Read romance book story online

Honorbound
Tracy Hughes

"Century of American Romance - The 1970s"

Harlequin American Romance #381
February 1, 1991
ISBN: 0373163819

This book is for all of those who experienced the Vietnam war-
those who fought, those who fled...
those who survived, those who didn't...
those who suffered ridicule and hatred for their choices,
and those who tucked their memories into a dusty chamber of their minds
and closed the door.
It is for all the loved ones who waited behind,
those who cried out against the war
and those who, like me, were molded by the changes it brought about.
This child of the seventies salutes you all.

Chapter One

August 1973

The duffel bag lying on the musty bed was almost full, its contents carefully selected from the excess baggage Johnny Malone had brought with him from the airport a week ago. In it, he'd rolled his frayed bell-bottoms that he'd bought three years ago before enlisting, a pair of Keds that he'd bought at a mall in Hawaii on his way home, and an embroidered chambray shirt that wasn't really his, but that Hollinger had mixed up with his stuff when they'd shipped out. He would give it back, he thought, if he ever saw him again. But that wasn't likely.

Smoke burned his eyes from the cigarette between his lips, and he took it between his finger and thumb, tapped the ashes onto the planked floor and blew out a slow white cloud that faded into the air. He propped a bare foot on the frame of the bed and tangled his fingers in the silver chain that held his dog tags.

Bob Dylan's untrained voice asking where his "blue-eyed son" had been droned from the speakers of the transistor radio. Feeling as though the work had been written for him, Johnny looked around at his family's dusty lake house. It seemed more of a transitional station from one life to another than a resting place for his bruised and battered spirit before he was inducted back into "the world." But he couldn't stay here forever, he thought. He had to get home, wherever the hell that was.

The foreboding lyrics of Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" forced him to the closet, where he'd left his fatigues, the boots that had taken him miles through the mud-sucking jungle, and the other uniforms and gear that he didn't plan on needing again, because there was no going back where he'd been. He'd leave it here, he thought, along with the memories that tore at his scarred gut and the regrets that kept him hanging on to those memories.

But he couldn't leave it all. His hand closed around his dog tags again, and he decided that he'd wear them a little longer-just until his discharge papers came and his freedom from the Marines was something he could see, something that didn't seem like a foggy dream from which he would awake to mortar fire and more casualties. He glanced at the dress blues lying freshly pressed on the bed and remembered the day he'd gotten his officer's commission and worn them for the first time, fully adorned with the lieutenant's braid, white gloves and all the cocky pride that the Marine Corps had instilled in him. Despite the lessons he'd learned since that day, he wasn't ready to wear them for the last time. Despite all those regrets and haunting memories, he couldn't escape the fact that he'd spent his whole childhood dreaming of being a Marine.

Stubbing out his cigarette, he stepped out of his cutoff shorts, tossed them into the duffel bag and began putting on his uniform. He'd wasted enough time, he thought, and Meg's feelings would be hurt if he wasted any more. Stranger or not, she was his sister, the only family he had left since his mother died while he was gone. She would have wanted them to bond together. The changes would have to be dealt with sooner or later, he thought. Might as well be today.

He buttoned the last brass button on his coat and picked up his hat, and let his eyes stray to the closet where his past was stored like a Pandora's box of sleeping ghosts. No time for looking back, he thought. From now on, he would only look ahead. Instead of doubting, he would learn to hope. In place of fear, he would cultivate security. And if there wasn't a home here for him anymore, he would build one.

But as for now, he had a blind date with reality. And like it or not, it was time to keep it.

THE CROWD SWELLED in the Georgia State football stadium as the local rock band blared out its own rendition of "Maggie May," though the lead vocalist's voice couldn't be mistaken for the raspy signature of Rod Stewart. Above the band a banner flapped in the hot August breeze, declaring the event a Ceasefire Celebration, a self-proclaimed victory for Carrie Hunter's group, the American Reform Movement, which had spent the last six years organizing protest rallies, petition drives and countrywide demonstrations to end the Vietnam War, among other things. The end had finally come, but the victory was bittersweet, for it had come much too late-fifty-eight thousand dead American soldiers too late.

And now the membership in the ARM had dropped off and nobody cared much about reform anymore. Nixon could break as many laws as he wanted and hide securely behind executive privilege, Congress could turn their heads to the new problems the war had created, and the college students who filled the campuses today were more interested in partying and getting high than in making any changes. Nobody really gave a damn.

But Carrie wasn't prepared to give up. That was why the ARM had sponsored this concert on campus today. She hoped that at intermission, when she stood up to address the apathy-laden students who had come to rock to the music, she could raise their consciousness enough to recruit a few new members. There were still battles to be fought, more battles than a ranting minority could win alone.

The band ended the Rod Stewart song and picked up with the shrieking lyrics of Eric Clapton's "Layla," and the crowd roared its approval. Stooping down, for her Dacron skirt was too short for her to bend, Carrie salvaged a trampled ARM flier from the ground and dusted it off. It was the one that called for amnesty for all of the conscientious objectors who had left the country during the war, but instead of making someone think, it had been thoughtlessly dropped to the ground and stepped on. She wondered if it had even been read.

Trying to keep her spirits from plunging, Carrie tried to tune in to the music, telling herself that, at twenty-four, she wasn't old enough to feel removed from this generation. She could still make a difference as one of them.

Threading through the crowd, Carrie went back to her recruiting table and waited until it was time for her to speak. She'd turn them around if it was in her power, she thought.

She had come too far-lost too much-to stop fighting now.

THE ATLANTA STREETS HADN'T changed that much in two years, Johnny noticed with a little relief as the cab wove through town. Even the people looked much the same as when he had left, though he would feel out of place until his hair grew out again.

The song on the radio ended, and a nasally DJ began reading off the hourly news.

"Justice Department officials report that there has still been no compliance on the part of President Nixon to relinquish the subpoenaed White House tapes. Meanwhile, on this first day of the cease-fire in Laos and Cambodia, American troops-"

"Damn news." The cab driver cut off his radio and tossed Johnny a look over his shoulder, grinning like a next-door neighbor trying to be cordial.

"How many'd you kill in Nam?"

Though the question took him by surprise, Johnny didn't show it. Instead, he only stared back, his blue eyes a contrasting mixture of resentment and abysmal weariness-the same dull, battle-fatigued stare the cabbie saw in most of the GIs he drove home on their first day back to their hometown.

"I mean, any little kids, like that My Lai thing?"

"Pull over." Johnny's voice was quiet but held the firm confidence of a man accustomed to having his orders obeyed. The ponytailed cabby met his eyes in the rearview mirror and saw their whiplash glare.

"Right here?" he asked, looking back over his shoulder. "You can't get out here. That's the college campus."

"Just pull the hell over," Johnny said again. "I'll walk the rest of the way."

The driver swayed to the curb, shifted into park and waited as Johnny dug into his pocket, pulled out a ten dollar bill and thrust it over the seat as he got out. The wind whipped through his short-cropped black hair, but bucking the sudden thrust of freedom, he put his hat on.

"Hey, man, are you crazy? You can't walk through a college campus in uniform. They'll know you been to Vietnam."

The soldier swung around and peered back through the car door, that volatile glare blanching his icy blue eyes again. "I'm not ashamed of where I've been," he said.

"Yeah, well, you'll feel different after you've been home a coupla days." The cab driver stuffed the ten-dollar bill into his pocket. "You're in America now."

He'd been warned, Johnny reminded himself as he watched the cab pull out of sight. One didn't sweat out the last two official years of the unofficial war and not know that back home, people still had staunch opinions about the fighting going on there. He could take it, he thought. Just like he'd taken the mud swallowing his boots, and the mosquitoes swarming around his ears, and his buddies dropping like confetti.

He was home.

Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he started up the sidewalk, squinting against the sun at the street sign a block away, mentally measuring the distance to his sister's apartment just off campus.

He was in no hurry to get there, he thought, only to be doused in the face with the degree of change. When his mother died a year ago, he'd been in a hospital in Saigon after an encounter with a grenade. He hadn't made it home for the funeral, and when he was well enough to leave the hospital, he'd felt an angry, rebellious reluctance to go home and confront the aftermath of her burial. As long as he held off that confrontation, he'd told himself, she was still alive for him. So he'd forfeited his leave and gone back to his company-the only family he felt he really had left.

The concrete, marked with spray-painted graffiti that proclaimed Black is Beautiful and War Sucks, felt good beneath his feet, and the Atlanta air smelled clean, untainted, unlike the sweltering jungle air thick with human waste and wasted humans. In the distance, he heard a drum beat, then the bass-heavy vibration of a live band. Pulling a pack and lighter out of his pocket, he lit a cigarette.

He slowed his steps, straining to hear the song, to identify something familiar, something he could recognize on the campus that had once been his home... so many decisions ago.

It was a good rendition of "Suffragette City," a David Bowie tune he'd heard whenever he'd gotten near a radio in Da Nang. It had always made his squad members pick up their feet and bounce a little. He smiled, as if someone had chosen that song just for him, a welcome home for a vet who'd done his best.

He began to walk faster, following his ear and the sound of a crowd in the football stadium where he'd scored the winning point in three games his senior year. It was all coming back to him with stark familiarity-the freshly groomed August lawn, the billboard that read Good luck, Class of '73, the students ambling barefoot beneath their bell-bottoms from one idle destination to another.

The faces of the students he saw were carefree with pseudo-sophisticated innocence, unlike the faces of their contemporaries, who'd served with him overseas. The difference lightened his spirits and almost made him smile. Innocence was something he had begun to believe was another of America's war casualties. But it wasn't dead, he mused now as a feeling of peace dared to flit over him.

He walked faster, his strong legs carrying him easily across the expanse of grass to the stadium. The music grew louder, the crowd cheered, and Johnny felt his heart responding with a twist.

He reached the gates of the stadium and saw three college-aged men with hair stringing down past their shoulders and their hands full of fliers blocking the entrance.

"Haven't you heard, GI Joe?" one of them asked, not moving to let him pass. "The war's over."

"Tell me about it," Johnny said. He started to push past them, but one of them grabbed his arm and stopped him.

Slowly, Johnny turned around. "You got a problem?"

"Yeah, man," the scraggly-haired student said. "I got a problem with that uniform. It ain't welcome here."

The thin filament of Johnny's control stretched tighter, and Johnny eased his duffel bag off his shoulder and let it hang from one hand. "Are you gonna let me pass, or do I have to take on all three of you?"

The oblique hatred in the young men's faces altered a degree and one stepped back, taunting. "You got your gun on you, soldier? You gonna blow us away?"

"No," Johnny said, his eyes taking on a lethal amusement. "I'm gonna take you apart with my bare hands."

The young man glanced aside at his friends, all intention in his face suddenly draining with his color. Finally, they stepped aside, letting Johnny through.

"'Predate it, pal," he uttered, pushing past them. The music inside the stadium stopped, and Johnny brought his shaking hand to his head, massaged the ache starting to gnaw at him and told himself to get a grip. It was a time for relief, not dread. Nixon's ceasefire had freed him, not so he could be a new prisoner in his own land. Everyone wasn't like those ignorant students who felt a moral obligation to belittle those they were too small to understand.

He heard the crowd roar in approval at some invisible subject farther inside the stadium, and steadying his breath, he picked up his bag, slung it back over his shoulder and went in.

The crowd was bigger than he had thought before, and he guessed it must have been upward of a thousand students, their attention centered on the young woman standing on the stage in a plaid miniskirt that revealed long, tanned legs encased in tight boots. Her hair, a luscious sweep of tawny blond, fell to her waist from a delicate part at the side of her head. Above her he saw the words Ceasefire Celebration, and behind her was a smaller banner that read American Reform Movement.

"We won!" she said, her voice reverberating over the massive amplifiers, and the crowd cheered. "Finally, the government has listened to us and as of today, American fighting in Indochina has stopped!"

The whoops that went up around him made him smile, and suddenly Johnny felt a slight kinship with the others in the crowd. The war was over, for him, for his buddies, for the wives and mothers and sisters... for everyone here.

"But we can't become apathetic yet!" the woman shouted into the microphone, quieting the crowd. "Don't let the anger die just because the war isn't a threat anymore. There's more work to be done. Nixon robbed McGovern of the chance to redeem this country, and now he's covering up the Watergate break-in with more lies! It's time he started answering for his crimes!"

Caught in the passion of her speech, Johnny punched his fist in the air and found himself cheering with the others, though he hung on the outskirts of the crowd near the stage. He saw the annoyed stares of some of the students, but ignored them and pressed forward, his eyes focused on the woman who mesmerized them all.

Her eyes were green, he thought as he grew closer, and they were full of fire and fight and a thick passion that only someone who truly cared could feel. Green eyes, he thought with a rush of joy. Round, American green eyes. There had been a time, deep in the heart of the jungle, when he thought he'd never see eyes like that again.

"Nixon owes us," she went on. "He owes us for every one of our boys he sent over there to die, and for every one of the soulless shells of men who came back to us, brutal and morally destitute, ruined as human beings!"

Johnny's heart jolted at the furious pronouncement of his own condition, and his soul twisted in protest as the roar of the crowd rose again. This time his voice wasn't among them. Instead, he stood motionless, stricken with the sense that some unknown hand had marked a giant black X across his forehead, an X that said he didn't count anymore, he didn't fit, he didn't belong, now that the last statistics had been reported.

He didn't hear the rest of the impassioned speech coming from the woman who, moments before, had seemed so kindred a spirit. His spirit was as battered and bruised as the combat helmet he'd left behind. And suddenly, the passion he'd admired in her only moments ago now seemed superficial and flat.

She made some trumped-up plea for amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters-whitewashing them as conscientious objectors-and the crowd shouted and whistled. The band resumed with "Bang a Gong, Get It On," but he didn't feel the same sense of rhythm or decadence as he had when he'd listened to it in Southeast Asia. Somehow, here, it was flat and riddled with feedback, and brought his spirits further down.

Now he was home.

The woman stepped off the stage, smiling at her well-wishers, shaking the hands of those on the outskirts of the crowd.

And then she saw him.

Her eyes, as vivid as the beauty of the jungles of Southeast Asia-and just as lethal, he suspected-looked startled as they met his. He saw her quickly assess the single silver bar that boasted his rank, then her gaze swept over his medals. The mirth in her eyes drained slowly out, and he could have sworn she went pale.

Then, lifting her chin and fixing him with a dull stare that ranked somewhere between disgust and despair, she turned and disappeared behind the stage.

Johnny Malone felt suddenly more alone than he'd ever felt in the middle of the brush surrounded by Viet Cong who waited to shoot him down. He felt more alone...

Because he was home.

TWILIGHT WAS THE LONELIEST time of day, Carrie Hunter thought as she stepped into her home-a one-bedroom apartment-and flicked on the light. It was the time of day when things grew quiet, unhurried, and memories and realities had the chance to catch up with her. She tossed her big cloth purse on the table and wearily headed for her sofa bed to pull off her white vinyl boots.

She propped her forehead in her hand and told herself not to be depressed about her speech at the concert intermission today. The apathy she sensed growing in the college community wasn't something she could single-handedly hold off. Just as she wasn't exclusively responsible for keeping the consciousness raised of every new high school student who would enter her history class when the fall term started in two weeks. The Kent State shootings had been three years ago, too far in the past for kids so young to retain the fever of furor it had created then. Now all that dominated the minds of the kids she taught was football, homecoming and smoking in the bathroom stalls. The draft had ended eight months ago, and with the threat of death held at bay, they had already forgotten.

Maybe someone had listened today, she thought. Maybe amid the music and celebration of the ceasefire, someone had heard what she was saying. Maybe there were enough people left with fight in their spirits that they could still make a difference in the scheme of things.

The sudden image of the Marine lieutenant flashed through her mind and she felt her heart tighten. He had looked at her as if she had wounded him, as surely and fatefully as enemy fire. But she wasn't his enemy, she told herself. She was just someone who'd also been affected by the monster called Vietnam. She was someone who bore her own wounds.

She went to the bedroom, dark with earth colors and rich wood paneling, pulled out the top drawer of her dresser and reached for the framed picture of Paul she kept tucked away there. He looked so young, she thought, so innocent. And she'd been so proud of him wearing that starched Marine uniform-the same one the soldier had been wearing today-when he'd gone off to war.

But he had never come back.

Her eyes filled with tears and that crazy emotion-that inexplicable anger that she felt toward him as much as the war that had done him in-welled up inside her heart. The urge to throw the picture against the wall repeated itself in her mind, but as always she told herself it was just grief, even after two years. Quickly, before she acted on that familiar emotion, she set the picture back in its place, facedown in her drawer.

She closed the drawer and leaned against the dresser, meeting her own eyes in the mirror. That soldier she'd come face-to-face with today had brought back too many memories, and she wasn't sure why. She came in contact with uniformed men almost every day, in one way or another, but there was something about this one that had gotten under her skin. Something about the pain in his eyes in response to what she'd said.

But he was an officer, she reminded herself. One of the very men who had driven Paul over the edge, making it impossible for him to survive his tour of duty when he couldn't survive his own conscience.

Suicide. The word echoed in the hollow chamber of her soul, piercing through her heart like a bayonet, just as it had a year ago when Paul's friend had looked her up and let the news slip, mistakenly believing his family had told her the whole truth about his death.

"He should have hung on a little longer. He could have made it.

"What do you mean he should have hung on? He was shot-"

"Yeah, with his own gun... he took the easy way out...."

Carrie shuddered as the words ebbed through her mind, but she buried the still-living anger again and insisted that it wasn't betrayal she felt. Paul was too sensitive to endure the atrocities he faced, she told herself, and those who survived were those who had no conscience nor spirit...

Paul had been different.

She dragged in a shuddering breath and went to the television, flipping through the channels to All in the Family. Archie was yelling at "the meathead," while Gloria whined, "Daddy, you're not being fair!" Carrie turned the sound down and checked the clock. Nixon's speech concerning the Watergate tapes was scheduled for nine o'clock, and she couldn't wait to hear it. If Americans weren't angry enough to oust him for his sneaky approach to the war under the guise of Vietnamization, then maybe this Watergate blunder would cause the reaction she hoped. If only they'd listened to McGovern when he had run for the highest office last year, perhaps the country wouldn't be in such a mess now. She had campaigned her heart out for him, directing all her anger at Nixon so she wouldn't feel it toward the man she had loved and trusted.

But McGovern had been defeated, anyway. And if the reports were right, Nixon's campaign people had cheated, lied and stolen their way to victory.

The presidential speech was still half an hour away, so switching off the television, she chose an eight-track tape from her stereo cabinet, shoved it into her tape deck and waited for the sound of Joni Mitchell's voice to fill the room. When it did, it reminded her of a rainy day, driving through the country with Paul...

Shoving away the thought, she sat down at her small table, big enough for only two, and began going over the handouts she was preparing for her first week of the new school year. Maybe this year she needed to get tougher, she thought. Maybe this year she should change her approach.

Because apathy was a greater threat to the nation now than the threat of communism, she told herself. And if anyone had the passion and will to change things, she did.

THE TEARS IN HIS SISTER'S eyes were something Johnny hadn't expected when he stepped into her apartment that evening and returned the death-grip hug that almost squeezed the breath out of him.

"You're home!" she said softly. Wiping her tears, she stepped back and looked up at him. "Thank God, you're finally home."

Johnny closed the door at his back, dropped his duffel bag and smiled down at the woman who hadn't seemed so small and fragile when he'd left her three years ago. "What did you do, Meg? Shrink?"

"No," she said, pulling him farther into the apartment decorated with brown wallpaper with huge gold, rust and beige flowers. "You've just gotten bigger. Lord, look at you. You've turned into a man."

Johnny couldn't help laughing. "Meg, I was twenty-two when I left here."

"But you were just a scrawny kid to me," she said. "And now..." Her voice trailed off on a sigh, and letting it go, she picked up his duffel bag and gestured back toward his bedroom. "Well, come on. I'll show you the guest room."

The fact that she hadn't yet mentioned their mother or the sale of their family home made things a bit more awkward. Johnny followed her to the small guest room where she'd put out a few of his things from their mother's house-a framed photograph of his college football team, a picture of him in uniform next to his mother before he'd shipped out, a family portrait that included his father before he'd died ten years earlier.

"It's nice, Meg," he said quietly, picking up the picture of his mother and sitting down on the bed.

Meg leaned against the door frame and swept her layered brown hair behind her ear, watching him quietly.

"She was real proud of you, Johnny," she whispered.

He nodded, but couldn't find his voice.

