The Lonely Hearts Club

by Radclyffe

  “Ah,” Liz said teasingly. “An adrenaline junkie?”

  Reilly nodded, not offended. That was the simple answer, and partially true. “Maybe. I get a charge out of being in the hot seat, I guess. Thinking on my feet, knowing that there’s no time to do anything except follow your instincts.”

  “You enjoy the challenge.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do,” Reilly said. “Don’t you, doing what you do? Duking it out in court?”

  “I like pitting my mind against my opponent, outmaneuvering them mentally,” Liz replied contemplatively. “I like finding the weak point in the argument and turning it into a weapon.”

  Reilly chuckled. “You sound like you enjoy winning.”

  “I suppose I do.” Liz wondered at the personal turn in the conversation. She had lunch with her colleagues at the firm several times a week, and she didn’t think in almost eight years she’d ever had more than half a dozen personal conversations. And here she was, having one with a stranger. Maybe that explained her willingness to talk about herself—after today she’d never see Reilly Danvers again, so she didn’t have anything to fear.

  “What did I say?” Reilly asked, pushing her cup and the pile of white Styrofoam chips aside.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look upset. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “No. Sorry. Just a lot on my mind.” Liz schooled her expression to relax. “You asked about my work. In many ways, it’s like an elaborate game of chess. The aspect I enjoy most is uncovering the subtle facts in a case that will make the difference in the verdict.”

  “And the truth?” Reilly asked quietly. “Is that part of it, too?”

  Liz searched Reilly’s eyes, looking for reproach, but found none. “I like to think so.”

  *

  Candace half-stood as Liz slid in opposite her in the booth, next to Bren. “We were about to send out a search party!”

  “I’m only fifteen minutes late,” Liz said with a wry smile. Candace was always volatile, but she didn’t usually hover. For the last two months, though, she’d been hovering quite a lot. Most of the time, Liz didn’t mind, but today her nerves were raw. “I had a bit of an accident—well, not really an accident,” she hastened to add when alarm flashed across Candace’s face, “more like an encounter.” She laughed. “I collided with a surgeon and knocked her flat. I only thought it was right to buy her a couple of aspirins by way of an apology.”

  “You left us sitting here worrying while you bought some surgeon…” Candace narrowed her eyes. “Was she cute?”

  Brenda groaned softly.

  “Yes,” Liz said indulgently, recognizing the Candace she knew and loved coming to the surface, “she’s very cute.”

  “Still, even if she was hot…was she hot?”

  “Yes,” Liz replied, thinking that Reilly Danvers was definitely hot, if you went for the intense, darkly attractive types. Which she didn’t. She had always been drawn to the brightly burning extroverts like Candace and Julia. At the thought of Julia, her heart ached. Even as she struggled to push the sorrow aside, she wondered as she had so frequently over the last eight weeks, if the pain was from missing Julia or just from knowing she had lived six years of a lie.

  Brenda, with her usual quiet sensitivity, touched Liz’s arm. “You okay?”

  Liz clasped her friend’s hand. “Yes, I’m fine. Thanks.”

  Candace, seemingly having forgotten her interest in Reilly Danvers and whether she was a potential bedmate, reached across the table and took Liz’s other hand, joining the three of them in the old familiar circle. “So, honey, what did the doctor say?”

  Liz looked from one expectant face to the other. Brenda, who spent her days directing the rare books department in the Temple University library and her nights in some sort of scholarly pursuit that Liz had yet to completely understand. At five-foot-four, raven-haired, doe-eyed Brenda had women following her at any kind of gathering, but she rarely dated. And Candace. Candace, who had stolen Liz’s heart when Liz should have been old enough to know better, and who had casually, innocently broken it on her way to the next effortless conquest. Her two best friends. One ex-lover. So different, and yet together, forming a whole.

  For nine years they’d shared secrets, heartbreaks, the joy of new beginnings and the pain of breaking up. The three had forged something that went beyond friendship and created a family in a far more intimate way than anything Liz shared with most of her blood relatives. Her friends looked at her now, with worry and expectation.

  A few minutes earlier, as she had crossed the campus from the University Hospital to the bar where they had hung out in their carefree student days, she had considered what she would say when they asked the inevitable question. What would she tell them, when she herself wasn’t certain how she felt about the news? She wanted to give herself time, time to examine a future that was so very different than what she had anticipated just three months before. But now, sitting with her friends, the family she had made, she knew that time would not change her answer.

  With a tremulous smile that for once she could not control, Liz said, “You’re both going to be aunts.”

  Chapter Two

  “What are you going to tell Julia?” Brenda asked softly.

  “Not a damn thing,” Liz said sharply. Brenda’s gentle smile never wavered, but Liz made her living, and quite a successful one, reading the subtle expressions and body language that most people missed. Her tone had stung, and her misery wasn’t Bren’s fault.

  “I’m sorry, Bren.” Liz squeezed Bren’s hand and then let go of both Bren’s and Candace’s. She settled back in the booth with a sigh. “I’m jumpy today. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. You’re allowed,” Brenda said.

