Lessons Learned

she could be. What she might’ve been.”
    “The choice was hers, Juliet. Just as your life is yours.”
    “I don’t want to ever be bound to anyone, anyone who could humiliate me that way.” She lifted her head again. “I won’t put myself in my mother’s position. Not for anyone.”
    “Do you see all relationships as being so imbalanced?”
    With a shrug, she drank again. “I suppose I haven’t seen so many of them.”
    For a moment he was silent. Carlo understood fidelity, the need for it, and the lack of it. “Perhaps we have something in common. I don’t remember my father well, I saw him little. He, too, was unfaithful to my mother.”
    She looked over at him, but he didn’t see any surprise in her face. It was as though she expected such things. “But he committed his adultery with the sea. For months he’d be gone, while she raised us, worked, waited. When he’d come home,she’d welcome him. Then he’d go again, unable to resist. When he died, she mourned. She loved him, and made her choice.”
    “It’s not fair, is it?”
    “No. Did you think love was?”
    “It’s not something I want.”
    He remembered once another woman, a friend, telling him the same thing when she was in turmoil. “We all want love, Juliet.”
    “No.” She shook her head with the confidence born of desperation. “No, affection, respect, admiration, but not love. It steals something from you.”
    He looked at her as she stood in the path of the lamplight. “Perhaps it does,” he murmured. “But until we love, we can’t be sure we needed what was lost.”
    “Maybe it’s easier for you to say that, to think that. You’ve had many lovers.”
    It should have amused him. Instead, it seemed to accent a void he hadn’t been aware of. “Yes. But I’ve never been in love. I have a friend—” again he thought of Summer “—once she told me love was a merry-go-round. Maybe she knew best.”
    Juliet pressed her lips together. “And an affair?”
    Something in her voice had him looking over. For the second time he went to her, but slowly. “Perhaps it’s just one ride on the carousel.”
    Because her fingers weren’t steady, Juliet set down the glass. “We understand each other.”
    “In some ways.”
    “Carlo—” She hesitated, then admitted the decision had already been made before she crossed the hall. “Carlo, I’ve never taken much time for carousels, but I do want you.”
    How should he handle her? Odd, he’d never had to think things through so carefully before. With some women, he’d have been flamboyant, sweeping her up, carrying her off. With another he might have been impulsive, tumbling with her to the carpet. But nothing he’d ever done seemed as important as the first time with Juliet.
    Words for a woman had always come easily to him. The right phrase, the right tone had always come as naturally as breathing. He could think of nothing. Even a murmur might spoil the simplicity of what she’d said to him and how she’d said it. So he didn’t speak.
    He kissed her where they stood, not with the raging passion he knew she could draw from him, not with the hesitation she sometimes made him feel. He kissed her with the truth and the knowledge that longtime lovers often experience. They came to each other with separate needs, separate attitudes, but with this, they locked out the past. Tonight was for the new, and for renewing.
    She’d expected the words, the flash and style that seemed so much a part of him. Perhaps she’d even expected something of triumph. Again, he gave her the different and the fresh with no more than the touch of mouth to mouth.
    The thought came to her, then was discounted, that he was no more certain of his ground than she. Then he held out his hand. Juliet put hers in it. Together they walked to the bedroom.
    If he’d set the scene for a night of romance, Carlo would’ve added flowers with a touch of spice, music with the throb of passion. He’d have given her the warmth of candlelight and thefun of champagne. Tonight, with Juliet, there was only silence and moonlight. The maid had turned down the bed and left the drapes wide. White light filtered through shadows and onto white sheets.
    Standing by the bed, he kissed her palms, one by one. They were cool and carried a hint of her scent. At her wrist her pulse throbbed. Slowly, watching her, he loosened the tie of her robe. With his eyes still on hers, he brought his hands to her shoulders and slipped the