"I can...show you her grave later. It's right next to Daddy's. When you feel ready."

Johnny cleared his throat and swallowed. He'd lost a lot of people he cared about in the past two years, he thought, but had never seen any of their graves. Somehow, he didn't see the point.

As if she sensed his thoughts, Meg pulled the wicker chair in the corner closer to his bed, sat down and faced him with misty innocence in her eyes. Even though she was seven years older than he, he felt much older.

"Johnny," she said, her voice raspy and soft. "I know we've never been close. But we're all we've got left. We're family."

"I know," he said. "I just.. .I need some time to let it sink in that everything's changed."

Meg took his hand, watched his big fingers curl over hers. She lowered her head and tried to blink back her tears.

"When you called this morning to say you were on your way home, I-I wanted so much to get the old house back, and your old room, and make things like they were when you left, so you really would feel like you were home. But I couldn't."

Johnny set the picture back on the table and touched Meg's chin, drawing her face back up to his. "You didn't have to, Meg," he said, "I know home when I see it, and it's not in that house."

Meg smiled, her big eyes lifting his heart. "You really are a man now, aren't you?"

He spent the afternoon catching up and going through the boxes of his things that Meg had brought from the old house-things he'd once thought he couldn't live without, before he'd learned how to survive on just what he could carry on his back-and that evening, he told her about his reception on the college campus that day.

"That shouldn't surprise you, Johnny," she said. "People were protesting the war before you left. When you were in college, even you got in the spirit of things a few times."

"There's a difference," he said grimly. "It's one thing to knock the war. It's another to knock the people who fought in it."

Meg set two plates on the table and he smiled down at the spaghetti piled up on his-the same recipe his mother had used. He'd dreamed about his mother's spaghetti sometimes when he lay in a foxhole with the taste of dirt and sweat in his mouth and a can of C rations to quell the hunger gnawing at his stomach. Now he dug in, twisting the long noodles around his fork.

"So, how's school?" he asked her, changing the subject that only tied his stomach in knots. "Did they finally give you tenure?"

"Yes, finally," she told him. "But a lot of good it's doing me. I found out last week that I'm still not getting paid as much as the men on the faculty. So there's going to be a fight, to say the least. They don't know who they're dealing with." She took a gulp of the frosty Coca-Cola she had poured into a glass that said, The Real Thing, and leaned forward, her eyes lighting up. "Umm. I forgot to tell you. I ran into Bill Altus last week..."

"The high school principal?" Johnny asked.

"The same. When I told him you were coming home, he asked me if you had a job yet. His football coach got fired last week when he got busted for possession of marijuana. It really left the team in a bind and made the school look pretty bad."

Johnny lifted an eyebrow. "I guess so."

"He said he was looking for a coach for his team. You know, when you were playing here at Georgia State, he was your biggest fan. He said to tell you to come by and see him if you were interested. Of course, you probably aren't in any hurry to dive into a new job right away."

Johnny shrugged. "My discharge papers got held up and until they come, I'm still technically on leave. But I don't want to just sit around."

"Then call Bill," she said. "You'd be a great coach."

He shook his head. "I don't know, Meg. I didn't really plan to teach. My degree was in business."

Meg's smile was pressureless and gentle, and he suddenly realized how much he had missed it. "Well, it's just something to keep in mind," she said. "In case you have any problems."

"Problems? What kind of problems?"

"Well, you know. Finding a job or something. You probably won't, though. Your grade point average in college should speak for itself. Not to mention your leadership on the team."

"And what about my leadership in the Marines?" He knew she was aware of the hard edge in his voice, but he couldn't cover his defensiveness. "The time I served? The medals? Don't they count for anything?"

Meg looked down at her food, as if his sudden change of tone hurt her. Heaving in a deep breath, she said, "They should, Johnny. But maybe you should do yourself a favor and when you go for interviews, don't wear your uniform."

Johnny dropped his fork to his plate with a clash. "And should I lie about where I've been the last two years?" he asked in a metallic voice.

"I'm not suggesting that," Meg said softly. "I just wouldn't flaunt it. You never know how someone might react."

It was later that night, as he lay in the bedroom she'd fixed up for him, complete with a portable black-and-white television, that he thought how absurd the whole situation was. He'd spent two years in Vietnam risking his butt to defend democracy because in his family military service was a prerequisite to manhood, and because he believed that the Marines had something vital to contribute.

He hadn't expected a heroic homecoming like his father'd had after World War II. Hell, he'd known for years that America hated the war that played gruesomely on television each night, dispelling the glamorous image of soldiers marching into combat. Visual images of reality had awakened the nation. Even he had almost changed his mind about the Marines before college and had ruled out ROTC in favor of football and a business major. But despite public opinion, he had enlisted, anyway. And now that the country had squeezed what they could out of him, he felt like an abandoned soul on a barren planet. A soul whose real home was in the trenches with the buddies who valued him as a human being.

Soulless shells of men... brutal and morally destitute... ruined human beings...

The words of that woman on the stage today tore at his gut, making the scar on his side ache. He sat up, unbuttoned his shirt and looked down at the mangled patches of skin where he'd taken some shrapnel. The ribs had healed over, but the scars were still there. And he realized there were new scars yet to endure. The kind that ripped at your spirit. The kind that etched themselves on your soul.

But he'd get through it, he told himself, staring at the ceiling. He'd lived through worse. He would just stop kidding himself that the war was over. It was still going on in his heart.

Maybe it would never end.

Chapter Two

The front door to Carrie's parents' home was wide open when she pulled her VW Bug into the driveway the next morning, and her mother's gardening tools lay abandoned in the yard, something unheard of for the woman whose meticulous neatness was one of her points of pride. Something was wrong.

Myriad fears rolled through Carrie's mind as she stumbled out of the car and toward the house. No one was more aware than she of the stress her mother had been under lately, or the tension that had grown like a terminal disease between her parents in the last few months. Her mother's weight had dropped off with suspicious ease until she looked much older than her age, and her father seemed to wear a perpetual scowl these days.

She reached the door of the house and peered inside. "Mom? Dad?"

She saw her father sitting on the sofa in the living room, his face an expressionless mask of bitterness. He looked up at her, the dullness in his eyes alarming her. "Dad? What's wrong? Where's Mom?"

"In the kitchen," he said. "Your brother's on the phone."

"Brian?" She glanced toward the kitchen as a smile almost dared to dance in her eyes. "Is-is everything okay with him?"

"I wouldn't know," her father said. "And frankly, I couldn't be less interested."

As always when they had these conversations, Carrie felt as if her father had disowned her, as well, when he'd declared his shame for the son who had gone AWOL from the army and fled to Canada to avoid going to Vietnam. He would never understand, she thought with a pang of bitterness. Things were black or white to the World War II veteran who'd spent his life carving out his values and traditions in stone, then expecting his family to live by them simply because he said so. He had never been able to see the colors that she and Brian saw... or her mother, either, for that matter.

Deciding that the phone call was more important than a fight with her father, she left him alone and went into the kitchen, where her mother stood clutching the telephone as if it were her son's very hand. Thank God her mother could still see colors, she thought.

Quietly, Carrie pulled out a chair and sat down, her wide eyes concentrated on the telephone, as if she could summon the image of the twin brother she hadn't seen in two years.

"Don't worry about your father," May Hunter was saying, struggling to keep her voice low. "He'll come around, son. I've been working on him."

Carrie saw the tears push to her mother's eyes, and she found herself confronting the hatred she'd felt toward her father so many times over the last two years. He had no right to make judgments on Brian, she thought. And he had no right to put her mother between them.

"I wish we could come to Toronto and visit," her mother was saying, each word issued with terrific strain that made her whole body tremble. "But you know how he feels about that...."

She paused, wiped her eyes and nodded in answer to some question he had asked. "Yes, honey. I'll keep trying. Carrie just walked in and she's waiting to talk to you now. I love you."

Carrie tilted her head and set a hand on her mother's shoulder, and the small woman nodded that she was all right. "He sounds so good," she whispered as she handed Carrie the phone.

Swallowing the emotion obstructing her throat, Carrie put the receiver to her ear. "Hey, Brian. What's up?"

"Not much, sis," he said. His voice was just the same as always, its deep, crisp tone sending a warm nostalgic feeling through her. But there was something missing. That exuberant, musical quality that had been there before.

"I just got Mom's last letter, and she seemed a little down in the dumps. I was hoping to cheer her up, but I guess it'll take more than a phone call."

Carrie glanced at her mother, who had wilted into the kitchen chair and buried her face in her hands, and she re-focused her eyes on the floor and tried to picture her hippie brother, probably still wearing that heavy gold medallion with the peace insignia and holding a guitar in his lap. "So what's going on up there?" she asked, trying to lighten her voice. "How's your love life?"

Brian laughed. "Nonexistent." The smile in his voice faded and a long pause followed. "I don't know. I guess it's about time I committed myself to living here. It's just that ever since I came, I've felt like it was just temporary. I should have gotten a real job instead of temporary construction work. And I have to stop avoiding relationships. There's no point in pretending I'm ever coming back."

She imagined that sad gleam in his green eyes and his sunbleached hair waving somewhere around shoulder-length ... or even longer by now. "Don't say that," Carrie admonished. "You never know."

"Well, I know that Nixon sure as hell isn't going to grant any kind of amnesty to us guys up here. If I come home, I go to jail. Period. Simple as that."

"I'm still working on it through the ARM, Bri," she said. "But we seem to be losing steam. Nobody in Washington is listening anymore. They're so busy covering themselves for this Watergate business right now that they haven't got time to think about things like that. But don't give up."

"I won't," he said. "Not as long as they have you to reckon with." He sighed, then went on, his voice tight. "So how's Dad doing?"

Carrie glanced toward the door, and knew that her father was probably listening to every word, weighing it and imagining Brian's half of the conversation. "Stubborn as ever."

"Yeah," Brian said dolefully. "That's too bad."

"Yeah."

"Well..." He sighed loudly, and she knew he was having trouble breaking this short contact. "I guess I'd better get to work. Talk to you later."

"Okay, Bri. I love you."

"Love you, too," he said.

She waited for the click cutting them off, then gently laid the phone in its cradle on the wall. For a moment she stood there with her hand still on it, and finally she turned back to her mother, trying to strengthen her weak expression.

"He sounds good, Mom."

May smiled, trying her best to appear happy for him. "I just wish I could see him again."

"Yeah," Carrie whispered. "Me, too. Maybe we could go without Dad. Just the two of us-"

"I could never do that!" her mother whispered, horrified. "He would never allow it."

Carrie laid her hand on her mother's wrist and made her look at her. "Mom, Brian's your son, too. It's not right that Dad's opinions are dictating your life."

"Enough!" her mother whispered harshly. "Not another word!"

Footsteps shook the oak floor in the living room, and Carrie's father came into the kitchen as if oblivious to the quiet but volatile conversation and poured himself a cup of coffee. The silence seemed a tangible thing, something that couldn't be easily discarded. Carrie met her mother's sad, oppressed eyes, then settled her gaze defiantly on her father.

"He asked about you," she said, knowing that a confrontation would inevitably follow, but welcoming it.

"I told you, I'm not interested," he said.

"Dad, he's your son. He needs you."

"Well, he should have thought of that before he turned coward."

"Bradley!"

Her father swung around, saw the censure on his wife's face and glared at her as though daring her to go on.

"My son is not a coward," she said, "and you can pretend he doesn't exist if you want to, but I can't help grieving every day for what I've lost."

Carrie stepped between the two of them, holding both their gazes. "You haven't lost anything, Mom. Brian's still alive. If Dad weren't so stubborn, you could both go visit him anytime."

May leaned forward, bracing her garden-soiled elbows on the table. "I was watching the news yesterday," she said, "and they were talking about the final ceasefire and the withdrawals of the troops... and I saw all those GIs coming home from the war..." Her voice broke, and she averted her eyes. "I kept thinking that if he had gone and survived, he'd be home today."

"And with honor," her father added. "He'd be someone we could be proud of."

Carrie's mouth dropped open and her electric eyes fixed on her father. "Is that all you care about? Whether or not you can brag to your friends? Show off his medals?"

"Carrie!" Her mother's disapproval was now directed at her, but Carrie wouldn't be stopped.

"Just tell me this, Dad," she said. "What if he had gone and gotten killed in Vietnam? Would that make you proud?"

"Carrie, please!" Her mother's pain sharpened her voice, and Carrie turned back to her.

"No, Mom. I'd rather have him three thousand miles away, alive, than home in a body bag. And if he had made it, I don't think we'd even know him anymore." She paced across the floor, looking back at her father. "That was Brian's voice on the phone, with Brian's laugh and Brian's soul. He's intact. He's still got a good, whole spirit. But if he'd gone to Vietnam, they would have stripped him of that just as surely as the army stripped him of his hair and his clothes and everything personal that means something to him. He would have wound up just like Paul-" Her voice broke off and she cleared her throat, then forced herself to go on. "I thank God every day that he made the choice he made."

"Choices," her father scoffed. "He took a choice that wasn't offered to him. It wasn't his choice to run out on his duty to his country!"

"Come off it!" Carrie shouted. "He's supposed to sacrifice his personal beliefs and maybe even his life for a country that's ruled by liars and thieves and blackmailers?"

"Carrie, it's no use!" her mother cried, stepping between them. "Just stop it, because you're not going to change his mind. I've tried."

Carrie held her father's turbulent gaze over her mother's head, and finally, she backed toward the door. "Then maybe I don't belong here, either," she said.

Her father didn't make any response at all, and her mother collapsed at the table again as Carrie walked out of the house.

IT WAS STARTING TO RAIN, and a clap of thunder in the distance greeted Johnny as he stepped out of the cab he'd hailed at the employment office, a gratuitous list of insignificant jobs clutched in his hand. The employment agent had arranged all of his appointments for after lunch, hoping to give him time to "go home and change out of that uniform."

"Look, lady," he'd said, "anybody can take one look at my resume and tell where I've been, with or without the uniform. Besides, I don't own a suit."

"Do you want a job or not?" she'd asked, popping her gum and adjusting her wire-rimmed glasses to better look down on him. "The less you do to point out your service record, the better chance you'll have of getting a job."

He stood outside Meg's apartment now, letting the rain beat down on his hat, and studied the list of appointments he'd been given. A factory job, making headlights for cars. An insurance salesman. A job selling light bulbs.

He wadded the list in his hand and started to toss it in a public trash can that bore the sign, Keep America Beautiful, but stopped just before he let it go. It might be a last resort, he told himself, after three days of pounding the pavement answering ads in the newspaper. No one seemed to care about his degree in business or the popularity he'd garnered from quarterbacking the college football team or the leadership abilities he'd exhibited over and over in his life, even before he'd gone to Vietnam. All they saw was the uniform and his record of service, and then they'd each looked at him as if he were a dangerous killer who might bring disease and distress into their nice, neat establishments and had inevitably told him their positions had been filled.

He shoved the balled paper into his pocket and started up the steps to his sister's door.

Meg had come home for lunch and was preparing sandwiches when he walked in.

"Johnny! How's it going? Was the employment office any help?"

"Some." Johnny shrugged and dropped into a chair, and decided not to be completely honest. "I'll know more after I go on some of these interviews." He looked out the window next to the street, at the traffic whizzing by, and wondered how long it would take him to get used to so many cars barreling by after two years of nothing but an occasional truck or jeep on the dirt roads of Southeast Asia. He brought his eyes back to his sister, propped his chin on his fist. "They wanted me to change out of my uniform first, but I haven't even bought a suit yet."

Meg's dark eyes flashed up to his. "Then buy one. Johnny, sometimes you just have to conform. Civilian guys have to cut their hair to make a good impression, and military guys have to dress like civilians. It's part of the game."

"Yeah, well, I'm not really into game playing right now, Meg," he said, his gravelly voice drawling with fatigue. "I don't want to work for some jerk who's got it in for vets, anyway. Might as well find out up front how they feel."

He could tell from the way she handed him his plate that she didn't agree with him. "I'm just saying that you have so much potential. If the uniform is a strike against you, get rid of it. Getting a good job is the important thing."

"A good job doing what?" He unbuttoned his coat and shrugged out of it. "I have a business degree. Big deal. I know how to fieldstrip and assemble an M-14, but I can't program a computer. I can clear a path through a rain forest, but I don't know how to sell. I can lead a night raid and set up an ambush, but I can't run an office."

He stood up just as Meg sat down at the table, and ran his fingers through his hair as he began to pace. "In Nam, I could call an order into a two-way radio for a night strike, Meg. My men would have tiptoed over a minefield if I told them to, because they trusted me. I knew how to lead. But how do I translate that into civilian life?"

He saw his sister's face pale at his gruesome description of his skills, but she didn't balk. "I don't know, Johnny. Maybe you just wait until you know. Take something temporary. Give yourself some time. You can stay here as long as you want."

"That's just it," he said. "I like being here with you, Meg, but I need my own place. And I need a job so I can get on with my life. I want to feel normal again."

"Johnny, don't forget Bill Altus's offer," she said. "You'd make a terrific football coach, and he has all the respect in the world for you. Your time in the service wouldn't go against you at all."

Johnny heaved a heavy sigh and shook his head as his calloused fingers rubbed roughly at his eyes. "You know, I'm really having trouble believing all this. When Dad was in the war, he came home and people were handing out jobs to soldiers left and right. When Grandpa came home, he was treated like a hero. They had parades, for God's sake." He set both elbows on the table and leaned forward, trying hard to find the words to make his point. "See, I never expected to be a big hero here. But I sure as hell didn't think people would treat me like an ex-con just because I decided to serve my country."

Meg tilted her head and looked at him with too much sympathy, making him wish he'd never brought the subject up. "It was an unpopular war, Johnny. Americans have seen and read about a lot of horrible things connected with it. They don't see what you were doing as serving your country. It wasn't our country you were fighting for."

Johnny felt that red heat flushing his face again. He couldn't believe this was his rebel sister talking-the one who didn't take any guff off of anyone, the one who counted fairness and justice higher than just about anything he could name. "What I fought for was democracy. Stopping the spread of communism is vital to our country, Meg!"

"I know that, Johnny. But they don't know that. You just have to prove that their stereotype of you is wrong."

"I have to prove it," Johnny repeated incredulously. He laughed without meaning it, then let his bitter smile die to a disheartened scowl. "I enlisted, Meg. Nobody twisted my arm and made me join up. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do. But here, it's like you're more respected, more 'courageous,' if you skipped the country and hid out in cushy Canada to dodge the draft. It's sickening, Meg, and it isn't fair."

Meg sifted idly through the packets of saccharin in the bowl on her table. "The world's a different place than it was when Dad and Grandpa were fighting wars, Johnny. And fairness doesn't even figure in."

"You're telling me?" Johnny pulled out the wadded job list and thrust it across the table. "Check this out and tell me how different the world is. You think Dad would have taken any of those jobs?"

Meg skimmed the list, sighing. She took his hand, the faint lines between her eyebrows creasing with concern. "Johnny, whoever sent you on these interviews needs mental help. You're way too qualified...." Her voice trailed off, and he could see her frustration mirroring his. "Please go talk to Bill."

Johnny clasped his hands and tapped his lips with his thumbnail and gazed back out the window.

"Taking a year to coach football might give you a chance to figure out what you'd really rather be. You might even whip those boys into shape and get Central High its first winning season in ten years. It would be good for you to be involved in something positive for a change."

Johnny leaned back against his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment, a fleeting memory passing through his mind. A memory of him tearing across the football field his last year in college, with the sound of the crowd going wild in his ears as he scored the winning point. Life had been so uncomplicated then. So secure. All that had been expected of him was to keep the ball moving.

And he wasn't about to fumble it now.

Maybe it would be good to get back to that and be around kids who weren't yet corrupted by the world or the war, kids who didn't know how to fire artillery or launch grenades. Maybe, knowing how far he had trudged in hell, he could show them just how much heaven they had here at home. Maybe he could make a difference.

Finally, he picked up the wadded list and tossed it into a trash can a few feet away and gave his sister one of the first real smiles he'd given her since he'd come home. "All right, Meg," he said. "I'll go see him this afternoon. Maybe that is just what I need."

JUST WHAT I NEED, Mark Gray thought as he stood behind the high school building and dragged on the joint he'd brought with him today. The only way to get through summer school, sometimes, was to get high first.

He raked his long black fingers through his Afro, and thought how his old man might just have a point about cropping his hair for the summer. It was too hot for long hair, but it looked good, and that was the important thing. It made him look bad...dangerous, even. And it never hurt to give that impression. Sometimes that was the only way to get any respect.