  “I’ll tell you what you should say to that miserable two-timing bitch,” Candace seethed. “You should tell her to take the next train back to Hoboken, or wherever the hell she came from, and to take her little graduate student girlfriend with her.”

  “It’s Hackensack,” Liz clarified, “and since Julia just got tenure last fall, I don’t think she’s planning on moving anytime soon.”

  “Maybe we can get her fired,” Candace said, leaning forward with a feral glint in her sky blue eyes. “Don’t they have some rules against fucking your graduate students?”

  “Uh, Candace,” Bren interjected, “maybe we should just celebrate Liz’s news right now and plan our smear campaign later.”

  Liz ordered a Sprite from the waitress who stopped beside the table, and felt some of the bleak pall that had surrounded her lift a little on the wave of her friends’ unstaunchable support. “Julia isn’t involved with one of her graduate students, at least not that she mentioned. And even if she was, that’s not our problem.”

  Candace snorted and took a healthy gulp of her martini. “I hate that bitch.”

  “Thank you,” Liz said.

  “So,” Bren said into the sudden silence. “What do we do now?”

  We. Liz liked the way that sounded. She could count on these two. When she was lonely or scared, they would be there, and that was a big reason why single motherhood didn’t loom quite so dauntingly. Her friends would help her, even though they couldn’t heal the betrayal of discovering that her lover of almost six years hadn’t been in love with her for a long time. Julia had informed her of that at the same time as she had announced that she was currently involved in a passionate affair with a woman more than a decade younger than either of them. Almost worse than Julia’s infidelity was Liz’s loss of faith in her own judgment, because she hadn’t suspected Julia was on the verge of leaving. Oh, on some level, subconsciously, she had sensed something was wrong. They didn’t make love as much as they used to, especially not in the last year. Julia seemed to have more committee meetings and evening academic obligations than ever before, so they saw less and less of one another. In retrospect, it hadn’t been the best time to start a family, but at thirty-five, Liz was running out of time. They
’d always planned on having children, and in the midst of actually preparing for the reality of it, she hadn’t noticed that Julia wasn’t really involved. Obviously, she hadn’t noticed a lot of things.

  “Stupid,” Liz muttered.

  “No you’re not,” Bren said, as if she’d read Liz’s mind. “Trusting. Not stupid.”

  Liz fixed Bren with a stare. “Actually, I think they’re one and the same.”

  *

  Reilly’s head snapped back and she bit down hard on the rubber mouth guard clamped between her teeth. She kept her gloved hands raised in front of her chest and tucked her elbows tight to her sides, dropping back with one leg in anticipation of the roundhouse kick she knew was coming. Blocking the kick with one arm, she snapped a back fist and caught nothing but air.

  “Halt,” Master Drew Clark called, and Reilly immediately shifted into her ready stance, fists extended in front of her, legs spread shoulder width apart.

  “Come with me,” her tall, blond instructor ordered.

  Reilly followed her friend and teacher to the far corner of the room, away from the other students. “Sorry.”

  “For what?” Drew asked, indicating Reilly’s gloves with a tilt of her head. “You can take those off. You’re done for tonight.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Reilly jerked loose the Velcro on the wrist of her right glove with her teeth, clamped the glove under her left arm, and pulled her hand free. Then she rapidly removed her left glove and placed them both on the bench against the wall.

  “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t train if you’d worked all night,” Drew said.

  “Yes ma’am, we did,” Reilly said, confused. As usual, she could read nothing in Drew’s face beyond the usual intense focus she displayed in the dojang. A few inches taller, Drew was a good twenty pounds lighter but all muscle, and the fiercest fighting machine Reilly had ever seen. If she didn’t know the ex-Marine sergeant outside the confines of this twenty-by-forty-foot room where Drew taught women to defend themselves and to trust in themselves, Reilly might have thought Drew had no more feelings than a machine. But Reilly knew otherwise. “I didn’t work last night. Well, I did, but it was quiet and I slept five hours. That’s plenty for me.”

  “Then what happened today?”

  “Nothing.”

  Drew didn’t object, but Reilly felt her probing gaze. Nothing had happened—if she didn’t count being taken out by a femme in heels, which surely didn’t warrant mentioning at the moment. The rest of the day had been typical—an MVA with two patients requiring urgent fracture reduction in the OR, a delayed bone graft on another, and a few washouts on patients waiting for flap closure. It was true, she’d thought about Liz Ramsey every now and then, in between cases—waiting for the patient to come up in the elevator from the surgical ICU, waiting for a room to be cleaned, waiting for anesthesia to put her next patient under. Hurry up and wait was the order of the day in the OR. She’d had fleeting glimpses of Liz’s all too infrequent smiles, her melodic but oddly weary voice, and the brief glimmers of her sharp wit and bright mind. It had been a long time since a woman had occupied her thoughts, even for a few seconds. A long time since Annie.

  Involuntarily, Reilly shuddered. She knew Drew would see it and hurried on. “Nothing happened. But maybe I am tired. I missed that block, didn’t I?”

  “The one where I could have taken your head off?” Drew asked levelly. “Yes, you missed it completely. That’s a dangerous lapse, Master Danvers.”

  “Yes ma’am, I know.”

