The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

the curve of her breast and all but stopped her heart—“in secret?”
    “I didn’t come here looking for romance.”
    Hadn’t she? he thought. With her myths and legends and tales. “Looking or not, you’ll have it.” On that score his mind was made up. “And when I make love with you, the first time, it’ll be long and slow and sweet. That’s a promise. Walk back with me now, before the way you’re looking at me makes me break that promise as soon as I’ve made it.”
    “You just want to be in charge. In control of the situation.”
    He took her hand again in the friendliest and most annoying of manners. “I suppose I’m accustomed to being so. But if you want to take over and seduce me, darling Jude, I can promise to be weak and willing.”
    She laughed, damn it, before she could stop herself. “I’m sure we both have work to do.”
    “But you’ll come see me,” he continued as they walked. “You’ll sit and have a glass of wine in my pub so I can look at you and suffer.”
    “God, you’re Irish,” she whispered.
    “To the bone.” He lifted her hand and nipped her knuckle. “And Jude, by the way, you’re damn good at kissing.”
    “Hmmm,” was the safest response she could think of.
     
    But she went to the pub, and sat and listened to stories. Over the next days as spring took a firmer hold on Ardmore, Jude could often be found at the pub for an hour ortwo in the evening, or the afternoon. She listened, recorded, took notes. And as the word spread, others with stories came to tell them, or to be entertained by them.
    She filled tapes and reams of pages and dutifully transcribed and analyzed them at her computer while she sipped at what was becoming her habitual cup of tea.
    If sometimes she dreamed herself into the stories of romance and magic, she thought it harmless enough. Even useful if she stretched things a bit. After all, she could understand the meanings and the motives all the better if the stories and the actions in them became more personal.
    It wasn’t as if she was going to waste time actually writing it that way. An academic paper had no room for fancies or fantasies. She was only exploring until she found the core of her thesis, then she’d tidy up the language and delete the ramblings.
    What the hell are you going to do with it, Jude? she asked herself. What do you really think you’re going to do even if you polish and perfect and hammer it until it’s dry as dust? Try to have it published in some professional journal absolutely no one reads for pleasure? Use it to try to kick off a lecture tour?
    Oh, the idea of that happening, however remote the possibility, felt like an entire troop of Boy Scouts tying knots in her stomach.
    For an instant she nearly buried her face in her hands and gave in to despair. Nothing was ever going to come of this paper, this project. It was self-defeating to believe differently. No one was ever going to stand around at a faculty function and discuss the insights and interests of Jude F. Murray’s paper. Worse, she didn’t want them to.
    It was no more than a kind of therapy, a way to pull her back from the edge of a crisis she couldn’t even identify.
    What good had all those years of study and workaccomplished if she couldn’t even find the right terms for her own crises?
    Poor self-esteem, bruised ego, a lack of belief in her own femininity, career dissatisfaction.
    But what was under all of that? Really under it. Blurred identity? she mused. Maybe that was part of it. She’d lost herself somewhere along the line until whatever was left, whatever she’d been able to recognize, had been so pale, so unattractive, that she’d run from it.
    To what?
    Here, she thought and was more than a little surprised to realize that her fingers were racing over the keyboard, her thoughts were speeding out of her head and onto the page.
     
    I ran here, and here I feel somehow more real, certainly more at home than I ever did in the house William and I bought, or the condo I moved into after he’d grown tired of me. Certainly more at home than in the classroom.
    Oh, God, oh, God, I hated the classroom. Why couldn’t I ever admit it, just say it out loud? I don’t want to do this, don’t want to be this. I want something else. Nearly anything else would do.
    How did I become such a coward, and worse, so pitifully boring? Why do I, even now with no one to answer to but myself, question this project when it pleases me so much? When it