He heard footsteps coming around the building and quickly stubbed his joint on the bricks and shoved it into the pocket of his worn jeans, careful not to waste it. He pulled out a stick of Juicy Fruit gum and shoved it into his mouth to cover the smell of marijuana, then started back to the classroom where he belonged.

"Mark? What are you doing out here?"

He looked up to see Carrie Hunter, "Miz Hunter," as he "respectfully" addressed her since she'd declared the title of "miss" to be chauvinistic and sexist, starting into the building with a stack of papers in her arms. "Uh, how's it goin', Miz Hunter. Uh...ole man Gregory...he was late for class, so I slipped out to go to the can."

Carrie cocked a disbelieving look at him and shook her head. "The bathroom's inside, Mark."

"Yeah, I know. I was just-"

"You were just trying to get yourself into trouble again," she said. She stepped closer to the boy who, at seventeen, stood taller than she, and looked into the ebony eyes that looked a little dilated just now. She wondered if he was high. "Mark, how many days left of summer school?" she asked.

"Uh... three."

"Right," Carrie said. "Three more days and you'll be promoted to senior. But still, you're doing just what you did last year to make you wind up in summer school in the first place. Cutting class, sneaking around... Are you trying to fail, Mark?"

"No," he said, heaving a grand sigh. "I'm trying to get to class."

Carrie nodded stiffly, not fooled by his evasion. "Fine. Go to class, Mark. But try not to blow it this time, okay?"

"Right on," the boy said, his voice lacking conviction.

He trudged into the building, not bothering to hold the door for the teacher weighted down with papers, and headed for his class. Three more days, he thought miserably. It might as well be three more years. Probably would be, before he ever graduated out of this dump.

The numbing haze of his high began to lighten his head, making the whole ordeal of sitting through another agonizing day of class seem that much less painful. As if he had every right to walk in late, he ambled into his biology class and slumped down into his chair.

The teacher-who, as far as Mark could tell had been sniffing too much formaldehyde-slammed his pointer stick on his desk. "Do you have a late slip, Mark?"

Mark shrugged and offered the teacher a cocky grin. "No. Do you?"

Bad choice of responses, he thought the moment he saw the chagrin on his teacher's gaunt face. The man needed a little sun, he thought. And maybe a toke off this joint in his pocket. Maybe that would loosen him up a little.

"You can just walk right back out of here and go to the office," Mr. Gregory said, tearing a piece of paper off of his notepad and scribbling a note to the principal. "Unless your attitude changes, young man, you'll be taking this course again in the fall. And I don't want you in my class another year any more than you want to be here."

Mark muttered a whispered curse that his classmates heard but pretended not to, and sliding out of his seat, he strolled up to the teacher's desk and snatched the proffered note from his hand. "Check ya later," he said.

It occurred to him as he started to the office that he didn't have to go. He could just walk out of there, he thought. He could go home. But the thought of his old man's wrath when he found out made him think again. He was high, but not that high.

He went to the office and saw Carrie Hunter standing over the photocopy machine, duplicating handouts for the class she would be teaching as soon as the fall semester started. She looked up, exasperated, when she saw him.

"Mark? What is it?"

"Gregory sent me here to bow down to the god of this humble institution," he said, thrusting the note at Sally, the secretary, who shook her head dolefully. "I committed the cardinal sin. I was eight minutes late, and since he was only seven minutes late, I win the booby prize. Breakfast with King Altus."

"You were more than eight minutes late," Carrie corrected. "The period is almost over." She tossed a disbelieving look to Sally, who seemed unsurprised by Mark's attitude.

"Mr. Altus is with somebody right now," Sally said, popping her gum. "Just sit down, Mark, and he'll see you when he's done."

Mark dropped into an orange chair and slung an ankle over his knee. "No hurry. I got no place else to go."

"No place but your next class." Carrie stacked the handouts she'd been photocopying and sat down next to him. "Mark, what are we going to do with you?"

"I don't know, Miz Hunter," he said, frowning with mock seriousness. "Whatcha wanna do?"

"I'd like to knock you on the head," she said. "What's wrong with you? Why are you doing this?"

The boy looked at her, struggling for a sarcastic answer, but suddenly it didn't seem worth the effort. "Because I'm bored," he said. "I'm 50 bored. Man, I've spent the whole summer in this place just because I don't have a brain like Einstein. And as soon as the summer's over, it starts up again."

Carrie leaned forward, cocking her head to make her point, and forced him to meet her eyes. "Mark, this is the most important year of your life. If you don't at least finish high school, you'll never get a decent job."

"Yeah, well, I can get by."

"Getting by is a long way from making it," she said.

"You oughta know," he sniped. "I heard what they pay ya'll here, so don't go jivin' me."

Carrie sat back in her chair and asked herself why she bothered. There were some kids you just couldn't reach. The bell rang, signaling a change of classes, and sighing, she went back to the machine, gathered her papers and gave him a weak smile. "I hear they're hiring at Bill's Burger Barn," she said. "And you don't even have to think. They use this little computer cash register that tells how much change to give. Maybe you should look into it."

Mark breathed an empty laugh and watched her walk out of the office. His gaze fell from her expressive if disappointed face, to the small hips encased in the seersucker skirt she wore. Great legs, he thought, for a teacher.

The principal's door opened and Mark turned back to it and watched as the principal emerged, patting the back of a guy in a Marine uniform.

"I can't tell you how happy I am to welcome you aboard," he was saying. "I think you'll do wonders for our team... not to mention our gym classes."

The uniformed man glanced at Mark, offered him a polite nod-to which Mark responded with a mock salute-then turned back to Mr. Altus. "I'd like to look around the school a little, if it's okay. I've never been here before."

"Feel free to roam wherever you want," Altus said.

At that moment, Mr. Altus noticed Mark for the first time and setting his hands on his brown polyester-clad hips, he looked down at the boy. "Mark, what is it this time?"

"I was late for class," Mark said contemptuously, "and my mommy didn't write me a note."

Johnny tried not to smile at the pseudo-serious way the hulking boy uttered the words.

"For crying out loud," the principal said. "Don't you think I have anything better to do than lecture to you every single day?" He tossed up his hands and gestured toward the clock on the wall. "Well, that class is over now and you're going to be late for the next one."

He stepped to the secretary's desk, picked up a pad of yellow slips of paper and filled one out. "All right, here's your pass. And tomorrow I want you to make an apology to Mr. Gregory. I'm going to tell him not to let you into class until you do that, and if you get sent to the office one more time in the next three days, you'll have to repeat these courses...again."

Mark stood up, wisely keeping his mouth shut this time, for it had been a similar threat that had landed him in summer school in the first place.

"Oh, and Mark. Since you're late for class anyway, do me a favor and show Coach Malone here where the gym is. Show him his office, too, while you're at it."

Martyred, Mark started to the door, assessing the Marine over his shoulder. "Coach Malone? So it's true about Coach Callow gettin' the ax?"

Johnny grinned and followed him through the door. "Guess so."

The boy gave Johnny's uniform a once-over. "I thought you were in the Marines."

"I'm getting my discharge papers soon," Johnny said.

They walked a few feet, their strides matched, when Mark looked over at him. "You been to Vietnam?"

"Yeah," Johnny said, bracing himself for the coming blow. "Just got back."

"What was it like?" the boy asked.

For once, an honest, unbiased question, Johnny thought. "A real picnic," he said. He looked up the hall, at the last of the students disappearing into their classrooms. "You know, there were a lot of kids over there with me, not much older than you. They'd have cut off their legs to be back home in school. There's something to be said for that kind of security."

"Yeah, well, they musta never had to sit through ole man Gregory's class. What a drag. We're talking falling-asleep-in-your-petri-dish boring."

"There are a lot worse things than boredom," Johnny said. He glanced back at the boy, assessing his mature size and visible strength. "Do you play football?"

"Me?" The boy laughed. "Hell, no. I ain't no jock."

"Why?" Johnny asked. "Because of the 'type' you think jocks are, or because you aren't big enough?"

Mark looked insulted at the comment about his size and straightened to his full five-feet-eleven. "Hey, I'm as big as any of them thickheads. I could hold my own with them."

"Then go out for the team," Johnny challenged. "I'm posting tryouts for the day after tomorrow, 1500 hours."

"Fifteen-hundred what?" Mark asked.

Johnny grinned. "Three o'clock. Let's see if you can really hold your own."

"Aw, man." Mark shook his head. "No way. First of all, I don't cut my hair for nobody. And second of all, I got better things to do with my time than butt heads with some pumped up honky running back every day."

"Nobody on my team has to cut his hair," Johnny said, making the decision even as he said it. "Conformity isn't my strong suit, either. But never mind. If you have better things to do..."

He came to the gym, saw that it was open and shrugged. "Look, I think I can find my way from here. You go on to class."

"Yeah," Mark said reluctantly, taking a step backward, his face a study in disappointment that Johnny hadn't tried harder.

"If you change your mind, that's three on Thursday."

"Don't hold your breath, man," Mark muttered, and started away.

The gym was quiet and the click of Johnny's footsteps on the waxed floor resonated over the room. The smell of sweat and competition wafted over the stale air. To the right of the gym he saw the men's locker room and holding his hat in his hand, he started toward it.

He made an inspection of it, saw where the uniforms and equipment were kept and told himself that he would like this job, after all, even if it wasn't his career choice. He had plenty of time to get involved in business. After a few minutes, he emerged out of the locker room and looked around the gym for the room that would be his office. He saw the one marked Basketball, then walked past it and came to the football office.

The door was ajar and someone was inside, so Johnny stepped up to it, knocked lightly and heard a woman say, "Come in."

He pushed the door open and saw a young woman standing with her back to him, bent over a long table, collating handouts. Her long, straight blond hair flowed down her back, touching the waistline of the red skirt that hugged her small, trim hips and introduced the long, tanned legs that made his heart palpitate.

Slinging her hair back, she turned around. "I was just borrowing this room for a minute..."

Her voice trailed off as their eyes met, soft blue and emerald green, and Johnny felt his heart sinking again. It was the woman on the stage the other day, he thought miserably. The one who'd had such contempt for men like him. The woman who'd looked at him with such disgust in her eyes.

Now, she only stared at him with startled surprise, niggling recognition confusing her. He was the man in the crowd the other day, she thought. The man who'd looked so wounded at her speech. The man who'd haunted her dreams ever since. "Uh... may I help you?" Her voice was suddenly hoarse.

Johnny swallowed the rising anger in his throat and told himself to keep his cool. "No," he said. "I just wanted to see my office. I'm Johnny Malone, the new football coach."

Chapter Three

"The football coach!" Carrie abandoned her handouts and took a step toward him. "Bill didn't say anything about-"

"He just hired me," Johnny said, lifting his shadowed chin and not budging from the doorway. "Was he supposed to clear it with you first?"

"No, but..." She found herself at a loss for any reason for her surprise, so mutely she turned around and began stacking her papers. Then picking them up and turning back to him, she tried again. "I-I'm sorry. I'm Carrie Hunter. I teach history."

"Mmm," Johnny said. "And I thought you just spent your time maligning those 'soulless shells of men' coming home from the war."

"Oh." She averted her eyes as recognition dawned fully, then made herself meet that piercing gaze again. "Then it was you I saw at the ARM rally the other day. What I said that day... I didn't mean it personally."

Johnny laughed, but the sound was empty and hollow, as if any joy he had once contained was all but spent. "No? Oh, well, that makes me feel better. Guess my time overseas was worthwhile, after all."

His sarcasm struck a responsive chord within her that squelched any intimidation she had felt, and dropping her papers on his clean desk, she tightened her lips. "Nobody promised you it would be worthwhile," she said. "How long were you there?"

"Two years."

"I see," she said, crossing her arms. "One is the norm. Did you ask for a second tour?"

Johnny could read the contempt in her eyes, but he matched it. "As a matter of fact, I did."

"Then you liked it?"

He heard the allegations lingering on the tip of her tongue and decided it was time to set her straight. Stepping farther into the office, he slapped his hat on the desk and leaned his thigh against it. "Lady, I don't owe you any kind of explanation," he said, "but just so you'll know, I stayed over there a second year because I thought the army needed a clear thinker. I didn't want to leave my men at the mercy of some Joe who'd been pushed too close to breaking. And you know what? I'd do it again."

Tears sprang to her eyes, but she held them back and fixed her unwavering eyes on him, knocking him off balance. Her lips trembled as she tried to speak. "Well... I'm sure your men were grateful, Lieutenant."

"I didn't do it for gratitude," he returned. "I did it out of a sense of honor. Something that used to guide me before I was labeled 'morally destitute.'"

Clearing her throat, she picked up her papers again and started past him. "Well, I can see that you and I have differing opinions on this."

"Opinions?" Johnny asked, amazed at the strength of anger she provoked within his heart. He could feel his blood beating color into his face. "No, lady. You have an opinion. I have memories."

Carrie hugged her papers to her chest, and when she turned back to him, he saw the first tear seep through her lashes. "I have memories, too," she whispered.

Then, not waiting for his response, she started to cross the gym.

Johnny stood quietly watching her until she disappeared from his sight, his heart thundering in his ears. Damn that woman. He'd let her get to him twice now... that was once more than he'd ever allowed any woman. And then, with a simple glimmer of tears, she had snuffed that anger out and left him wondering...

Tears. It was just like a woman to get his mind off the subject with a completely uncalled for reaction like that. He hadn't meant to make her cry. But what had he said? He hadn't insinuated that she was a nonperson, like she had implied he was. He hadn't questioned her conscience or her spirit. All he had questioned were her opinions.

He leaned against the door frame of his new office and looked in the direction she had gone, frowning as more questions came to his mind about Carrie Hunter. Maybe he needed to learn a little more about the lady with so much anger, he thought. Maybe she had good reason.

Then again, he doubted it.

CARRIE'S CLOGS HAMMERED the gym floor as she made her way into the high school corridor, cursing herself for letting his words hit so close to her emotional time bomb. This was no time to start dredging up old hurts, she told herself. Quickly, she slipped into the teacher's rest room and went to the sink. Had he seen her crying? she wondered, then admitted that he probably had.

Grabbing a tissue, she wiped the smudges forming under her eyes, smudges that had seemed a permanent part of her makeup two years ago when she'd gotten word that Paul was dead. She'd gotten comfortable with her grief, but months later, when his buddy had come back and looked her up and let it slip that Paul's death was really a suicide, she had felt herself slipping into a strange sort of numbness, as if she didn't know how to feel and so wouldn't allow herself any feeling at all. So far, the only emotion she had allowed herself to confront was anger. And she didn't understand the intensity of it.

So why had Johnny Malone's words today brought out that aching regret in her heart?

I didn't want to leave my men...

She sat down in the chair beside the sink and pressed the tissue to her eyes as warm tears squeezed forward. Maybe if Paul had had a squad leader who cared-instead of one trying to create a monster out of a sensitive human being- maybe he would have stuck it out a little longer.

The bathroom door opened and Sally, the red-haired school secretary whom Carrie had known since fifth-grade Glee Club, pranced in. "Uh-oh," Sally said quietly when she saw Carrie's distraught condition. "I guess I should have gone to the students' bathroom."

Carrie sniffed and wiped at her eyes. "No problem, Sally. I'm okay."

"Are you sure?" The young woman's eyes were sympathetic as they lingered on her friend.

"Yeah. I just started thinking about Paul."

"Oh, so you met the new coach, huh?" Sally stepped into one of the stalls and closed the door. "The uniform get to you?"

"Maybe a little," Carrie said.

"Carrie, when are you going to stop seeing the clothes on a man and look at the body? Did you look at him? I mean really look at him?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Are you kidding me?" Carrie heard the toilet flush, and in a moment Sally was coming out. She went to the sink and began washing her hands. "He's fine, that's why. The girls are gonna be swooning over him when school starts. And if they have eyes, so will the teachers. Shoot, I might go a little crazy over him myself."

Carrie laughed in spite of herself. "Sounds like you have already."

Sally grabbed a paper towel and grinned down at Carrie, her arched eyebrows confirming Carrie's suspicion.

Carrie's smile faded just as the color in her face did, and balancing her stack of papers, she came to her feet. "Anyway, I'm not in the market for a man. Especially one who just spent the last two years in Vietnam."

"Yeah, I know what you mean," Sally said, leaning a hip on the sink counter and finger combing her layered red curls as she spoke. "I've dated a few guys who came back from the war. They're either withdrawn to the point of being depressing, wild to the point of being frightening, or just downright weird."

Carrie's eyebrows came together. "What do you mean, 'weird'?"

Sally shrugged and looked over her shoulder to check out her makeup. "You know. You just look at them and know that they've killed people, or they could be drug addicts or have some Asian disease or be screwed up because of that agent orange stuff. It sort of gives you the creeps."

Carrie thought of Paul and wondered if Sally would have seen him that way if he had made it home. "You didn't seem too repulsed by the new coach," she pointed out quietly.

Sally grinned again and dug into her purse for her strawberry-flavored lip-gloss compact. Dipping her fingers in the greasy pastel color, she dabbed some on her lips. "I don't know," she said. "That guy might just have possibilities, anyway."

She snapped her lip gloss shut, dropped it into her purse and wiped her finger on a paper towel. "Anyway, we've got to get you out of this blue funk you're in, and I know just the thing. Come with Barbara and me tonight. We haven't done the town in a couple of years. We're going to hear this great band at Sholey's, have a beer..."

"Maybe," Carrie said noncommittally. But as she followed her friend back into the corridor, her mind drifted back to Johnny Malone. Somehow, she had to figure out a way to stay as far away from him as her job allowed her to. She had too much at stake to let him get under her skin now.

SHOLEY'S WAS MUCH THE SAME as Johnny had left it in his college days, with the lights low, the music loud and the dance floor full of people. Only the dances had changed, he thought with a grin as he stepped farther into the club and watched the couples "bumping" to the beat of "Proud Mary."

He went to the bar to order a beer, and looked around at the tables for the college buddies he had come here to meet.

When he didn't see any familiar faces among the new breed of younger ones, he glanced toward the pool room separated from the bar by a long curtain of beads, wondering if they waited for him there. Had Zeke shaved his beard in the three years since he'd seen him? he wondered. Had "Doc" Rex survived medical school? And had Larry kept up his effort to see just how long he could grow his hair?

None of the faces at the tables looked familiar, but he supposed he would be hard to recognize, as well. In his younger days, days that seemed a century ago, he'd worn a mop of hair rather than the military style he wore now, and a Nehru jacket rather than a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He'd left his uniform hanging in the closet back at Meg's apartment because dress blues weren't appropriate for a place like this, and his casual uniform was stored away at the lake house. He felt oddly transplanted without it. But tonight he wanted to have a good time and relax, not spend the whole evening defending who he was.

He was catching on.

"Johnny-boy, is that you?"

Johnny swung around and saw Zeke standing before him, still wearing his beard, though it was neatly trimmed now. A wave of nostalgia sucked Johnny under its spell, and laughing, he grabbed his friend's hand and pulled him into a quick, rough hug. "Son of a gun, how are you doing?"

"Great! Look at you," Zeke said, stepping back and giving Johnny a once-over. "Two years over there and nothing's missing? A little less ugly, maybe," he teased, "but hell, I can still compete. Or I could before I tied the knot with Kathy."

Johnny laughed. "Married! Man, why didn't you tell me?"

"I started to send you an invitation," Zeke said, "but under the circumstances, I didn't think the Marines would let you come. Besides, you'da razzed me about my confirmed bachelorhood. We were all confirmed bachelors, weren't we?"

"Yep," Johnny said, "but we were also confirmed Republicans, but I can't stand Nixon. People change."

Laughing and slapping his back, Zeke turned to the bar, got the bartender's attention and pointed to a table at the back of the room, where two men sat. "How about a round for the table over there?" he said, then glancing at Johnny asked, "Draft okay?"

Johnny hesitated. Addressing the bartender himself, he asked, "Do you have any beer that isn't cold?"

The busy bartender cut him an annoyed glance. "I'll heat it up for you if you want," he quipped sarcastically.

Johnny gave him a half smile and decided to let it go. "Bad idea. Just give me what they're having."

Zeke chuckled and threw Johnny a look. "Were you kidding, man? Warm beer? Is that how they tortured you guys over there?"

Johnny grinned. "Only when they ran out of bamboo shoots." He took two of the beers and nodded for Zeke to lead him. "Let's go see the guys."

Zeke took a drink from his own cup and started between the tables, talking to Johnny over his shoulder. "You gotta see Doc. He's as clean-cut as you. And I'm worried about ole Lare. His hair weighs more than he does now. Whatever you do, don't mention his tattoo."