  Drew’s eyes flickered to the rest of the room, then she rested a hand on Reilly’s shoulder. She wouldn’t have done it if any of the students could have seen the personal gesture. She never even touched her own lover intimately within the walls of the dojang. “Are you okay, Reilly?”

  “I am, thanks. I had an interesting accident earlier. Nothing serious.” Reilly grinned. “I’ll tell you about it later, over a beer. Are we going out?”

  “I think Sean plans to. Why don’t you take the under-belts through their forms for the rest of the class.”

  Reilly snapped her arms to her sides and bowed. “Yes ma’am.”

  *

  “Let me get this straight,” Sean Gray said, leaning close to Reilly so that the students at the adjoining table wouldn’t overhear. Her deep hazel eyes sparkled with amusement. “You got taken off guard and dumped on your ass?”

  Reilly knew she would take some ribbing if she told her story, especially from her friend and friendly rival Sean, Drew Clark’s lover. When Reilly had started training at the dojang four years earlier, Sean had just earned her second degree black belt, putting Sean two levels below Reilly’s fourth dan. And even though Reilly’s rank automatically placed her in a senior position to Sean, that had not prevented them from becoming friends. She was especially grateful that both Sean and Drew never pushed her for personal details that she didn’t want to reveal. The dojang had become her refuge, and in those early, difficult years, she’d spent more time there than anywhere else except the hospital.

  “She came out of the stairwell like a torpedo,” Reilly said in her own defense. “It wasn’t just a question of being unprepared, she was right on top of me before I could blink. Splat.”

  “Splat,” Drew mused. “I can see how that offensive tactic would work.”

  “The splat attack,” Sean laughed while shifting her chair closer to Drew and curling one hand around the inside of her leg, just above her knee.

  Reilly noticed the familiar gesture and felt a pang of longing. Sean didn’t look anything like Annie—Annie had been small and blond, whereas Sean was dark-haired and solidly muscled from years of training, but Sean had the same ready smile, and she touched Drew with the same easy familiarity that Annie had used to touch her. She missed that connection, despite everything else. She wondered why she was thinking about Annie more today than she had in months. To her surprise, Reilly realized that she didn’t think about her every waking moment the way she had the first couple of years. A little disturbed, she wondered when that had changed.

  “Maybe you need some more time sparring,” Drew said seriously.

  Sean looked as if she was about to disagree, then quickly fell silent. Reilly was always impressed with the way Sean balanced her personal relationship with Drew and her role as Drew’s student. Not an easy line to walk.

  “I don’t mind more workouts if you think I need them,” Reilly said. “It’s just the competition I need to avoid. I can’t afford another broken finger, especially not now that I have a staff position.”

  Drew nodded, covering Sean’s hand where it rested on her thigh. “Of course, you’re probably not going to be attacked by attorneys in full battle mode too frequently.”

  Laughing, Reilly caught the glint of amusement in Drew’s eyes. As serious as she knew Drew to be about the importance of training and self-defense, she had grown to appreciate Drew’s subtle humor. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll get lucky again.”

  “Oh ho,” Sean said softly. “So it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant experience.”

  “Unpleasant?” Reilly thought back to the twenty minutes she had spent in the cafeteria over coffee and conversation with Liz Ramsey. Liz was a stranger, but she had felt comfortable with her, even relaxed. She had been curious about her, too—wondering what caused the sadness that hovered just below the surface of her appraising green eyes. She hadn’t been curious about a woman, about anyone, in a long time. “No. If you don’t count the bump on my head and the blow to my pride, it was—sort of nice.”

  Sean gave Reilly a long look, then just nodded. Reilly was grateful that she didn’t have to elaborate, because she didn’t have an explanation for why she had thought more about Liz Ramsey in one day than she had about anyone else in years.

  *

  When her cell phone rang at a little after eleven p.m., Liz checked the readout before answering. She didn’t do the kind of legal work where emergencies arose in the middle of the night, and if it
was some eager or anxious young associate, then they could email her and she’d check it in the morning. When she saw the number, she answered. “Hi, Candace.”

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “No,” Liz said, laying the paperback romance novel aside. “I was reading.”

  “Something serious or something trashy?”

  Liz laughed. “Something hot. Melanie Richards’ latest.”

  “Fallen Angels?”

  “You read it already?”

  “I’ve worked my way through the good parts,” Candace said. “A couple of times each. God, that woman delivers more orgasms per page than any writer I know. I can hardly make it through a chapter without stopping to—”

  “I get it,” Liz interrupted, not wanting any further incentive to recall exactly what Candace liked to do while reading something hot. Not while she was lying alone feeling completely unaroused and unarousable. Nothing like getting dumped and feeling faintly nauseous a good part of the day to kill one’s libido. “Something wrong?”

  “No. Just restless. Wanted to hear a friendly voice. You know.”

  “Uh-huh. No one to keep you company tonight?”

  Candace laughed, a satisfied purr. “You know I never let them stay all night. Besides, she had an early meeting in the morning, so I had an excuse to send her home after round three.”

  “So why are you really calling instead of basking in the afterglow?” Liz felt Candace’s hesitation. “Confess.”