Mind Over Matter

parents nervous. They thought it would be best if their children stayed away from me.”
    “And that hurt,” he murmured.
    “Yes, that hurt a lot. Clarissa understood. She was comforting and really wonderful about it, but it hurt. I still had the dreams, but I stopped talking about them. Then my father died.”
    She stood, the heels of her hands pressed to her eyes as she struggled to rein in her emotions. “No, please.” She shook her head as she heard David shift on the stool as if to rise. “Just give me a minute.” On a long breath, she dropped her hands. “I knew he was dead. He was away on a selling trip, and I woke up in the middle of the night and knew. I got up and went into Clarissa. She was sitting up in bed, wide awake. I could see on her face that she was already grieving. We didn’t even say anything to each other, but I got into bed with her, and we just lay there together until the phone rang.”
    “And you were eight,” he murmured, trying to get some grip on it.
    “I was eight. After that, I started to block it off. Whenever I began to feel something, I’d just pull in. It got to the point where I could go for months—at one point, two years—without something touching it off. If I get angry or upset to the point where I lose control, I open myself up for it.”
    He remembered the way she’d stormed into the house, strong and ready for a fight. And the way she’d run out again, pale and terrified. “And I make you angry.”
    She turned to look at him for the first time since she’d begun to speak. “It seems that way.”
    The guilt was there. David wasn’t certain how to deal with it, or his own confusion. “Should I apologize?”
    “You can’t help being what you are any more than I can stop being what I am.”
    “Aurora, I think I understand your need to keep a handle on this thing, not to let it interfere with the day-to-day. I don’tunderstand why you feel you have to lock it out of your life like a disease.”
    She’d gone this far, she thought as she walked back to the counter. She’d finish. “When I was twenty, scrambling around and trying to get my business rolling, I met this man. He had this little shop on the beach, renting surfboards, selling lotion, that sort of thing. It was so, well, exciting, to see someone that free-spirited, that easygoing, when I was working ten hours a day just to scrape by. In any case, I’d never been involved seriously with a man before. There hadn’t been time. I fell flat on my face for this one. He was fun, not too demanding. Before I knew it we were on the point of being engaged. He bought me this little ring with the promise of diamonds and emeralds once we hit it big. I think he meant it.” She gave a little laugh as she slid onto the stool again. “In any case, I felt that if we were going to be married we shouldn’t have any secrets.”
    “You hadn’t told him?”
    “No.” She said it defiantly, as if waiting for disapproval. When none came, she lowered her gaze and went on. “I introduced him to Clarissa, and then I told him that I—I told him,” she said flatly. “He thought it was a joke, sort of dared me to prove it. Because I felt so strongly about having everything up front between us, well, I guess you could say I proved it. After—he looked at me as though…” She swallowed and struggled to keep the hurt buried.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I suppose I should have expected it.” Though she shrugged it off, she picked up the spoon and began to run the handle through her fingers. “I didn’t see him for days after that. I went to him with some grand gesture in mind, like giving him back his ring. It’s almost funny, looking back on it now, the way he wouldn’t look at me, the way he kept his distance. Tooweird.” She looked up again with a brittle smile. “I was just plain too weird.”
    And she was still hurting. But he didn’t reach out to her. He wasn’t quite sure how. “The wrong man at the wrong time.”
    A.J. gave an impatient shake of her head. “I was the wrong woman. Since then, I’ve learned that honesty isn’t always the most advantageous route. Do you have any idea what it would do to me professionally if my clients knew? Those I didn’t lose would ask me to tell them what role to audition for. People would start asking me to fly to Vegas with them so I could tell them what number to bet at the roulette table.”
    “So you and Clarissa downplay your relationship and you block