"What tattoo?" Johnny asked with a grin.

"The one that says, Peace, Love, Dope. He's clean now, but he can't find anyone around here to remove it, so we just act like it's not there. You're still clean, aren't you, Johnny? I mean, war didn't turn you into an acid freak or anything, did it?"

Johnny tried to hide the strain on his face at the unexpected but typical question, and he told himself not to expect any more from these guys than he'd gotten from anyone else. "No, Zeke. I'm still straight," he said.

Zeke laughed, as if the question had only been a joke, and trying to loosen up, Johnny followed his friend between the tables to the guys he'd gotten into so much trouble with in college, friends who'd been on the football team, catching his passes and completing his plays, establishing a camaraderie that he hadn't known again until he'd gotten to Vietnam. But his heart wasn't in the reunion, he realized. He had little in common with a doctor, a husband and a reformed doper with a tattoo that proclaimed his former habit to the world.

Still, the greetings were boisterous and warm when he reached the table, but as natural as the camaraderie seemed, he felt a strain between them, as if they, too, wondered just how volatile their warrior friend had become.

Doc, he learned, was serving his residency at a local hospital, and Larry owned a motorcycle repair shop specializing in Harley-Davidsons. And Zeke couldn't shut up talking about his baby.

The beers were embraced with masculine gusto, but Johnny let his sit untouched until the chill wore off. After two years in the brush, cold beer-cold anything-burned unnaturally at his throat. But that wasn't something they would understand, he thought. There was a lot they'd never understand.

But as the evening wore on and the empty beer mugs cluttered the table to the accompaniment of the live band, he began to grow restless. He wasn't connecting with them anymore, he thought. Their lives, so filled with useless ballast, had gone on; his had been on hold.

"I can't believe you're a dad," Johnny told Zeke after a while. "Isn't parenthood kind of like joining the dreaded establishment? Don't you feel like a turncoat?"

Zeke laughed. "Don't give me that, when you're about to be a teacher. God, teachers were the worst."

"A coach," Johnny corrected. "I'm a coach. The teacher stuff is just P.E. a few periods a day."

"Same difference," Larry threw in. "Before you know it, you'll be pacing the halls with a pad of pink slips in your hand, looking for innocent little punks to keep after school."

Doc laughed and leaned across the table, raising his voice to be heard over the music. "You'll be flunking people for having smelly lockers and raiding the bathrooms looking for cigarette smokers."

"Yeah, yeah," Johnny said. "And Zeke'll be taking the car keys away from his kid and forbidding her to listen to that loud rock music."

Zeke smiled. "Janie's only ten months old, man. She can have the keys anytime she wants, and she already knows the words to most of the Allman Brothers' songs. I'm a new breed of dad."

"And I'm a new breed of teacher," Johnny volleyed.

"Right," Zeke said, raising his beer in a toast. "I guess we all have to settle down sometime."

Johnny's smile faded as he brought the mug to his lips. Settle down. The words scraped at his heart, making his spirit buck in its cage for release. It was a sweet concept, one that he longed for. But before he could settle down, he had to find his place.

"Oooh, Mama." Larry had zeroed in on three women- two blondes and a redhead-coming in across the room, and Johnny followed his leering eyes. "Come to Papa."

The women stopped at the bar, ordered drinks, then turned around, scanning the crowded room for a table. And as one of the blondes turned their way, her gaze collided with Johnny's.

"Carrie Hunter." He uttered the name without realizing it, and saw her pause as she met his eyes. For a moment, he wished he had worn his uniform, just for the sake of satisfying the woman's hatred.

You can take the man out of war, but you can't take the war out of the man, huh, Carrie?

Dragging his eyes away, he shifted in his chair, making sure that he wasn't facing her, and threw back the last of his warm beer.

"You know her?" Larry asked.

Johnny leaned his elbow on his armrest and stroked his chin with his trigger finger. "Yeah, I know her."

"Then what are you waiting for? Get them over here."

"I don't want her over here," Johnny said, not bothering to temper his harsh tone. "She's not my type."

"Well, she's my type," Larry said. "You can take one of the others."

And before Johnny could stop him, Larry had left his seat and was on his way toward the women, his charm turned up as high as the music blaring from the amps.

"THERE AREN'T ANY TABLES." Sally turned back to Carrie and Barbara and shook her head. "Maybe we should go somewhere else."

Carrie made a subtle half turn with her body, scanning the tables again, and once more her gaze grazed Johnny Malone. The friend he sat with seemed to be watching them with animated beast-hungry enthusiasm, and quickly, she looked away again.

The new coach wasn't wearing his uniform, and so her eyes drifted back to him again, assessing him with curiosity and a little awe. He looked different now. Younger. Even a little gentler. But it was just a front, she thought. Probably a facade he used for picking up women.

"That guy with the tattoo's coming toward us," Barbara whispered. Straightening the tunic that half covered her matching hot pants, she said, "Quick. What are we going to do? Go or stay?"

"Go."

"Stay."

Sally and Carrie glared at each other, each appalled at the other's answer. "He's cute!" Sally whispered. "What's the matter with you?"

"I didn't come here to get picked up," Carrie said through her teeth. "You said you just wanted me to hear the band. Besides..." She glanced back at Johnny, saw that he didn't look happy about what his friend was doing. "That guy he's with is the new coach. Don't you recognize him?"

Sally's eyes only lit up more, and she checked the bow at her back that tied her halter top in place. "It sure is. Don't worry. If you don't like him, I'll take him. He's the best-looking, anyway. You can have Mr. Peace, Love, Dope."

"Oh, please." Carrie turned her back to the men and fixed her eyes on the two women she'd known since the fifth grade. "Is that all you two think about? Men and how they look? Doesn't anything else matter to you? Just this afternoon you told me how weird you thought veterans are!"

"Don't be so uptight," Sally whispered as the man approached them. "He'll hear you."

"Hello, ladies."

Carrie forced herself to turn around and face the man standing before her, his pony tail hanging past his shoulders.

"My friends and I were wondering if you'd like to join us," he said.

"All of your friends?" Carrie uttered.

Larry set his arm on her shoulder and turned around to look at Johnny, making it distressingly obvious that they were discussing him. "Well, now, Johnny's a little rough around the edges sometimes. But a few years ago when we used to hang out, the chicks loved him."

Carrie stepped away from Larry, shrugging off his arm. "Well, if I see any 'chicks,' I'll be sure to send them over."

"Uh-oh." Larry grinned, as if delighted by her indignation, and made a wounded face to the men at his table. Johnny was the only one who didn't laugh. "I didn't mean anything bad," he said. "Just come on over. Give a guy a chance."

"I'll go," Barbara said, and Sally shrugged and added, "Why not?"

Not knowing what else to do, since she didn't relish the idea of standing alone in a bar, Carrie acquiesced and followed her friends, thanking her stars that she'd come in her own car, so she could slip away and go home as soon as she found the opportunity.

Johnny stood up when she approached, and their eyes locked and held with mutual contempt. In the dim light, she couldn't help noting that the color of his shirt made his blue eyes look softer.

"Miss Hunter," he said in cold greeting.

"Lieutenant," she returned.

"Lieutenant?" Barbara asked, pulling out a chair next to him. "Are you in the service?"

Johnny nodded, but his focus was still centered on Carrie.

"Johnny just got home from overseas," Zeke said.

"Vietnam?" Barbara asked. "I thought the troops all came home months ago."

Johnny and Carrie both settled disbelieving eyes on the woman. "You don't read the paper, do you?" she asked.

Barbara lifted her shoulder in a shrug. "It's too depressing."

Carrie released an impatient sigh and shook her head, remembering why she and her friends had drifted apart over the last few years.

"There was a cease-fire in January," Johnny said, his voice dull but patient, "but there were still troops in Laos and Cambodia. That's where I ended up."

The band launched into a loud rendition of "Wild Thing," and people sprang up from all around the bar, heading for the dance floor. Barbara abandoned the subject that didn't interest her and grabbed Johnny's arm.

"Do you want to dance?" she asked. "I love this song."

Johnny realized she was talking to him and shook his head idly. "No thanks. It makes my ears ring instead of my heart."

Barely ruffled by the rejection, Barbara turned to Doc. "You dance?"

"Sure, Doc dances," Larry answered for him. "Don't you, Doc?"

"Yeah, among other things," Doc said with a lascivious grin.

"Doc?" Barbara asked, bouncing up and latching onto his arm as they started to the dance floor. "Are you a doctor?"

They disappeared into the crowd as Larry pulled Sally to her feet and tossed a twenty dollar bill onto the table. "Hey, Zeke. Get us another round of drinks, will ya? I'm buying."

Zeke headed for the bar, unaware that he'd done the unthinkable. He'd left Carrie and Johnny alone.

For a moment, they sat watching the band, both their faces changing colors with the rainbow lights strobing from the stage.

"I knew this was going to happen," she muttered.

Johnny feigned disinterest, but finally he looked at her. "What?"

"That I'd get dragged over here, only to be left alone with you."

Johnny set his elbows on the table and leaned forward. "Don't worry. I'm not armed."

She glanced at him in the darkness, met those eyes again. "I didn't come here to meet men," she said.

"Then why?"

"To drink a beer, listen to some good music, relax."

Johnny set his chin on his knuckles. "Well, I hate to tell you this, Teach, but we have something in common. I came here for the same reason."

"Yeah, sure."

She watched her friends on the dance floor doing the Robot and the Funky Chicken, warming up to Johnny's friends. Some part of her wished she could let go, but she hadn't been interested in a man since Paul. More than anything, she wanted to be home... she wasn't doing anyone any good sitting here with a bunch of virtual strangers.

"Your friends...are they just home from the war, too?" Her question was gratuitous, for she felt the need to make conversation.

"No," Johnny said. "They're still morally intact. That's why they're out there charming the panties off your friends."

Carrie felt the stab and told herself not to respond to it, though her heart sped up with adrenaline, much like it had earlier today. "Then how do you know them?"

"We played football together in college," Johnny said, picking his friends out in the dancing crowd. As if he had to make the explanation more for himself than her, he went on. "We all got 2S deferments to go to school, so we weren't drafted. And by the time we graduated and were eligible for the draft, they were only drafting nineteen-year-olds. Those guys completely missed it."

Carrie moved her eyes back to him. "And you?" she asked. "Why did you have to go?"

"Because I enlisted," Johnny said with a smile that dared her to make some unconscionable issue out of the fact.

"I see."

"Of course you do."

The fact that she didn't see at all was apparent as she fixed her eyes on the band.

She brought her gaze back to the man sitting next to her, his hands nesting around his mug of beer as he stared at a stain on the tabletop. She wondered what he saw there. The sadness in his eyes tugged at her heart and inexplicably, she felt the need for a truce. She didn't like herself much for taking potshots at him.

"Look, I know we got off to a bad start," she said. "But if we're going to be working together, don't you think we should put it all behind us and try to get along?"

"Do you think your conscience would allow that?" Johnny asked. "Making peace with a Vietnam vet?"

The question slashed through her heart, and she drilled into his eyes with her own, hers full of anger and passion, the same that had drawn him to her that first day when he'd seen her on the stage. The emotion erupting in them startled him, just as her tears had startled him that afternoon. "If my fiance hadn't come home in a body bag, Lieutenant, I would have married one."

She sprang out of her chair and started for the door, but Johnny was after her in a second. Grabbing her hand, he swung her around. "Wait."

"For what?" she asked, tears misting her eyes again. "So we can sit here and snipe at each other? I would think you've had enough of that."

"I'm sorry," he said, and she could see the honesty in his eyes. "I didn't know. The things you said at that concert the other day, and then today... I thought..."

"You thought right," she said, blinking the tears back. "I hate the war, I hate the people who kept the war going, and I hate-"

"Everyone who survived it?" he provided gently.

"No," she said. "I was going to say that I hate all the pain that it's caused so many people."

"You and me both. Looks like we have something else in common."

She wanted to shout that she didn't have anything in common with him, nothing at all, but the words got caught in her throat as her tears pushed forward again. "I'm going home," she said, her voice teetering on the edge of control. "I'm not in a partying mood. Tell my friends I'll call them tomorrow."

"Sure." Johnny saw the pain in her eyes and wanted to reach out, but he knew she would only rebuff him. After a moment, he nodded. "Take it easy, Teach," he said. "I'll see you around."

He watched as she disappeared out the door, and finally, when he knew she wasn't coming back, he went back to the table, grabbed his beer and bottomed it. Maybe he should go, too, he thought.

After all, he seemed to have more in common with the woman who hated him than he had with the guys he'd known most of his life. Too much had changed to go back, he thought, so maybe it was time to move forward.

Reaching into his pocket for enough to cover the round of drinks he had bought, he dropped it on the table and got up, gave his friends at the bar and on the dance floor one last look, and left the same way Carrie had.

They probably wouldn't notice he had gone, he thought. They would just think that he was with Carrie. Funny thing was, he was probably the last one in the world she would have gone home with tonight.

But strangely, he felt close to her anyway. As charged as their exchange had been, it rang with vivid notes of honest emotion and regret. It vented his frustration a little, he thought. Even made him feel better.

He just wished she didn't hate his guts. Because he could use a friend right about now.

CARRIE UNLOCKED THE DOOR of her VW and slipped in, slumping over her steering wheel and trying to pull herself together before she drove away. She shouldn't have let him get to her again, she thought. It was time she figured out how to be strong. It was time she learned to deal with the raw fury waging its own war inside her.

She swiped the tears from her face, hating herself for not holding them in. Her trembling fingers jammed the keys into the ignition, and she hauled in a shaky breath and pressed the clutch, and started to turn the key.

A knock on her passenger window startled her, and she looked up and saw Johnny peering in at her.

Muttering a curse she wiped her tears and unlocked the door. Johnny opened it and leaned inside. "What?" she asked.

Johnny slipped into the seat next to her, leaving his door open. For the first time, she was glad the dome light in her car had burned out so that she could take partial refuge in the darkness.

"Oh, God," he whispered, gazing at her with eyes so gentle they almost made her trust him. "Did I do that? Did I make you cry?"

She felt her lips trembling, and propping an elbow on the steering wheel, she covered her face with her hand.

"Carrie...I'm sorry," he said. "Really. I was out of line with that crack about your conscience. I guess I have as many assumptions about you as you have about me. I didn't know you'd lost someone in the war."

She bent her head down, allowing a tangled curtain of hair to hide her face from him. "Don't apologize," she said. "I've been nothing but rude to you."

Johnny pushed her hair back from her face and his fingers lingered at her neck, stroking the tender skin there. "Hey, I don't hold grudges."

"Well, I guess I do," she admitted. She tried to steady her voice, but it wobbled nevertheless. "You're right about me, you know. I do have prejudices against everyone involved in the war. I'm as mad as hell at the Marines and the government...." Her voice rose and her lips stiffened with each declaration, but she stopped short of admitting just who she was angriest at.

"I wasn't the wife," she whispered on a raspy breath. "I wasn't there when they delivered the news to the family. When I got the news, there was no one to lash out at. No one standing there I could hit or scream at. Maybe I've been beating up men in uniform ever since."

Johnny sat in the darkness of the car for a moment, looking at her with eyes that saw more than she dared to reveal. After a moment, he took her hand in his, laced his fingers through hers and held it tightly. "Well, I guess when you put it that way...you can beat up on me. I've been through worse."

She frowned through her tears and looked down at their clasped hands. Breathing in a sob, she met his eyes. "I don't want to beat up on you, Johnny. I'm so tired of fighting."

As if he'd done it a thousand times before, Johnny released her hand and slipped his arm around her, pulling her face against his chest. Something told her not to wilt against him so willingly, but her heart left her no ammunition with which to fight. Instead, she savored the warmth of his embrace, the strength of the chest she wept against, the patience and quiet with which he held her. This man was not a shell, as she'd accused. And for now, he felt incapable of brutality or destruction.

And he smelled like British Sterling, night wind and a trace of cigarette smoke.

He touched her chin, eased her face up to his. He didn't offer her a chance to think about where her heart was guiding her, and when her lips met his, all rationale flew away, leaving only an aching need that made her melt against him.

His tongue traced the edges of her lips, and mesmerized, she parted them. His mouth was wet against hers, warm, hungry, and his tongue mated with hers in a way that awakened her most dormant emotions.

Finally, he broke the kiss, gently withdrew and gazed into her damp, eloquent eyes. The intensity and insight in that gaze startled her.

"I-I should go," she whispered.

Instantly, she saw the disappointment in his expression and wondered if she was doing the right thing by retreating.

"Just tell me you're okay," he said. "And that you know that if you ever want to talk about it, I'll listen."

She smiled and willed her heart to stop fluttering. "Thanks, Johnny."

He put a leg out the door, but made no further move to get out. "So we have a truce?" he asked, reaching up to brush the dampness from her cheek.

"Okay," she said, not trusting her voice.

"Sort of like Nixon's peace with honor?" he went on.

Carrie smiled. "Let's not bring Nixon into this."

Johnny laughed, and she felt her heart melting, warming her all the way to her toes.

"But I can handle a cease-fire," she whispered.

"Good."

He sat still for a moment longer, a comfortable, but maddening silence falling between them, making her heartbeat race again.

Finally, he got out of the car. "Lock this door," he said.

Carrie nodded. "I will."

He closed the door and she reached across to lock it and watched him amble across the parking lot to a car she couldn't see. He was getting to her, she thought. Sliding right beneath her barriers and ambushing her heart. And she was running out of ammunition.

Cranking her car, she shifted into reverse and pulled out of her space, then into a lane of traffic. But instead of the red light at the intersection near the club, she saw Johnny's face as he'd stood in the crowd at the concert the other day, so tall and proud in his neatly pressed dress blues, his eyes surprised and stricken with pain as he looked at her. All she heard was his voice, soft and mellow, telling her that if she needed to talk, he was there to listen.

Even after all she'd said to him.

Funny that a man who'd been to war, suffered, dodged death on a daily basis, could have a greater understanding of her than she could have of him.

Maybe it was time to let go of her anger, she thought. Maybe Johnny Malone could show her how.

Chapter Four

The night air was warm and damp when Johnny stepped out of the Malibu he'd bought at a used car lot that day, and a faint scent of freshly mown grass wafted across the parking lot of Meg's apartment complex, a scent he'd almost forgotten in the jungle. He slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans and glanced toward the pond at the nucleus of the complex, and his mind inevitably returned to Carrie Hunter.

Maybe I've been beating up men in uniform ever since....

What was it about her tonight, he wondered, that would make him offer himself the way he had? He'd seen enough death to last forty lifetimes, and he'd been shot at enough to die forty times. He'd even had to hang on by a thread himself after being hit with enough shrapnel to kill a weaker man. It shouldn't be so important to him to soothe her ailing emotions, he thought. And yet it was.

He strolled toward the railing edging the pond, and in the darkness ahead heard someone whistling an old Lovin' Spoonful song that his men had often sung as they trudged through the mud and brush, trying to hold their fatigue and despair at bay...

"What a Day for a Daydream "

Some nostalgic pull drew him toward the sound until he saw the source-a black man sitting in a wheelchair, looking out over the railing to the water below. The man only had one leg.

Johnny stopped a few feet away from him, leaned both elbows on the rail and began to whistle quietly with him.

For a moment, it was as if the two had known each other all their lives. As if they knew the same ghosts, wrestled the same memories. It was a comfortable feeling, like that of brother with brother in silent contentment. Yet they had never exchanged a word.

They came to the end of a chorus and the night grew quiet again. After a moment, the man rolled his wheelchair closer to Johnny and offered a smile. "Nice night, ain't it?" His hoarse Louis Armstrong voice made Johnny feel even more at ease.

"Yeah," he said. He nodded down at the man's missing leg. "Nam?"

"Right on," the man said. "You?"

Johnny nodded. "Just got back last week." He held out a hand to his comrade in arms. "Name's Malone."

The man took his hand, his own as calloused and scarred as Johnny's. "Brady. Been home three and a half years myself."

"Three and a half years?" A low chuckle traveled up Johnny's throat, not borne of amusement, but of a dull irony, instead. "Damn. Three and a half years ago I was playing football at Georgia State and thinking I was the biggest stud ever to hit the earth."

"You mean you ain't?" the man asked with a laugh. "You got lady trouble now?"

Johnny reached into his pocket, withdrew a cigarette and set it between his teeth as he searched his pockets for a light. "Lady trouble." He breathed a derisive laugh. "I have trouble with a lady, but it isn't exactly lady trouble. This one just happens to have a thing against men in uniform."

