RainStorm

that would have grieved forever
    doesn't have to, or minds that would have been destroyed by
    trauma remain intact."
    She paused again, then added, "I should quit? Because my superiors
    who ought to know better don't trust me? Yes, then I can
    explain to the bereft and the amputees and the permanently traumatized
    that I could have done something to save them, but didn't,
    because I wasn't treated sufficiently respectfully at the office."
    She looked at me, her cheeks flushed, her shoulders rising and
    falling with her breathing.
    I looked back, feeling an odd combination of admiration, attraction,
    and shame. I took a big swallow of the Laphroaig, finishing
    it. I refreshed her glass, then mine.
    "You're lucky," I said, after a moment.
    She blinked. "What?"
    I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples for a moment. "To believe
    in something the way you do ..." I opened my eyes. "Christ,
    I can't imagine it."
    There was a long pause. Then she said, "It doesn't feel lucky."
    "No, I'm sure it doesn't. I used the wrong word. I should have
    said 'fortunate.' It's not the same thing."
    I rubbed my temples again. "I'm sorry I said what I said. That
    you shouldn't bother. Over the years, I've developed the habit
    of. . . preempting betrayal. Of thinking that the possibility of betrayal,
    and defending against it, is paramount. And maybe that's true
    for me. But it shouldn't be true for everyone. It shouldn't be true
    for someone like you."
    For a few moments, neither of us spoke. Then she asked, "What
    are you thinking?"

I waited a second, then said, "That I like the way you use your
    hands when you talk." Telling her part of it.
    She glanced down at her hands for a second, as though checking
    to see whether they were doing something right then, and
    laughed quietly. "I don't usually do that. You pissed me off."
    "You weren't only doing it when you were pissed."
    "Oh. Well, I do it when I forget myself."
    "When does that happen?"
    "Rarely."
    "You should do it more often."
    "It's dangerous."
    "Why?"
    "You know why. You have to protect yourself."
    Her expression was so neutral that I knew she had to be consciously
    controlling it. She took a sip of the Laphroaig and asked,
    "And you? What do you do?"
    "I don't get close."
    "I told you, I don't have that luxury."
    I looked at her and said, "I've never thought of it as a luxury."
    She looked back. The look was noticeably long. Definitely
    frank. Possibly inviting.
    I got up and sat down next to her on the couch. One of her
    eyebrows rose a notch and she said, "I thought you just said you
    don't get close." But she was smiling a little, those warm notes of
    irony and humor in her eyes.
    "That's the problem with making your own rules," I said. "There's
    no one around to straighten you out when you break them."
    "I thought you said you weren't going to fuck me."
    "I'm not."
    I looked at her for another moment, then leaned slowly forward.
    She watched me, her eyes focusing on mine, then dropping
    momentarily to my lips, and moving back to my eyes again.
    I paused. Our faces were a few centimeters apart. There was the
    hint of rare perfume, maybe something she had bottled uniquely
    for her in expensive cut glass at an exclusive shop in Paris or Milan.
    The scent was there but you couldn't quite get ahold of it, like the
    remnant of a dream upon waking, or an afterimage fading from the
    retina after an intense flash of light, or the memory of a face you
    knew and loved a lifetime earlier. Something just real enough to bring
    you in, to make you want to pull it closer, to get it back before it
    flickers away again and is irretrievably lost.
    I inclined my head further and kissed her. She accepted the kiss
    but didn't exactly embrace it, and after a moment I drew back
    slightly and looked at her.
    "Some people might call what you're doing 'mixed signals,'" she
    said. She was smiling a little, but her tone was serious enough.
    "I have a conflicted nature. All the military shrinks said so."
    "A few minutes ago you were slapping me down, remember?"
    I shook my head. "That wasn't you. It was your alter ego. I'm
    not interested in her."
    "How do you know you'll be interested in what's behind her?"
    "I like what I've seen so far."
    She looked at me. "Maybe you were right. Maybe I can only be
    an actress. A poseur."
    "That would be sad if it were true."
    "You're the one who said it."
    "I was trying to get under your skin."
    "You did."
    "Show me I was wrong."
    "I don't know that you were."
    I