The rest will take a few more minutes, so we can start with this." He figured he'd eaten more salad in a couple of weeks with her than he normally did in six months on his own.
    "Joanie's going to have a fit when she sees that bathroom."
    "So paint it."
    Reece stabbed at her salad. "I can't paint the tiles, the floor."
    "Mac's probably got some solvent or something that'll deal with it. The place isn't a frigging penthouse. Slim. Needed work anyway."
    "There's a silver lining. Brody, I had lost time before. And memory lapses. Not in more than a year—or, ha ha, not that I can remember— but I experienced both."
    "Doesn't mean you are now, does it? I've been around you a lot the last couple weeks. I haven't seen you go into a fugue state or sleepwalk, or redecorate the cabin walls with messages from your subconscious. I haven't seen you do anything stranger than reorganize my kitchen drawers."
    "Organize," she corrected. "In order to be reorganized, they'd have had to have something at least resembling organization in the first place."
    "I could find stuff. Sooner or later." Since it was there, and hell, it was pretty damn good, he ate more salad. "Has anyone at Joanie's mentioned you did anything weird?"
    "Joanie thought it was weird I insisted I needed okra to make minestrone."
    "Okra is the weird boy of vegetables, after all. When you had this sort of thing happen before, in Boston, were you always alone?"
    She rose to put the finishing touches on the rest of the meal. '"No. I always felt worse about it because it might happen anywhere, anytime. After I got otit of the hospital—the first time—I stayed at my grandmother's. She took me shopping. Later, I found this hideous brown sweater in my drawer, and I asked her where it came from. I could see something was wrong by the way she looked at me, and when I pressed, she told me I'd bought it. That we'd had a conversation about it because she knew it wasn't my style. I told her, and the salesclerk, I had to have it because it was bulletproof." She flipped the scallops with a deft flick of the wrist. "Another time, she came into my room in the middle of the night because she heard all this racket. I was nailing my windows shut.