"Lot of that goin' around," Brady said. "But I don't see what the problem is. You ain't in uniform."

"Doesn't matter," Johnny said, offering a cigarette to Brady. "I'm wearin' it even when I'm not wearin' it. You know?"

The man took a cigarette from the pack and nodded sympathetically. "You ain't tellin' me nothin'. I'll be wearin' it the rest of my life."

Johnny lit the cigarettes and leaned back against the rail, taking a long drag as he stared down at Brady. "Tell me something, man. You've been back over three years. When does it start getting easier?"

"I'll let you know when it happens," Brady said. "Meanwhile, you just keep on truckin'. And be damn glad you're alive. Hell, in my company, we lost two cats for every one that lived. I'm a miracle. A day don't go by that I don't remember that."

Johnny smiled, realizing that divine intervention had kept him alive more than once, as well. There was something wonderful about having made it home. About having both legs. About still having a sound mind, a whole conscience-despite those who couldn't see it. "You live around here?" he asked.

Brady gestured toward his wing of apartments. "Two B." Headlights lit the parking lot in the distance and Brady perked up. "There's my ole lady comin' home from work," he said, grabbing the wheels of his chair and turning around. "Gotta go now. We're goin' dancin'."

Johnny smiled and pushed away from the rail. Stubbing out his cigarette, he held out his hand again. "Well, it was nice talking to you."

"You, too, man," Brady said, locking thumbs and fists with Johnny in what had gone beyond the black handshake and had become a clench of brotherhood. "Hang in there, brother. And knock on the door anytime. I'm usually there."

"You bet."

As Brady started back toward his apartment, he picked up the tune they'd been whistling earlier.

Johnny felt better knowing that there were others around just like him, guys who understood because they'd been there. Guys who knew what it meant to survive. Guys who had a first-name intimacy with death.

He supposed that in her own way, Carrie Hunter had that in common with him, too. She had suffered the war, the death, the tragedy. Her life had been irrevocably altered. If only she could see that they weren't all that different.

If only he could stop seeing it so clearly.

He strolled back toward Meg's door, remembering that sudden and surprising kiss that he hadn't planned. It had just happened, and now he feared that it would haunt him until he tasted of her again. He was making too much of it, he thought. Other than Brady tonight and Meg, Carrie was the only one he'd truly connected with since he'd come home. It didn't mean they shared some sort of common destiny. It didn't mean that they would even be friends.

But who knew?

Maybe there were better uses for raw emotions like those he'd seen in her, he thought as his mind drew back to those round, green eyes that had drawn him that first day back home.

Maybe, if he could make his truce with her hold, he'd have the chance to find out.

THE SUN BEAT DOWN with merciless heat Thursday afternoon when forty-three teenage boys assembled on the field for football tryouts. At the same time, sixteen students who had signed up for the Junior ARM club knelt in the parking lot clad in shorts and sandals, painting signs to be carried at the first football game, urging citizens to write their congressmen in favor of amnesty for conscientious objectors.

Carrie Hunter shook her head with frustration as she tried to narrow their interest to the signs and slogans, rather than the real reasons many of them had joined. Three of the senior girls had joined to be near the senior-class president, who had signed up because it would look good on his college application. At least five other students came because they wanted to gain the favor of their history teacher, and two had admitted that they hoped she would take them on "neat field trips." The rest had reasons Carrie couldn't pinpoint, but which she was certain had little, if anything, to do with political concern or social reform.

"Concentrate on those new slogans," she told some of the young women straining to see over their shoulders to the players warming up for tryouts. "Not the football field."

"But Ms. Hunter," one of the senior girls whined, "didn't you see the new coach?"

"I've met him," Carrie said, trying to keep her expression as disinterested as she could manage. "He's too old for teenage fantasies."

"Maybe so," the girl said, "but I'm not. Look at him! He's taking off his shirt. Oh, darn. He's got a tank top on underneath."

Despite her efforts not to look, Carrie's eyes strayed to the field. Johnny had peeled off his football jersey and slung it over his shoulder, leaving only the white tank top beneath it, and was leading the team in a Marine calisthenics routine that put the teenagers to shame. A thin sheen of perspiration glistened over his bronze skin, and his chest and biceps bulged with the strain of exertion. His dog tags bobbed from his neck as he moved. Through the wet tank top, Carrie could see the muscles rippling down his back to  his narrow waist and to the tight hips compacted in his gray gym shorts.

She swallowed and tore her gaze from the field. "Come on, people. Back to work."

But as the giggling teenagers began slapping paint on a fresh sign, Carrie found her eyes drifting again and again to the man on the field. And she realized that she needed to fortify herself against him. For he was getting to her in ways that she hadn't expected.

"MALONE, YOU DON'T have to do all this stuff with the team," Johnny's overweight assistant moaned. "You're not the one who's gonna be out there playing."

As the team jaunted off for laps around the track, Johnny wiped his forehead with the shirt over his shoulder and regarded Norman Vance, the paunchy head baseball coach who had been assigned to help Johnny during the fall season. In the spring, Johnny was expected to return the favor.

"I like to keep in shape," he said. "Besides, I can't expect my men to do something I'm not willing to do myself."

"Your men?" The assistant coach rolled his eyes heavenward. "This ain't the Marines, Malone. It's football."

"Do you want to have the first winning team in ten years or not?" Johnny asked.

The older man, who hadn't seemed all that thrilled about working under Johnny in the first place, shrugged. "Sure I do."

"Then I do it my way," Johnny said. "Don't worry. If you can't keep up, you don't have to join in."

Before Norman could object to the ambiguous insult, Johnny dashed off to catch up with his team.

He found his pace alongside the teenagers who panted and cursed as they ran, and grinned at the amount of work it would take to get these boys into shape before the first game. But he could do it, he thought. He'd done it before.

He made the curve of the quarter-mile track and glanced uphill at the large parking lot, where a group of students painted signs. His eyes fell on a long pair of bare legs beneath red jogging shorts, a flowing blond mop of straight hair flapping in the warm breeze and eyes the color of a rain forest stealing a look down at him.

Damn, he thought, looking away as quickly as she did. She had great legs. And he'd seen great legs before, but these were... these were fantastic legs. He swallowed and glanced back over his shoulder, allowing his pace to slow a degree.

He watched her bend over and pick up a sign, and her hips moved in a way that made his mouth go dry. Was she wearing a bra? he wondered. If he could just get a little closer-

"Lookout, Coach!"

Johnny jerked his eyes away and picked up his pace to avoid colliding with a player, and rebuked himself for getting so easily distracted. He was wasting his time fantasizing about her, he thought. The lady hated vets in general. And despite their truce and the tender moment they'd shared the other night, she wasn't crazy about him in particular.

He found that he was several paces ahead of the rest of the team and decided to slow down a little to narrow the distance between them. He saw the assistant coach standing in the sweltering heat, fanning himself on the sidelines, saw a few kids too young for high school watching through a fence.

And then he saw Mark, donned in paint-stained sweat pants and a T-shirt, standing just away from the field, dragging on a cigarette...

MARK TOOK THE SALEM FROM his mouth and blew a smoke cloud above his head. Those jive turkeys, he thought, watching with amusement as the team sweated and panted. He could run circles around those flabby white jocks. He saw Coach Malone running right along with them, though it was more than obvious that his mind was centered more on the blond teacher in the parking lot than his out-of-shape team.

Mark laughed to himself and brought the cigarette back to his lips, wondering if the two were shackin' up yet. He'd make a point of asking the next time they cornered him for something, he thought. That ought to distract them.

He saw the coach spot him at the fence, and Mark almost wished he hadn't come. He didn't want anyone to think he was anxious to join the team, because he wasn't. He just didn't have anything better to do today, and it was time these chumps got a lesson in real physical prowess. Laps and jumping jacks didn't even compare to the training you got on the street.

The coach veered off the track toward him and Mark dropped his cigarette and ground it out with the rubber sole of his torn tennis shoe.

"You're late," Johnny said, trying to control his breath.

"Who said I came to try out?"

Johnny set a hand on his hip and wiped his forehead with the back of his other hand. "Well, you either came to try out or you came to stand around in the heat and sweat."

"Maybe I came to check out the chicks, like you," Mark quipped.

Johnny grinned. "Well, don't look now, kid, but they're only interested in the guys on the field. 'Course, if you did come to try out, it isn't too late yet. The regimen might be pretty tough, but-"

Mark bristled despite himself. "Man, I can handle that stuff," he said. "Don't worry 'bout me."

"Then hit the track," Johnny challenged. "And if you make the team, I'll expect you to be on time from now on."

Mark hesitated a moment-just long enough to make it look like his idea. Finally, he strutted toward the team and fell into step with the fatigued young men jogging around the track.

Johnny smiled at the noncommittal way the boy had joined the team, and decided that the kid had a lot of potential. He'd have to keep an eye on him.

"Hey, Malone!"

Johnny saw Norman trudging toward him, obviously more agitated than he'd been before. "You ain't lettin' him on the team, are you? We already met our quota."

"What do you mean, 'our quota'? Quota for what?"

"For blacks, what else?" Norman said, dropping his voice to a loud whisper. "We don't need any more blacks on the team."

Johnny gave the man a dull look that spoke volumes. "I don't choose my team by color, Norm. I want him on the team."

"But I'm telling you, that kid's a loser. He's never applied himself to anything in his life!"

"Maybe he's never had the chance to win before."

Norman's face was growing red, and Johnny suspected that it had nothing to do with the heat. "He doesn't have the grade point average, and I can bet you a hundred bucks he won't cut his hair."

"Nobody on my team has to cut his hair," Johnny said. "And as for grade point averages, I made a deal with Altus. Anybody can join the team, no matter what their GPA, but once they're on the team, they maintain a C average or they're off."

"No way!" the assistant coach yelled. "That'll never work. You'll wind up with a bunch of thieves and bums signing up, and half of them'll have to drop out after the first grades are posted."

"Maybe they'll surprise you," Johnny said. "I've seen a lot of men who joined the Marines because some judge gave them a choice between military service and jail. You might have called them losers, but when it came to a firefight, I'd choose to have them covering my butt than some yellow-bellied middle-classers any day."

"I keep tellin' you, this ain't the war," Norman shouted. "This is real life. This is football."

Johnny couldn't help the ironic laughter edging up in his throat. "You think football is real life?"

Norman's chagrin was visible on his mottled cheeks. "Damn it, it's closer to real life than some stupid, unnecessary war halfway across the world! I'm sick of hearin' about it. You can't use this football field for a training ground for junior Marines!"

Lightning fury flashed across Johnny's blue eyes. "I'm not training Marines," he said. "I'm training winners."

"Yeah? Well, what the hell does a Marine know about winning?" the man taunted. "You're the one who wasted two years of your life shooting at civilians!"

Something inside him snapped and Johnny grabbed the collar of the coach's football jersey and jerked his face dangerously close to his. "If you ever say that to me again, so help me God, you'll be scraping yourself up off the dirt. Got that?"

He felt Norman swallow beneath his knuckles. "Let me go," the man said through his teeth.

Reluctantly, Johnny let him go and the coach fell back, touching his shirt as if it had been permanently damaged along with his deflated ego. His face was pulsating crimson, and he glanced aside to determine who had witnessed the humiliating exchange.

Mumbling an expletive under his breath, Johnny started back to the track to stop the laps.

"You're as dangerous as everybody said," Norman dared to shout at his back.

"Damn right," Johnny said, and then he motioned for the players to file in front of him for the drills that he figured he would have to organize himself. There was no one else he could depend on.

CARRIE TRIED TO HIDE her surprise at the scene she had watched from the parking lot. She had seen Johnny talking Mark into joining tryouts, had cheered mentally for the small victory when he'd started running laps, and then had watched as Norman Vance had chastised him about it. She had even seen the way Johnny had physically grabbed him, the fury in his eyes rocking her own heart.

Although the players were too busy running laps to have seen, and her students were painting with their backs to the field, she hadn't missed the humiliation and embarrassment on the assistant coach's ruddy face.

She met Norman as he made his way to the parking lot, but pretended not to have seen. "Practice over already?" she asked.

"Hell, no," Norman muttered. "But General Malone out there thinks he's got it all figured out. Let him do it by himself."

Carrie glanced toward the field, then back to Norman. "I take it you two haven't gotten along."

As though the question opened the floodgates of his anger, Norman pointed back to the field. "He's dangerous, Carrie. I can't work with somebody like that. He actually threatened me! And he's signing up a bunch of blacks on the team, ready to drag down the dedicated players who've been to practice all summer long. The man's treating this like basic training."

Carrie tried to work up some anger of her own in sympathy of the coach she had never really cared for, but she couldn't manage it today. "Well, the players look all right to me. Everybody seems to be keeping up okay. And frankly," she ventured, knowing it wouldn't calm the man's ire, "I'm glad to see Mark Gray trying out. It's about time he found something in school to interest him."

"Yeah, well, he'll probably be passing out dope to his teammates and robbing their lockers. He's gonna make a real contribution, all right."

Carrie regarded the man with disbelief, and suddenly felt a keen understanding of why Johnny had almost decked him. "Come on, Norman. It's just football. Give the kid a chance."

"Just football," he mimicked. "I know it's just football." He started up toward the school building, shaking his head and mumbling furiously under his breath.

Carrie drew in a deep sigh and let her gaze drift back to the field, where Johnny was dividing the team into smaller groups for drills. She saw him look up at her, the anger on his face apparent even from so far away. She wondered what Norman had said to make him so angry.

Probably something stupid and unfeeling, like some of the things she had said to him. Somehow she wished she could take it all back, for they hung in the air between them like live grenades.

And truce or not, she knew an explosion was at hand.

IT WAS OVER AN HOUR LATER, when her ARM members had been dismissed and the football team was showering, that Carrie worked up the courage to knock on Johnny's office door.

"It's open." His voice was sharp, impatient, making her hesitate to go in.

She turned the knob and pushed the door open, and saw him leaning with one hip on his desk, jotting on the clipboard he balanced against his hard abdomen. He still wore his tank top like a second skin, and his dog tags hung from their chain against his chest. The unabashedly masculine scent of outdoors and physical exertion sent a shiver scampering down her spine.

"Hi," she said, drawing his attention from the clipboard.

He looked at her, surprised, the irritation draining from his blue eyes. He dropped the clipboard on the desk. "I thought you were Norman. We didn't exactly hit it off today."

"I gathered," she said. "I saw him after your little incident on the field. What did he say to you?"

Johnny looked at the floor, as if regretting that she was privy to any part of what had happened today. "Something stupid," he said evasively. "I don't think he'll say it again, though. At least not to my face."

A smile took hold of her lips, and she looked down at the avocado-colored shag carpet beneath her feet. "You seem to bring out the worst in people."

Johnny breathed a laugh. "Tell me about it. I just mind my own business, and people feel compelled to make judgments on my life. Beats the hell out of me."

Carrie searched for some explanation, but came up empty. An awkward silence fell between them, for without the volatile exchanges that she'd grown accustomed to between them and since the kiss that still burned on her mind, she didn't know how to behave around him. "Well, the reason I came by," she said, forcing herself to meet his soft gaze, "was to tell you that I saw Mark Gray trying out today."

"You don't miss much, do you?" The beginnings of a smile tugged at his lips.

"I guess not." She sucked in a cleansing breath and tried to go on. "Anyway, I appreciate your getting Mark interested in football, whether Norman liked it or not. Mark's a problem student. He's bored stiff, has too much idle time on his hands and can't stay out of trouble. But he's really a smart kid. I've always wondered what would happen if he could find something that interested him."

Johnny shrugged. "I can't promise any miracles. It's one thing to have talent, but another thing entirely to have the drive and stamina to put it to good use. There's nothing out there forcing him to come to practice or keep his grades up. It's just up to him."

"I don't know," Carrie said, grinning. "I think football has a few more perks than he counted on. After practice today, I noticed several of the girls in my ARM group crowding around him. I don't think he's used to that kind of attention."

"Well then," Johnny said, "maybe we should make sure you keep meeting at the same time as football practice." His eyes slowly swept the length of her, making her twinge with awareness, and she wished she'd worn a bra. But she hadn't even owned one since she'd burned hers five years earlier.

She suddenly felt as if she stood too close to him in the tiny office, and the air seemed thin and sparse.

Their eyes met, and she felt her world stopping, teetering just before rolling off the galaxy, as he wet his lips with the tip of his tongue.

"I'm sorry," he said, and she saw the color highlighting his tan. "I don't mean to stare at you. It's just-" A self-conscious grin claimed his mouth, and he whispered, "God, do you know how good you look in shorts?"

Her heart jolted, and she diverted her eyes, then told herself she wasn't a teenager. She was an adult. With adult feelings. And adult needs, no matter how hard she tried to deny them.

"You know," he said softly, touching her hand with the rough tips of his fingers. "I have a lot of my own problems right now, and I could use a friend, you know? But I don't really know how to act around you. Maybe I've been out of circulation too long."

The bold admission made her look up at him, and the vivid vulnerability in his eyes startled her. He wasn't supposed to be vulnerable. He was supposed to be tough, mean, insensitive.

"I know you have some of your own baggage you're dragging around from the war," he whispered. "And it isn't easy to put it away. I know. There's this lake house my family's had for years. Before I came home, I spent a few days there, trying to figure out how to shed some of mine. I left everything there. All I brought with me was my uniform, a change of clothes, and-" his free hand came up to clasp the dog tags at his chest "-and these."

He didn't have to say how hard the separation had been for him, for instinctively she knew. She had tried to put her own baggage away, but she hadn't quite been strong enough.

"I think sometimes we need help figuring out where to put things," he went on.

Her eyes stung with the ache of emotion, and she felt his fingers lacing through hers, pulling her infinitesimally closer.

She looked at him for a long moment, her heart pounding out the seconds, and she felt as if she was falling, falling, falling to her death... And that baggage she clung to was all that kept her from it.

Her eyes fell to his lips, and she smelled the faint tobacco scent mixed with the flavor of the cherry Life Savers she'd seen on his desk, and she asked herself how she'd gotten so close to him so fast. It was too fast, she thought with a jolt of terror. Too fast.

"We could go out tonight," he whispered, his breath feathering across her lips with each word. "We could catch a movie. I don't know when I went to the movies last. My sister tells me Live and Let Die is a big hit right now. You like James Bond?"

She shook her head. "I-I don't think...not tonight..."

"Then forget the movie," he said. "How about just a pizza? That's another thing I haven't had in I don't know how long."

Carrie cursed herself for thinking of the more intimate things she had done without for at least as long as he had. Things like holding a man, touching...

She took a step back and withdrew her hand from his, and tried to pull her barriers back up. But they wouldn't stand anymore. "I can't. Not tonight."

He dropped his hand to his side, but she saw from his intense gaze that he wouldn't easily accept her rejection. "All right. When then?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe never."

Those protective shutters of defensiveness closed over his eyes, hiding the vulnerability and replacing it with cool indifference. '"Maybe never,'" he repeated. "Okay. But just so it'll be clear in my mind, is it because of who I am or because of where I've been?"

"Neither," she said, struggling to sustain her shredding voice. "It's because of who I am and where I've been."

Even behind the surface indifference, Carrie could see that she had hurt him. But she told herself that it was just as well. She couldn't get closer to him. Her emotions were still too raw to risk more pain.

She started from his office, but turned back to him at the door. "I'll see you at registration tomorrow," she whispered.

Johnny nodded. "Affirmative. I'll be here."

"Okay, then." She considered the door knob and asked herself why she always had to retreat from him like a wounded enemy running for her life. "Tomorrow."

He didn't say a word as she disappeared through the door.

Chapter Five

Johnny sat still for a moment, staring at the door and contemplating what had just happened. Had he only imagined the chemistry smoldering between them? Had it just been wishful thinking?

He picked up the clipboard off his desk and tried to remember what he'd been doing before she came into the room. But the thought of her fresh, outdoor scent lingered, mingling with the wafting fragrance of all that hair and the image of the saddest eyes he'd ever seen as she'd told him she wouldn't go out with him.

Maybe never.

So much for truces, he thought. He had only wound up alienating her further. She hated what he stood for, and despite the electricity sparking between them, she would never get over that. And neither would he.

A knock sounded on the door and he looked up, hoping to see her standing there, waiting to tell him she'd changed her mind. Instead, Mark Gray stepped in.

"Hey, Coach."

The boy stood in the doorway, water still beading on his hair from his shower. Despite the fact that he'd just bathed, the unmistakable scent of marijuana wafted from his clothes, and his eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.

Johnny frowned, but decided not to mention it just yet. "You did good today, Mark."

Mark came further into the office, picked up a pen off of Johnny's desk, flicked it. "So I made the team?"

"Looks like it," Johnny said. "You didn't really have any doubts, did you?"

Mark shrugged. "Not until Coach Vance cornered me in the locker room," he said. "Told me he wouldn't make it easy if I stayed."

"You can count on that," Johnny said, tucking his anger away and deciding to deal with his assistant later. "Whoever said it would be easy?"

Mark laughed. "Nobody. But that dude's got it in for me. Last year I had him for gym and I sort of cut class a lot. He hates my guts."

Johnny got off of his desk and went around it to drop into his chair. "Cutting class is no way to win the man's respect, Mark. You want to be treated like a winner, you have to act like one."

"Ain't no black winners in his classes," Mark said. "Man, if he's in on this stuff, maybe I don't belong here. I don't need the hassle."

Johnny leaned forward on his desk and settled his chin on his clasped hands. "Maybe you don't. Maybe you just don't have what it takes, Mark." He dropped his face in his dusty hand, rubbed at his temples. He was tired, he thought. So tired. Maybe he didn't need the hassle, either. After all, no one's life hung in the balance.

Still, the boy seemed like someone worth the effort.

"You know, I don't have a lot of prerequisites for joining this team, but it'll take stamina and guts to stay on it. No more cutting class, no more slouching on the grades, no more smart-mouthing the teachers. If you're on my team, you act like a winner, and I'll make you one. I don't have time for whining or excuses, and the color of your skin or how long you wear your hair doesn't have one thing to do with it. And if Coach Vance doesn't like it, that's just too bad."

A tentative smile lifted the corners of Mark's lips. He looked at the floor between his big, torn-up tennis shoes for a moment, then brought his eyes back to Johnny. "Okay, Coach. You can count me in."

Johnny reached across the desk and gripped the boy's hand. "Three o'clock tomorrow," Johnny reminded him. "After school registration. Don't be late."

Mark grinned and strutted toward the door. "I'll be there, Coach. Don't worry about me."

"And, Mark..."

The boy stopped and turned back to Johnny. "If I ever smell pot on you again, you'll be off the team so fast you won't know what hit you. Got that?"

Mark stood quietly for a moment, struggling between denial and acquiescence. Finally, he nodded. "Okay, Coach" was all he said.

IT WAS LATE THAT NIGHT before Johnny got to sleep, for the events of his past few days kept crowding his mind in fragmented thoughts and impressions that left him feeling uneasy and ungrounded. He fell into a shallow sleep...

... and heard the brutal orchestration of mortar fire in the distance, the whistle of shells firing nearby. His boots were wet from the puddle in the trench where he tried to sleep, but above him he could hear his buddy Sloan cursing at the sniper who'd terrorized them for hours.

He heard the thud of something in the dirt beside him, looked down, and saw a live grenade. Life fell into slow motion as he grabbed it, hurled it into space, but it was too late.

He felt himself being thrown from the trench, and saw Sloan slam to the ground, his face black and charred, prefigured in the death that was soon to follow. The mud slimed and slipped inside his boots as he crawled toward the man who had been in his platoon for most of his tour.

A bullet nicked the earth next to him, and furious and invincible in his rage, he stood up and started toward the source, firing his bullets with every step.

"I'll get you, you son of a bitch!"

A hand touched his arm, and he slung around, poising his bayonet to strike, and suddenly he was falling, falling, falling ...

He hit the ground with a thud.

"Johnny! You're hurting me!"

He felt himself being shook, not by the quake of another explosion, but by the hands of someone who couldn't see where he'd been.

"Johnny, are you all right? Look at me!"

He opened his eyes and focused on Meg, holding him with horror and tears in her eyes as she lay next to him on the floor. Had he knocked her down?

"Meg," he whispered, trying to catch his breath. "I thought you were-"

"It's okay," she said, and he could hear the tremor of fear in her voice. "I'm okay."

He got up and sat on the edge of his bed, and realized his clothes were soaking wet, yet his skin felt cold and filthy. If he bathed a thousand times a day between now and the end of his life, he thought, he'd never get completely clean.

His breath still came in heavy gasps when he managed to look at his sister. "Meg, did I hurt you?"

"No," she said, wiping his hair from his forehead. He saw a tear roll down her cheek, and quickly she wiped it away. "Johnny, what did they do to you over there to make you dream like that every night?"

He pulled his feet back onto the bed, dropped his head back to the pillow and threw his arm over his eyes. "It's no dream, Meg," he whispered. He moved his fingers to his eyes, kneaded, and looked back at his distraught sister again. "I'm gonna find my own place tomorrow. You haven't gotten a decent night's sleep since I've been here."

"Sleep?" Meg shook him again, this time more gently. "Johnny, I'm not worried about sleep. If you get your own place, who'll wake you up when you're in the middle of one of those? Who'll take care of you?"

"I can take care of myself," he said. "But I can't promise not to hurt you when you wake me up like that. I've been trained for too long to react to the slightest sound or the lightest touch. It's reflexive, and God help me, I can't do anything about it. But I can make sure that I don't hurt you and that I don't keep you up all night every night."

Meg slumped over and leaned her forehead on his mattress. She breathed in a soft sob, and he reached out and awkwardly stroked the back of her head.

"When you were a little boy," she said, "you used to sleep so soundly. Nothing could wake you. Mom would send me to get you up in the mornings, and I'd have to drag you out of bed. And now-"

"Things change," Johnny whispered. "That was a long time ago."

"Not that long," she said. "Not to me."

Johnny swallowed and tried to remember the days before Vietnam, when he'd been innocent and invincible, without a care in the world. But it was hard to remember anything before the day he'd landed in Da Nang.

"Go back to sleep, Meg," he whispered, pulling her to her feet. "I'm fine now."

He saw her lips trembling as she leaned over and pressed a kiss on his cheek, and as much as he wanted to, he didn't know how to make her feel better. He hadn't come to accept the cruel changes life had inflicted on him. He knew better than to expect her to, either.

REGISTRATION CAME AND WENT, shortly followed by the first day of school and the chaos of the first week. The high school seniors strutted around with their noses in the air, determined to set themselves apart from the other students as much as possible, just as their predecessors had done. The freshmen struggled to look older and act cooler, so that they might blend into the sophomores and juniors, who longed for the next grade and the status it would bring.

Carrie's path didn't cross Johnny's very often that week, but she caught occasional glimpses of him at football practice, or bouncing a ball in the gym classes he taught, or traveling between his office and the principal's. He looked tired, she noted, as if the grueling pressures of starting a new job so soon after returning from the war might be too much for him. And when he saw her, he was distant, as if their last encounter, and her rejection, had been enough to squelch any urge he'd had to pursue a friendship.

It was Friday of that week before she saw him sitting alone in the school cafeteria, poring over a page of the newspaper and occasionally marking it with a pen.

For some reason she couldn't name, she didn't want him to be alone. Slowly, she approached him. "I haven't seen the paper today," she said. "My paper boy doesn't get it to my apartment before I leave sometimes. Do you mind if I read the front section?"

He looked up at her over the paper, and a soft, tired-but-reluctant smile told her she was welcome company. Sifting through the stack of sections, he handed her the one she wanted. "There you go," he said. "Nixon still claims that handing over the tapes will cause a breach in national security, Agnew's still roasting on the investigative skewers, and Kissinger's confirmation hearings for secretary of state started today."

Carrie took the paper and shook it out, scanning the headlines. "If you ask me, they ought to exile the whole lot of them and concede the White House to McGovern. If Nixon's people hadn't lied and cheated to get into office, McGovern might have won, anyway."

"And then he would have lied and cheated," Johnny said, jotting something else on his section of newspaper. "If there's anything I've learned over the last couple of years, it's that men in power do anything they have to do to manipulate events in their favor. And then they sit back in their nice air-conditioned offices and watch the dominoes fall."

The conversation wasn't the one she had expected from him, but she found it intriguing. "So you think Nixon manipulated the Watergate break-in?" she asked.

Johnny glanced up at her. "I think it doesn't make any difference whether he did or not. I mean, really, what difference does it make?"

"What difference does it make?" Carrie dropped the newspaper and crumpled it as she leaned on the table, gaping at him. "Are you serious? If the president ordered that break-in, or even covered it up, then he should be impeached. Worse, he should be prosecuted. How can you say it doesn't make any difference?"

"Because it's an idealistic, naive view to think that the executive office should be ruled by some saintly, godlike figurehead who looks like McGovern and rules like Mr. Rogers. The truth is that those guys in the top offices are just as screwed up as we are. And it doesn't matter whether they're Democrats or Republicans."

Carrie glanced around to make sure none of the students at nearby tables had heard his outburst. "Calm down," she whispered. "I didn't mean to start a fight with you."

The fight drained from Johnny's body and his shoulders fell. He straightened out his newspaper again and gave her a weary look. "I just get sick of it sometimes. All this preoccupation about tapes and break-ins and bribes, when there are bigger, more significant things happening in the world."

He looked exhausted, she thought, on edge, as if he were about ready to throw the towel in. Some instinct deep within her soul made her want to reach out and comfort him. Instead, she picked the paper back up and tried to read the front page. The lead article projected gas prices would go above fifty cents a gallon by year's end, a prospect that she found inconceivable.

She saw him mark an X on the page he was reading and heave a rugged sigh. She stole a look at it.

"What are you doing?" she asked, her voice soft, conciliatory.

"Apartment hunting," he said. "But as usual, I'm a day late and a dollar short. The college students have taken over every decent apartment in the area."

"I know of an opening in my complex," she said without thinking. "A furnished one-bedroom apartment." She caught herself and stopped, wondering what had gotten into her to bring that up. Did she really want to be that close to him?

"Really?" he asked skeptically. "Are you sure? I've called just about every place in the area."

"Positive," she said. "One of my neighbors eloped with her boss to Las Vegas last Wednesday, so the apartment just became available. She's getting her things out tomorrow."

Johnny came to his feet almost instantly. "I'll take it," he said. "Give me the address, or the manager's phone number, or whatever. I'll call her right now."

"You'll take it sight unseen?" she asked, astounded. "Don't you even want to see it?"

"Yeah, but I can't get away until after five-thirty tonight. What if it's rented out by then?"

Realizing that he was more desperate than she imagined and that she was, at that very moment, sealing her fate to be his neighbor, Carrie abandoned the newspaper and stood up. "I could call the manager and tell her to hold it for you," she said. "But are you sure? I mean...we'd be neighbors..."

Her reluctance seemed to irritate him. "Don't worry, Teach," he said. "I won't bother you. I hardly ever go on wild, mutilating rampages in the middle of the night."

The sarcastic comment slapped her in the face, infuriating her. "I'm not suggesting that I'm afraid to live near you," she said. "I just meant-"

"What?" he asked. "That I may not fit into your nice little apartment complex? That I might cramp your style?"

"No, damn it!" She took a deep breath brought her hand to her forehead and tried to start again in a whisper. They could both get fired for raising their voices to each other in front of the students. "I'll call the manager, all right? If you want the apartment, it's yours. You can live anywhere you want."

"Gee, that's magnanimous of you," he said. "But I don't need any favors. Just tell me the name of the complex, and I'll call the manager myself."

Carrie's cheeks blazed with pulsating anger, and she considered telling him to shove it and find it himself. Instead, however, she bit out the name of the complex, then left him standing alone where she'd found him.

Damn him, she thought. Try to do the guy a favor, feel a little compassion for him... and where does it get you?

He thought she was repulsed by living near him, she reminded herself as she went back to her empty classroom, and her heart softened a degree. Was he that sure that everyone was out to get him? Had her rejection hit him that hard?

But she couldn't set him straight, she thought. How could she tell him that she worried about herself, knowing that he lived just across the courtyard from her? How could she keep her distance? How could she maintain her need to keep from getting more interested in him? Didn't he realize it wasn't him she was afraid of, but herself?

Somehow, she'd have to make sure that it didn't evolve into something she wasn't ready for. Maybe she could keep her distance, even if Johnny wound up being her neighbor. Maybe she could make herself forget he was even there.

BUT IT WASN'T THAT EASY to forget he was there when he moved in that weekend. Despite her determination not to, she couldn't help an occasional look out her window toward his apartment directly across the courtyard. She saw no moving van backing into the lot, no friends helping him carry his things up the stairs, no neighbors coming out to greet him. It almost made her feel like abandoning her vow to keep her distance and go welcome him into the neighborhood. But some protective instinct within her kept her from it.

It was later that afternoon when she saw the woman standing out on his balcony, a drink in her hand, laughing with him. Carrie's heart sank inexplicably and she turned from the window, determined not to let the Marine occupy her mind one more minute. They had different life views, different philosophies, values, pasts. He had survived a brutal war that was bound to have scarred him for life. She couldn't help admitting that those scars, invisible though they were, frightened her away from him. Wars changed people. Killing altered them for life. It had to, if they'd ever been human at all. She wasn't interested in a relationship with someone who bore those kinds of scars, she told herself over and over.

But sometimes her heart didn't listen. Times like when she'd see him at the football games after their team had scored a winning touchdown and he'd grab one of the players and swing him around in joy, as if he held a fifty-pound kid rather than a two-hundred-thirty-pound athlete. Times like when she saw him sitting off by himself in the cafeteria, reading or just staring off into space, the dark shadows under his eyes testifying to his weariness and fatigue, as if no amount of sleep would ever catch him up.

She found herself thinking about him at inconsistent moments, at times when there was no cause for it. And she found herself understanding his moods, because they were not so distant from her own. She hadn't expected to see less of him as his neighbor than she had before. What irked her more, however, was that she hadn't expected to be so disappointed at that. And she hadn't expected every time she did see him to entrench her heart even more deeply than it was.

Over the next couple of months, Carrie watched Johnny make winners out of the group of boys who had been accustomed to making excuses for poor plays and poorer scores. She went to each game and rooted for them as they won one right after the other. And she was increasingly aware that Johnny had become the school hero. Even Norman Vance tolerated him, for the most part.

She watched Mark Gray turn from a pot-smoking loser into a kid who had the beginnings of self-respect-and more than that, respect for others. It was Johnny's influence that had won him over, she knew, and that, she feared, was winning her over, as well.

But nothing about Johnny was easy. He still scowled more than he smiled, and those circles under his eyes grew more pronounced. He was as tough as a drill sergeant with the players on his team. One D, and they were off. It didn't matter if they were first string or bench warmers. They were all expected to follow the same rigid standards.

It was about those unyielding standards that she heard him talking to Mark in the school corridor toward the end of the season.

The stairwell to the second floor was crowded with students, so she paused behind Johnny a moment before pushing her way up against the flow. She couldn't help hearing the conversation going on next to her.

THE WARNING BELL signaling five minutes before Mark Gray was to be in his class sounded, making the hulking boy groan as he faced Johnny.

"Coach, I'll never pass that test, let alone make a C. Man, last year I couldn't even pronounce algebra."

"Have you studied?" Johnny asked doubtfully.

"Yeah, man, I studied. I'm still studyin'. And I'll keep studyin' until the day of the test. But what if I flunk? Would you really throw me off the team right before the last season game? Even after I scored a touchdown last week?"

"I don't care what you scored last week," Johnny said. "After we win the game this weekend, we'll be ten and O, and I know we have the stuff to be state champs. But if you don't make at least a C on that test, then you won't play in any of the post-season games."

Mark threw himself back against the wall and rolled his eyes, as if the situation was utterly futile. "Man, what do you care if I know algebra? Why can't you just make an exception since we're going to the play-offs?"

Johnny leaned a hand against the wall and pointed his clipboard at the boy. "Mark, listen to me," he said. "For the first time in your life you have a real shot at college-not just because of football, but because you're pulling down some good grades this year, and you're showing potential you never even knew you had."

"Potential," Mark scoffed. "Come on, man. You know as well as I do that the only reason I ain't flunked any tests and been thrown off the team already is that I ain't had any real tests till now."

"I've kept up with your daily grades," Johnny said. "Don't sell yourself short. You can do this."

Mark rolled his eyes again, and Johnny made him look at him. "Listen to me, Mark. If you keep your place on the team, somebody might even offer you a football scholarship. But you have to use it, man. You have to do something with your life besides play football. If you have enough of an academic base behind you, you can be whatever you want to be. You can make a good living later, when it means something."

"Yeah, man? Like you?"

The kid's smart-aleck retort took Johnny by surprise, and he straightened and dropped his clipboard to his side.

"You think I'm stupid?" Mark went on. "You wouldn't be here wasting time if college did you any good, man. And I don't see you using no algebra out on that football field."

"Well, I'm not finished yet, am I? Maybe I don't plan to spend the rest of my life trying to beat some sense into smart-ass kids who think they have it all figured out." Johnny brought a finger to the kid's face and pointed it with each word. "I'm not cutting you any slack, Mark. Either make the grade or get out."

Mark gave him a disgusted look and pushed away from the wall. "Thanks a lot, man. You're a big help."

"Wait a minute."

Mark turned around, his disgruntled expression revealing that he braced himself for another lecture. For a fragment of a second, Johnny pictured the kid in a camouflage uniform, loaded down with his M-14 and his canteens, with mud up to his knees and blisters and sores eating his feet within his soaking wet boots. He had known so many guys like Mark. Black guys from nowhere, with shady pasts and no future... guys who would curse you in one breath and give you the shirt off their back in the next. And when the shells were falling and the sniper fire was chattering, it was men like Mark who used their heads to keep their buddies alive. It was for them-all the ones who'd saved his butt at the expense of their own-that Johnny felt he owed Mark Gray.

"Mark, I know I work you pretty hard after school, but if you feel like working even harder to make that grade, I'll help you."

"You gonna take the test for me?" Mark quipped.

"No," Johnny said. "I'll tutor you. Make sure you're ready so you can take it yourself."

"Tutor me?" For the first time since Johnny had known him, the kid seemed at a loss for any wise remarks. "You?"

"Yeah, me. I was good in algebra. I think I can help you."

Mark took a suspicious step toward him, his forehead wrinkling in surprise. "Really? You'd do that?"

Johnny pulled a pencil out of his pocket and reached for Mark's notebook. A peeling Black Power bumper sticker covered it. "Here, I'll give you the address. And bring your books. We're not watching Kojak, we're studying."

Grinning with new hope, Mark took the notebook back as the bell sounded again. "Thanks, Coach. I'll be there at 1900 hours." The kid cocked his chin up at Johnny's smile and added, "That's 7:00 p.m., in case you've forgotten."

"I haven't forgotten," Johnny assured him.

Mark started toward the stairs, saw Carrie standing behind him and raised his hands guiltily. "I'm going to class, Miz Hunter. I'll prob'ly beat you there."

Carrie smiled, but she made no effort to make her way to the stairwell now that it was almost empty. Instead, she turned around and regarded Johnny, her soft smile revealing that she'd heard everything.

"Hi, neighbor," he said.

Her smile crept farther across her face. "Hi, Johnny." She glanced in Mark's direction, then met Johnny's blue eyes again. "I couldn't help hearing that just now," she said. "It's really nice of you to help him out like that."

Johnny shrugged. "It's either that or kick him off the team. He's too good a player. I don't want to lose him."

Carrie looked at the floor, and a silky strand of tawny hair fell into her face. She swept it back behind her ear. "You know as well as I do that rules are made to be broken. Most coaches would change the rules for that one kid or strong-arm the teacher into recording a higher grade."

"But that wouldn't do the kid any good."

"No, it wouldn't." She sighed and glanced toward the stairs, but found she was in no hurry to get to her class. "Well, I guess I'd better go to class before chaos breaks out."

"Yeah."

She felt him watching her as she climbed the stairs, and she was suddenly self-conscious about the way her skirt hugged her small hips and the way her legs moved in their black stockings. At the top of the stairs, she adjusted her wool vest and turned around. A soft shiver coursed through her at the desire in his eyes, and she ran her finger over the black velvet choker at her throat. "You know, Johnny, we don't have to be such strangers. If you needed a cup of sugar or something, I wouldn't slam the door in your face."

He grinned. "You wouldn't?" He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms as he cocked his head up to her. "Maybe you'd better keep a bag handy, just in case."

Carrie smiled. "I'll do that, Johnny," she said, then left him standing at the bottom of the stairs.

MARK SLIPPED INTO HIS DESK in Carrie's history class and opened the book he would need. It was strange, he thought, actually using these books for a change. Until this year, he'd never even brought a book to class.

"Hey, nigger, you ready to get thrown off the team?" Mark looked up and saw Eric Idlemore, the running back he'd replaced last game when the more seasoned player had dropped the ball a few too many times. He hadn't been happy then about abdicating to Mark, but he'd been livid when Mark had scored the winning touchdown. Mark railed at the racial slur but tried hard to ignore it-after all, he didn't expect better from Idlemore.

"I don't know where you get your information, jerk-face, but I ain't gettin' thrown off the team," he said.

Eric unfolded himself from the small desk and towered over Mark's. "Oh, yeah, gutterbrains? You really think you're gonna pass Ole Lady Henderson's algebra test next week? Coach said one failure and you're off the team. And then you can get the hell out of my way and let me do what I do best."

"What's that?" Mark asked. "Fumblin' the football?"

As the class sucked in a collective gasp, Eric reared back and crashed his fist across Mark's jaw, knocking him from his seat. Before Mark could scramble to his feet, desks slid and tumbled, and students scurried to the edge of the room anticipating the havoc about to break loose.

Carrie came through the door as Mark smeared the blood across his lip. The small wound was a triumph to Eric, who grinned with arrogant pride, but putting all of his weight into the attack, Mark grabbed him and slung him into the desks behind him, knocking the smile from Eric's face. Immediately they were one form, punching and kicking on the floor, rolling one above the other, and the students' cheers and cries rose loudly enough to alert the whole wing.

"Stop it!" Carrie dashed toward the scuffle, shouting behind her, "somebody go get help! Hurry!"

She saw a fist crash into a nose, saw more blood and heard more vicious cursing. "Eric! Mark! Stop this right now!"

"I'll kill you, nigger," Eric shouted at fever pitch as his fingers closed around Mark's throat.

Tears blurred her vision as Carrie grabbed Eric's shoulders and tried in vain to pull him off of Mark. The huge running back let go of Mark's throat just long enough to shove her away.

Carrie fell back on the floor as Johnny burst into the classroom and headed for the two boys locked in murderous combat.

Chapter Six

As if Eric were a toddler entangled in a fist fight, Johnny grabbed his collar and one arm and slung him off of Mark. "Break it up!"

Mark scrambled to his feet, still swinging his fists at Eric, but Johnny grabbed his shirt in his other fist and held him back.

"I said break it up! Now!" He glanced over his shoulder at Carrie, who still sat on the floor, her face red and flushed with horror.

"Are you all right, Carrie?"

Nodding, but still breathless from her part in the scuffle, she got to her feet.

"He started it, Coach!" Eric said.

Mark's rage inflated two degrees and he struggled to get closer to Eric. "The hell I did! Everybody in here saw what happened."

"I don't care who started it," Johnny said, shaking them both. "You're both going to the office, and after Mr. Altus gets finished dealing with you, I'll deal with you myself."

"Aw, man!" Mark shook out of Johnny's grip and straightened his T-shirt. "I don't believe this. I'm sittin' here mindin' my own business-"

"Save it," Johnny cut in. "Go to the office. Now!"

Mumbling a string of expletives under his breath, Mark started out the door, but Eric hung behind.

"Coach, I-"

"I said now!" Johnny yelled. "And if you so much as utter a word to each other on the way there, you're off the team!"

Paling, Eric disappeared through the door.

Johnny turned to Carrie, saw her lips trembling as she teetered on the very cliff edge of crying, and she blinked back the mist in her eyes. She was all right, he thought. Eric hadn't hurt her, at least not physically. But he could have. The thought sent a new wave of rage fuming up inside him, and suddenly all he wanted to do was comfort her and make sure that no hidden bruises colored her pale skin. Trying to keep his voice devoid of emotion, he asked, "Can I see you in the hall, Miss Hunter?"

Still not managing to speak, Carrie nodded and stepped out into the empty corridor, wilting back against the wall now that she was out of her students' sight. Johnny followed her, his own breath just beginning to return to normal.

"Are you all right?" he asked, touching her arm as she brought her hands to her face and allowed a few tears to escape. "You took a pretty hard shove."

"I'm fine." She wiped her tears with trembling fingertips. "I just couldn't believe that was happening in my classroom. Thank God you came when you did, or Eric might have..."

Her voice trailed off at the awful thought of what might have happened to Mark, and her face distorted in despair. Johnny slid his hands up her arms to her shoulders, felt them shaking as her emotions took full control of her. Dipping his head down to look at her, he coaxed her face up to his. "It's okay," he whispered. "It's all over."

"I know." She met his eyes, and he noted the way the tears slipped quickly down her face and traced the edges of her lips. "I just hate that feeling of total helplessness."

"I know that feeling," he said. "Like when a beautiful woman is crying her heart out and you don't for the life of you know what to do about it."

She swallowed and locked gazes with him, and he felt the sob hiccuping out of her throat. "You're doing just fine, Johnny," she whispered.

As if that tiny affirmation gave him permission to do more, he let his eyes fall to her lips, wet and red and trembling. He met her eyes again, saw that she followed the progress of his own tongue across his lips. Would she pull away this time if he let his face descend to hers, slowly, slowly, slowly...?

Their lips met before he'd had a moment to consider the repercussions, but his heart burst and told him whatever they were, they'd be worth it. He felt her tear-damp hands move up to encase his face in a gentle frame, felt her lips parting, allowing him intimate access...

His tongue swirled against hers, making some primitive need in his groin stir to life, and an ache in his soul cried out for more than he could have standing here in the school corridor. But would there be another chance to hold her like this? he asked himself. Could he take the risk of letting her go?

Breaking the kiss, she answered the question for him, looking up at him with misty, stricken eyes. "I-I have to get back to class," she whispered.

He pushed her hair back away from her wet cheek and wiped away the last vestiges of her tears. "Yeah. I'd better get to the office and mediate."

She nodded and dropped her hands. He forced himself to drop his, as well.

"Well, I'll see you later," he whispered.

She started back toward her classroom door, but turned around before he'd gone very far. "Johnny?" she called.

He stopped and slid his hands into his pockets and glanced back at her.

"Thank you."

He smiled, wondering if it was just his imagination that the thank-you was for more than breaking up the fight. "Don't mention it," he said. "It was my pleasure."

A gentle smile transformed her face as she disappeared from his sight.

THE SHOWER SPRAYED warm water over Carrie's face, washing away the remnants of her tears and restoring the energy they had robbed her of that day. She closed her eyes and recalled the kiss that had taken her so utterly by surprise, melting all her barriers and leaving her completely vulnerable. Rinsing the last of the conditioner from her hair, she cut off the shower and stepped out, grabbing a towel and slipping it around her.

The mirror was foggy, so she wiped a hand across it and stared at herself in the wet blur. How had he gotten to her this way? she asked herself. How had he made her forget all those unspoken promises she'd made to herself-promises about protecting herself from the kind of pain she had felt with Paul, promises about being independent and alone, promises about never needing anyone again?

But it was good to need, she thought as she wiped the water from her skin, then set about rubbing her hair dry. It had felt good today when Johnny had come to her rescue and found it more important to comfort her than to run after the boys and see that they were punished. He had distracted her completely, and for the rest of the day, it wasn't the fight that occupied her mind, but Johnny's kiss...

Still, those doubts, those damnable frightened feelings, kept flitting through her mind. She could feel herself sinking into an oblivion of desire, but she had desired before. And she still hadn't completely recovered from the pain of Paul's betrayal.

Wrapping the towel around her and tucking the corner in to hold it in place, she went to the bedroom, the cool air making her shiver. She sat down on her green velour bedspread and looked in the mirror again. The woman staring back frightened her, for she wasn't the same woman she had been two years ago. She was cynical now, she thought. Maybe even bitter.

Her eyes flooded with tears, and she pulled open her drawer and lifted Paul's picture out. She stared down at it, at the smile so innocent and proud, at the uniform so clean and pressed, at the eyes so passionate and warm. But she didn't feel warm anymore when she looked at it, she thought. Instead, she felt anger unlike any she'd ever felt in her life. Cancerous anger that grew and multiplied until she couldn't escape it no matter what she did.

"Why did you do it, Paul?" she whispered.

There was no answer, either in her heart or in her head. The justifications she had created in her mind for his act fled when she confronted the questions herself. It was betrayal, pure and simple. He had betrayed her...and he had betrayed himself. And for the life of her, she didn't know if she could ever forgive him for it.

But she would have to, she knew, before she could move on. For until she did, she would be too afraid to fall in love again. Too afraid of gambling her heart and losing.

"Help me, Paul," she whispered.

Again, no answer came to her, no comfort, no release. Feeling emptier and more hollow, she put the picture facedown in her drawer, closed it.

Maybe in her way, she thought, she was betraying herself just as Paul had betrayed himself. Maybe by hiding her feelings away, running from those emotions that proved so lethal, she was depriving herself of the very breath that could keep her living.

But that breath was too potent, she thought. And she wasn't ready for it yet. The problem was, she wasn't sure her heart could wait much longer.

She checked the clock, saw that it was six-thirty and pulling on her terry cloth robe and grabbing a comb from her dresser, she padded into the living room and flicked on the television. John Chancellor was delivering the bad news that Nixon's request for 2.2 billion dollars of assistance to Israel in their fight with the Arabs had prompted an oil embargo. Already, fuel prices had gone up seventy percent, and she could only imagine how she would afford to put gas in her car and run her electricity when things got even worse. And what if that military assistance escalated to more than just military equipment? What if they wound up with another Vietnam on their hands and more men had to die, kill, hide or take some gruesome way out?

Carrie's doorbell rang, startling her. Quickly running the comb through the wet strands of her hair, she dashed to the door. "Who is it?"

"The maniac across the courtyard."

Carrie caught her breath and hesitated, staring at the door as if it threatened her by its very ability to open. Forcing herself, she put her hand on the knob and turned it.

Johnny stepped inside, and she was at once keenly aware of his bold scrutiny of her wet hair and bare legs and feet. "I-I just got out of the shower," she said. "Sit down. I'll be right back."

She saw Johnny swallow, and he kept standing and leaned back against the wall, his serious perusal of her making her warm.

"Don't change for me," he said. "I'm not really staying long...."

She recognized the pause that came afterward, and told herself to ask him to stay. But some defensive instinct within her warned her that it wasn't wise. Not when her feelings for him were as unpredictable as they'd been lately.

"Just let me slip on a pair of jeans." She headed back for her bedroom to pull on the Britannia hip huggers she had just washed.

He cleared his throat, and she wondered if he still stood, or if he had sat down yet. Her heart pounded at the idea that he still stood in her entryway, so close to her bedroom, listening to the rustle of her clothes as she slipped off her robe.

"Did you hear about Mark's suspension?" he called back.

Carrie frowned and slipped the robe off her shoulders, leaving her top half bare as she searched for a shirt to put on. Her nipples budded to life, revealing the latent excitement tingling inside her at his nearness. Quickly, she found a body suit and slipped it on, snapped it at the crotch, and checked to make sure that her small breasts weren't too revealing through the tight nylon cloth. "Mark's suspension?" she called back, breathless, as she wriggled into her jeans. "Didn't Eric get suspended, too?"

"Nope. Just Mark. Eric got off scot-free."

"Why?" Tossing her hair back over her shoulders, she came out of the bedroom, her hair still wet and her feet still bare.

Johnny's eyes swept through her wet, trailing hair, feathered over her breasts, skimmed to the pink toenails peaking out beneath the frayed bottoms of her hip-hugger denims. "Why do you think?" he asked, meeting her eyes.

She struggled to remember what they had been saying ... Mark... suspended... the reason... "Because he's black?" she asked. "No, Johnny. That can't be it. Bill isn't a bigot."

"Let me tell you about our principal," Johnny said, following her into the living area and lowering himself to her couch when she sat down. "He asked both the kids what happened, and Eric came up with some story about how he was sitting there studying, when out of the blue Mark went on a rampage and knocked him out of his seat."

"But that's ridiculous," Carrie said. "The other students told me what happened-that Eric called Mark a nigger and that he threw the first punch. And I told Bill right after class. When I walked in, Mark was lying on the floor with a bloody lip. For heaven's sake, he even pushed me!"

"Doesn't matter," Johnny said. "Eric got five kids in the class to back up his story."

"I don't believe this." Carrie shook her head, trying to imagine how such a thing could have happened. "So Bill believed him and Eric didn't even get punished?"

"Right," Johnny said. "Mark Gray's standing there with blood smeared across his face and Eric walks."

Carrie leaned back and closed her eyes. "How many days is the suspension?"

"Three days," Johnny said. "Just long enough for him to miss his algebra test. And school policy is that you can't make up work that you miss while suspended, so he flunks the test automatically, which means I have to follow my own rule and throw him off the team before the play-offs, which means he's right back where he started, thinking a poor black kid hasn't got a chance in this world." Johnny stood up and paced across her living room, turned back to her.

"The hell of it is, if we don't do something to get this suspension lifted, he'll be right. He told me today that he's quitting school. He says he's had it with the establishment, and frankly, so have I."

"Don't look now," Carrie said with a grin, "but I think we're the establishment."

Johnny looked at her for a moment, and a slow smile tugged at his lips. "No, we can't be. I'm not old enough to be on the wrong side of the generation gap."

"Neither am I," Carrie said. "But it looks like that's where we are, unless we do something." She thought for a moment, and as an idea formed itself in her mind, her eyebrows arched. "We will do something. Tomorrow I'll go talk to Bill again. He can't enforce this suspension. A teacher's word has to carry more weight than a student's. We'll get it straightened out, Johnny, and Mark'll change his mind."

Johnny shook his head. "I'm not so sure about that. He told me he was taking a full-time job pumping gas at that little station down the street from the school."

"He'll change his mind," Carrie said again. "He'll do it because he trusts you, Johnny, and he respects you. You've been a real, positive role model for him, and if you talk to him, he'll come back. I know it."

Johnny looked at her, his blue eyes illuminated with surprise that she would see him as a positive anything. "But what do I tell him?" he asked. "'So you get a zero on your test that averages into your grade and will probably keep you from graduating this year, you get thrown off the team, and it's all because your face was in the way of Eric's fist?' Yeah, I'm sure he'll come back."

Carrie touched his hand, the gesture unconscious. "He has to," she said. "We'll think of something, Johnny. This is important."

Johnny brought his blue eyes to hers, and her heart twisted as his slow smile melted out the anger and frustration harbored there. He turned his hand palm up and closed it over hers.

"Okay," he said. "I'm gonna hold you to it."

A moment of quiet passed between them, quiet she wanted-needed-to fill by asking him to stay, offering him something to drink. But she wasn't sure she had the courage to keep him there a moment longer.

"Now that that's taken care of," he said, "I wondered if I could borrow some sugar."

In spite of the tension palpitating between them, Carrie smiled at the manufactured excuse that she'd offered him earlier that day. "Sure." Almost disappointed that the moment had been shattered, yet glad in a way that it had, she got up and went into the kitchen that adjoined the small living room. "How much?"

"Just enough for a cup of coffee," he said. "Oh, and can I borrow some coffee?"

Carrie grinned at him over the bar. "What about cream? Would you like to borrow that, too?"

"Just a teaspoon," he said. "Oh, and could I borrow your coffeepot? I haven't bought one yet."

His coy grin made Carrie's heart flip. "I know!" she said with mock inspiration. "Why don't I just make a pot here, and we'll both have a cup?"

"Now there's a great idea," he said. "Why didn't I think of it?"

The tension diminished as she laughed and filled her Mr. Coffee, the one she rarely used since it made way too much coffee for just one person. She got out two cups and found that her hands shook as she set them on the counter. What was she doing? she asked herself. Did she really want him to stay?

The news still played on the small television across the room, and she heard John Chancellor switch to a correspondent in Cambodia, reporting on the progress of the people there now that the American troops had all been evacuated. She watched Johnny lean over and turn the television up, saw the way his eyes pierced into the screen, saw the way he concentrated on the report, as if he still had some stake in the horrible events that had fallen upon that nation.

The report ended and the network broke for commercial, but Johnny didn't take his eyes from the screen.

"At least the Americans are out of it," she said quietly, going around the bar and sitting down beside him.

"Yeah, at least." He leaned back on the couch, and she didn't miss the ghosts that shadow danced in his eyes. "How many thousands of men did we have to lose to get to that point, though?"

Carrie looked down at her hands, debating the question herself. "Too many," she whispered.

"Yeah." He lifted a wet strand of her hair and twirled it around a finger as he frowned down at it. "Too many. Way too many."

He saw the sorrow darken her eyes and realized that her wound was still raw from the grief she suffered. He wanted to share that grief, he thought. He wanted to help her clear out space in the back of her heart where she could store it away, thus making room for him. "Tell me about him," he whispered. "What was his name?"

Carrie looked at the hair he worked through his fingers and tried to hold back the flood of unmanageable emotion that assailed her each time she remembered. "Paul... His name was Paul."

She pulled her hair out of his hand, cleared her throat and stood up. "I'll get the coffee."

Johnny caught her hand, the intimate contact jolting her heart and sending it into a triple-time cadence. "Forget the coffee."

She looked down at him, weighing her need to accept the comfort he offered, give the comfort he needed, against that instinct that warned her to fortify herself. But the pain, the betrayal, the anger, the frustration... all went too deep.

"Tell me about him," he beseeched in a whisper. "I want to know."

"I can't." Her voice shredded with the denial and slipping her hand out of his, she retreated into the kitchen.

He followed, unceasing in his determination to ambush her into telling everything. "Why?" he asked.

She shook her head and grabbed the cups from the counter. "Johnny, please-"

"You can't run from it forever," he said softly, leaning against the cabinet, facing her. "It'll catch up with you, Carrie. Tell me about it, and I'll help you beat it."

Carrie's emerald eyes hardened with denial as she looked up at him. "Nobody can help me beat it," she said. "You don't understand."

"I do understand," he whispered, nicking her chin with a hooked finger and forcing her to maintain her eye contact with him. She swallowed and abandoned the coffee, and gazed up at him with eyes so fragile she feared they would shatter into a million tears. "I understand that you and I have something between us that keeps drawing us together, even when our heads tell us we're no good for each other. I understand that when I've kissed you, I've felt a hunger like I haven't felt in years."

His hands rose to cup her neck, and she closed her eyes as his fingers pushed up into her damp, cool hair. She felt his breath on her lips, tasted the subtle warmth of it. His breathing was unsteady... as unsteady as the beating of her heart.

His voice mesmerized her, chasing away the ghosts and phantoms that haunted her. He pressed his forehead against hers. "I understand that there's something eating away at you, and I know about that kind of gnawing, because I've felt it, too," he whispered, the intensity of his voice rippling on every word. "I've tasted grief and remorse and anger so heavy that it flattens you."

She felt the tears seeping out under her closed lashes, and began to shake her head. "No," she whispered. "I can't talk about it. I can't."

He kissed away the tears from her warm cheek and his breath swept down to her neck. A feathery sensation made her shudder and sigh when his lips touched her throat. A feeling of trust-as vivid and warm as his lips against her skin-gave her the strength to share.

"Paul was a-a good, courageous, selfless man," she whimpered as she let her forehead fall to Johnny's shoulder. His arms slid around her, and he buried his fingers in the damp roots of her hair as she spoke. "He was."

"Of course, he was," Johnny whispered, pulling her closer.

"But he-" She swallowed the tears flooding her throat and sucked in a deep breath. "He just couldn't be what they wanted him to be."

"What who wanted him to be?" he asked, straining to understand.

"The... the Marines... the officers..."

Johnny's frown drew tighter and he loosened his hold from her and pulled back to look at her. "What did they want him to be?" he whispered.

She pushed the hair back from her face, wadding the roots as she did. The words came faster, with less effort, but rocking on the edge of emotion. "Whatever it is they pay Marines to be," she said. "But what he did was worse than what they trained him to do. And...I don't think I can ever forgive him..."

Johnny crushed her more tightly against him, but some hope inside him died as he tried to untangle her words. What couldn't she forgive him for? For killing? For following his orders? For doing what he had to do? His heart told him to hold her, to let her cry out all the heartache and blame, but first he had to know just who she really blamed.

"Forgive him?" he whispered painfully. "Or the officers who led him into combat?"

"I don't know," she said, anguish escalating her voice. "I don't know. Maybe both. All I know is that he's dead and nobody really cares why or how. Nobody has to live with the pain like I do. Those officers who sent him where they did don't ever have to think about him again!"

Johnny dropped his hands from their embrace, and he took her hands from his neck and looked down at her, his eyes two stricken slates of cobalt. "Don't be so sure about that," he whispered, his voice breaking. "I was an officer, and every day of my life I confront my conscience for the soul of every one of those men I sent into combat to die. Every last one I lost to booby traps and sniper fire and mines exploding out of nowhere. It eats at me, Carrie."

Carrie touched his face with both of her hands. "I know that, Johnny. But you're different."

He moved her hands from his face. "No, Carrie. I'm not different. And that hate you're nursing in your heart is as much directed at me as it is at those officers who led him to his death."

"No, it's not, Johnny," she said. "It's not! I swear it's not."

The pain on his face was so fierce that it cut like a blade through the center of her heart. He leaned back against the counter, dropped his head down, and she saw the way he struggled to keep his emotions from getting away from him. After a moment, he looked up at her, swallowed and slid his hands into his pockets. "Well, I've gotta go."

"Johnny, don't," she entreated, desperate for him to stay. "Please..."

He reached the door and turned back to her, and she could see the struggle on his face. "It's not me you need, Carrie." The words came on a defeated whisper. "You need some guy who sat the war out. Someone who never had to face the kind of decisions I had to face. Someone who can chase away all that sadness from your eyes."

Carrie watched him open the door, go through it and close it softly behind him. And she didn't have the heart to go after him, for she wasn't that sure that he was wrong.

THE ANNIVERSARY CLOCK that his parents had bought on their twentieth anniversary, the one Meg had given him for his new apartment, chimed 3:00 a.m. Out on his balcony, Johnny ignored it and stood up from the plastic-woven lawn chair and lit another cigarette.

Leaning back against the wall, he looked up at the night sky and inhaled the smoke into his lungs. Slowly, he blew it out. Damn, the sky was clear tonight. It looked as if all was well with the universe. Funny how nature could deceive that way.

He pushed off from the wall and paced across the narrow balcony, wishing like hell that he could go to sleep without dreams of snipers shooting at him. He wished he could just lie down and go numb for a while, but it never happened.

He looked across the courtyard to the glass doors overlooking Carrie's balcony and wondered why her judgments of him hurt more than the ones he'd taken from everyone else. And he asked himself why he continued expecting more.

He shouldn't expect anything. He should just be glad he was alive, glad he wasn't lying in some hospital like some of his buddies, learning how to use limp limbs and still remember they were men.

He leaned over the balcony rail and gazed vacantly into the pine courtyard below him. It was the loneliness that would ultimately do him in, he thought. The loneliness and the exhaustion from not sleeping. He'd gone to officers' training school with some other guys from Georgia, and he wondered where Clark and O'Hara and Simson were tonight? Had they gone back to their girls, their wives, their mothers? Had they fallen right into step, marching to the beat of civilian drums? Or had they come home at all?

That was why he couldn't call them, he thought morbidly, leaning back against the wall again. He didn't even know which ones had made it alive. What if he called their numbers and discovered they were lying in a grave somewhere with some noble inscription on their headstones?

There was no way to tell for sure if any of them were alive. And the ones he'd come home with-the ones who weren't missing body parts they'd have to learn to live without- were scattered so far across the country that it wouldn't make sense to stay in touch.

He tilted his chair back on two legs, propped his feet on the rail and brought the cigarette to his lips again. Who was he trying to kid, he asked himself? It wasn't his buddies that triggered his loneliness tonight. It was Carrie.

The pain at what she'd said tonight-or what she hadn't said-rose up inside him again, as fresh and piercing as if he hadn't had hours to forget it. How would he ever get past the sheer debilitating defensiveness he felt over every preconceived idea she possessed? When would he stop reacting and start listening? She had started opening up tonight. She had begun to share.

He just hadn't been ready to confront the truth of her feelings yet. He hadn't been prepared for the brusque reality of it all.

Still, he found that he was more angry at himself than her, and from some hollow corner of his soul, he wished she had come after him and made some stronger effort to convince him that he didn't represent all those men in uniform who had done in her fiance.

Because she seemed as lonely as he, and he couldn't stand to think of that pain in her eyes. It only made his pain greater. It only made him more lonely.

THE CLOCK BESIDE HER BED said 3:00 a.m., but Carrie still couldn't sleep. Giving up on the idea of trying, she got out of bed and padded on bare feet across her shag carpet into her small living room. To quell the suffocating silence, the palpable loneliness, she turned on her stereo.

John Lennon's "Imagine" echoed through the apartment, beseeching her to imagine a peaceful world, lending a more melancholy note to the sadness that had kept her awake tonight.

But such a thing was too hard to imagine, she thought. Not when the war raged on in the hearts of so many, not when she and Johnny faced each other like enemies.

Chafing her chilled arms, she went to the glass doors of her balcony and peered out across the courtyard.

And then she saw him.

It was no more than a speck of light at first, a cigarette moving from his mouth down to the railing where he leaned. But as her eyes adjusted, she was able to make out his form-still and tired and brooding...

Something in her heart swelled, and she wished with all her might that she hadn't alienated him tonight. Something about him reached out to her, made her want to be with him, to heal him, to let him heal her.

But something else inside her fought it, as if it were Paul's crippled spirit warning her she would be hurt again.

A tear fell onto her cheek and she wiped it away. Here they were, two scarred souls who needed union, but whose own agony kept them apart. Both of them awake and wandering in the middle of the night. And neither able to cross that courtyard or the chasm that yawned between them.

She watched him until he grew still in his chair on the balcony, until she was certain he'd fallen asleep out there. She worried that the nighttime chill or the morning dew would make him sick, and she longed to go over and cover him with a blanket. But he was on the second floor, and there was no access to his balcony without waking him. Instead, she wrapped a blanket around herself, and secure in the warm closeness of that one-sided intimacy, she fell asleep on her couch.

Chapter Seven

Morning dawned too early the next day, and by the time Carrie got to school and confronted her principal in his office, her mood was at its worst.

"Bill, Mark didn't start that fight," she said, leaning forward in the chair facing his desk.

"What am I supposed to do, Carrie?" the administrator asked. "I have five witnesses who say he did."

"What about me?" she asked. "Doesn't my word count for anything?"

Bill Altus stood up and strode across the floor of his office, the burden of his job during these days of generation gap, antiestablishment, racial tensions and downright rebellion deepening the lines of his face. "It counts for a lot, Carrie, but you said yourself that you came in at the tail end of the argument between them."

"I witnessed enough to hear Eric's prejudiced remark and see him attacking Mark. Bill, this is 1973-racial slurs have no more place in our school than violence does." Carrie stood up to face him, smoothing down her skirt. "If you can't lift Mark's suspension, you should at least suspend them both. The blacks in the school are really getting upset about this. I heard a crowd of them talking about it this morning. It isn't fair, and they know it."

Bill shook his head and slid his hands into the pockets of his green leisure suit. "If that's a threat, Carrie, it won't work. I don't want some group of Negro students thinking all they have to do is 'get upset' about something and I'll change my mind to keep the peace. A few years ago, it was chaos around here with all the walkouts and riots. Things have finally settled down, but if I give them an inch, they'll take five miles."

"Bill, you're making a mistake." Carrie shook her head and rubbed at the shadows under her eyes. "Mark says he's not coming back to school at all, and he was just starting to do well. You're making a lot of statements with this decision, and one way or another, you're going to have to answer for every one of them."

Bill dropped back into his chair and slumped over his desk. "I'm sorry, Carrie, but I disagree with you. The only statement I'm making is that I won't tolerate fighting in my school."

"But he wasn't the only one fighting!" she said.

Bill stemmed her outburst with his hand. "I've heard enough," he said. "I have a reputation to uphold, and if I make tough decisions only to change them the next day, I'll look indecisive."

"What the hell does it matter how you look?" she shouted, knowing she was pressing her luck. "A boy's future is at stake. Don't you care about that?"

"That's enough, Carrie!" Bill Altus's thundering voice left no room for further debate. "I'm not changing my mind. He probably would have failed that algebra test, anyway. End of conversation."

Carrie sat speechless, staring at her boss, and finally, realizing there was nothing more she could say and still keep her job, she left his office without another word.

She shot through the outer office, countering Sally's greeting with a contemptuous expletive about her boss, and into the hall where the bell for the first period was ringing. Students hurried to class in different directions, but in the center of the corridor a group of black students had gathered into a tight circle.

Knowing trouble was brewing, Carrie stepped up to the group. "Aren't you kids going to be late for class?"

The group opened up a little. "We ain't goin' to class," one of them said. "We're boycotting."

"Oh, no." Carrie moaned and stepped into the crowd. "You don't know what you're doing. I agree, it isn't fair that Mark got suspended and Eric didn't. But come on, if you all boycott, you're cutting your own throats."

"Might as well," someone said. "If we don't, some-body'll do it for us. Besides, you're the one always sayin' you gotta fight for your beliefs. Does it only work if you're fightin' for somethin' that doesn't make nobody mad?"

"No, but-" Carrie stopped cold, looking from one black face to another, wondering how in the world she could stand there and tell them to give it up without being a complete hypocrite. Grasping for the only straws she could find, even though she knew it was a long shot, she tried another approach. "Look, I'm trying to change Mr. Altus's mind about the suspension. If you start trouble now, he'll never reconsider. You can always walk out later. But I need a little more time. Please, just go to class."

The kids looked at each other and finally, someone said, "She's right. We got time to decide what to do."

Carrie breathed a sigh of relief as the crowd slowly dispersed and ambled in different directions to their classrooms, some of them raising their fists in the air in the "black power" sign that bound them together. She was late for her own class, Carrie thought, but something told her there was more important business to attend to. Grabbing one of the black girls heading past her, Carrie asked, "Do you know where Mark lives? I need to talk to him."

"Yeah, I know where he stays," the girl said. "But he ain't there. He's working at his new job at that gas station."

Carrie let the girl go and stared toward the front doors. She would go right now, she thought, before this thing got any more out of hand. Mark had to know that someone was on his side. Asking Sally to cover for her with her class until she got back, Carrie slipped out to her car.

BECAUSE OF THE ARAB oil embargo, the line of cars waiting for gas pumps was twelve vehicles long, and Mark worked as fast as he could to get them all filled.

"At this rate," Al, the owner, said as he washed one of the windshields, "I'll have to close down by noon. I don't have enough gas in the pumps to keep this up all day."

"Close by noon!" Mark asked. "You said if I don't work, I don't get paid. If you close-"

"Yeah, if I close, neither of us gets paid!" his boss said. "Now shut up and pump gas. And if you don't like it, thank your stars that you just work here and you don't own this place."

Mark laughed and stuck his pump in the next car. "Who you kiddin', man? You must be stashin' away five hundred bucks an hour. You tryin' to tell me you ain't gettin' rich off this?"

His boss dropped his chamois cloth in a bucket and shook his head, as if he couldn't believe the boy's naivete. "I have to pay for this gas, too, kid. They've raised my prices, what I can get. And these 'gasless Sundays' are murdering guys like me. If you can't sell the stuff, you sure as hell can't get rich off it."

Frowning, Mark went to the driver's window of the car he'd just filled, took the money, handed back the change. More cars pulled up to the end of the line... more cars waiting for the coveted fuel that was getting so hard to come by.

He began to fill the next car in line when he heard a car door slam and saw Carrie Hunter coming toward him. Rolling his eyes, he prepared for an excruciating lecture. Hell, she was probably gonna blame him for the fight, too. "Ain't you supposed to be in class?" he asked.

Carrie set her hands on her hips. "I came to talk to you, Mark," she said. She glanced at the line of cars, at the economy of motion with which Mark worked. "So, how are you liking the business world?"

"It ain't IBM," Mark quipped, "but it ain't so bad. Could be worse. Could be school."

Carrie leaned against the pump and watched him spray the windshield with soapy water. "Mark, I wanted you to know that I'm trying to figure out a way to keep you from missing that test. I've spoken to Mr. Altus, and I'm going to keep talking to him until something changes. It isn't over yet."

"Oh, yeah, it's over, all right," Mark muttered.

Carrie let out a heavy sigh and tossed him the cloth he needed to wipe the windshield. "Mark, I understand how you feel. But you can't just write it all off. You're the only one who'll be hurt."

Mark shook his head and glanced at her over the hood of the car. "I shoulda known it was too good to be true," he said, wiping the windshield with the rag. He glanced at the driver and asked, "Check under the hood?"

Carrie watched as he opened the hood and mechanically checked the oil. "Here I am, somebody like me, on the football team, scorin' touchdowns, studyin' for tests..."

His voice trailed off, and he laughed, but the sound held little amusement.

Carrie leaned on the car's fender and looked under the hood at him. "It isn't too good to be true," she said. "Not if you don't give up. You have a number of choices."

She leaned back as Mark shut the hood and went to the window to collect for the gas.

"Yeah? Choices like what?"

"Well..." She watched him punch out the cash register, drop the money in. "You could make a plea to Mr. Altus yourself. A mature, calm, well-thought-out plea. Or you could ask your algebra teacher to postpone the test for the whole class until your suspension is lifted."

Mark's laughter took her by surprise. "Ole Lady Henderson would never do that for me," he said. "She hates my guts."

"Well, you don't do a whole lot to fix that, Mark. You're no lily-white saint, you know."

"Hey, maybe I'm no saint," he agreed, "but if I was lily white, I wouldn't be suspended today, would I?"

Carrie saw that Mark's boss was getting irritated at them, and she decided to leave Mark alone before he lost his job. "I'm warning you, Mark. You're going to regret it if you don't sweat out this last year of school. And if you get the whole black population of the school in an uproar, I can guarantee that it won't get you anything."

"It'll get me some satisfaction," Mark said. "That's somethin'."

"Satisfaction doesn't pay the rent when you have to pump gas for the rest of your life," she said. "Just think about it, okay?"

Mark surveyed the cars still falling into the line and glanced at the strain on his boss's troubled face. "I'll think about it, Miz Hunter," he said.

"Good," Carrie told him. "You do that."

MARK GRAVS ABSENCE was a bigger problem than Johnny expected that afternoon at football practice, for in protest of Mr. Altus's decision to suspend Mark, the rest of the black players refused to attend practice. Which meant that they wouldn't play in the game that Friday night, which meant that Central would more than likely lose the final season game with their rival school and destroy their undefeated record.

Norman Vance pranced around the field, however, like Johnny imagined Hitler would have if he had succeeded at ridding the world of everyone but the blue-eyed blondes. And then when Johnny saw the cocky way Eric assured him that they could carry the game without "them niggers," Johnny decided he'd had enough.

Bill Altus was just getting ready to leave school for the day when Johnny burst into his office. "You've got to do something about Mark Gray's situation," he demanded. "I've lost a fourth of my team over this, and if you don't watch out, you're going to have a walkout-or worse-on your hands. I heard one of the kids saying they're trying to contact Jesse Jackson about the discrimination."

"Jesse Jackson?" Bill Altus laughed. "I'd think he'd have better things to do than mediate for a high school kid who's getting disciplinary action he deserves."

Weary to death of the principal's stand on the matter, Johnny leaned over his desk. "This kid has a chance, and you're taking it away from him!"

Bill Altus leaned back in his chair and stroked his long, graying sideburns with his forefinger. "Do you think you're going to lose the game Friday? Is that it?"

"Damn it!" Johnny slammed his hand down on the desk and took a frustrated step back. "This is not about a football game. Don't you understand that? It's about fair play. It's about someone trying, really trying, and losing anyway. It's about 'the system' crapping on him. It's about a person doing the best he can and having it thrown back at him like he's a criminal!"

"Wait a minute!" Bill came to his feet and braced his hands on his desk. "Are we talking about Mark Gray here or you? Because I'm not interested in correcting your view of the world... or Mark's, either, for that matter."

Johnny slumped down into a chair, the exhaustion from the last few sleepless days catching up with him. He felt old, he thought. So old. "I just think it stinks that the kid's defeated before he even has the chance to try," he said. "I know how it feels to have the system work against you. I've been a part of the system, a pawn of the system and a kick-ball for the system. And I'm sick and tired of it."

"Then go tell it to Richard Nixon," the principal said, his voice as angry as Johnny's. "Go tell it to the Marine Corps. But don't come into my office and pretend that it has one damn thing to do with some loser black kid who probably would have dropped out of school by Christmas, anyway."

Weary to the core, Johnny rose to his feet. "It has everything to do with him," he said. "Because when the system fails, it fails for all of us. You, me, everybody. You may not know it now, but you'll find it out one day."

And before Bill Altus could determine whether he'd just been threatened or not, Johnny left the room and headed for his own office.

It was stuffy, he thought when he reached it, pulling his shirt and tank top over his head and slinging them on his chair. Stuffy like the whole town. Like the whole damn country.

As it always did when he removed his shirt, his hand gravitated to the big scar at his side, the scar that almost sucked the life from him, the scar that was half burn, half jagged cut from a piece of shrapnel that, had it hit him anywhere else, would have killed him as dead as the other men who were left motionless that day on patrol.

He flicked on the radio and tuned it to a station playing "Rocket Man."

Lying down on the couch against his wall, he propped his feet on the arm and closed his eyes. It had been so long since he'd slept. Too long. He hadn't gone that long since he was in Cambodia...

... and the mortar fire came from nowhere whenever he closed his eyes, and the foxhole he lay in was walled with mud and floored with puddles, and two medics in the next hole tried in vain to save the private who 'd had a hole blown out of his back...

His mind sank down, down, down into the foxhole of sleep as afternoon turned to dusk.

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time Carrie gave up trying to convince Mrs. Henderson, Mark's algebra teacher, to postpone her test until Mark's three-day suspension was lifted. Funny, she thought, how the color of Mark's skin immediately made him immune to sympathy from the faculty. He was on his own.

Deciding that it was time to take action herself, and hoping it was a good way to smooth things over with Johnny for the words that had sent him home so quickly last night, Carrie headed for Johnny's office. Practice had been over for an hour, but he often stayed late in the office.

The gym was growing dark as she cut across it, and she saw that there was a dim light on in his office. The door was open and the low sound of a radio broke the silence. Quietly, she stepped up to the door, looked in and saw Johnny asleep on the couch.

She told herself to turn away and call him later when he was home, but something about the restless way he slept, the perspiration dotting his face, his agonized expression, tugged at her inexplicably.

He turned his head and his body jerked, and she thought he was waking up. His lips began to move with silent words that rose to a whisper, then a barely coherent rush of sounds.

"... Incoming... get down... stay down..."

She caught her breath at the image those slurred words conjured and frowning, stepped inside. She reached out to wake him, but something told her she shouldn't... not yet. Outside, she heard Norm coming out of his office, his whistle echoing across the gym. Quietly, she closed the door to keep the sound out, and gazed down at Johnny.

His face glistened with perspiration, and in the dim glow of lamplight, she saw a drop roll down his temple. Stooping down beside him, she reached out to touch him again, but stopped herself before her hand made contact with his skin.

"Sloan's hit!" His voice was rising, growing louder, and she saw the anguish on his face. "Oh, God, I can't reach him!"

His words were shouted so loudly that they shook Carrie's heart, and tears sprang to her eyes. She wanted to step into his dream, tell him to come back to "the world" with her and let her heal his memories.

But still she didn't touch him.

He rose halfway, then dropped back down and thrashed like a spirit trying to break out of the confines of his body. A yell broke from his throat, and he clutched at his side. "I'm hit! I'm hit!"

Carrie looked down to his side where his hand covered his skin, and saw the spider scars branching out from beneath his fingers. Three quick tears dropped from her lashes and fell onto his stomach.

"Oh, Johnny," she whispered.

Slowly, she reached out and took his hand. It closed around hers in a fist, and she brought it to her lips. "I'm here, Johnny. It's okay."

She felt him relaxing back onto the couch, felt the fight seeping from his body. Her eyes gravitated to the scar, jagged and blotched and bigger than his hand.

How had he lived through an injury like that? she asked herself as some block of emotion lodged itself in her throat. How had he survived the mental scars that came from the memory of it?

"I'm okay...." he muttered under his breath. "But I can't reach Sloan..."

"Sloan's okay," she whispered, knowing that the words could be a blatant lie, for she had no idea if the unknown soldier had lived or died. "It's okay, Johnny."

His hand tightened over hers, and she set her other one over his scar, feeling the pain that seemed to radiate from it. More tears stung her eyes and traveled down her face.

Slowly, her face descended to that patched place over his ribs and grazed the graft of skin there, feeling the thick smooth flesh beneath her lips.

She heard the breath issue from his lips in a low moan, and his hand relaxed its hold on her. She turned her face against the scar, kissed the soft skin nearer his navel, reveling in the scent of male flesh. She felt him shudder beneath her ministrations, and some primitive need quivered up inside her in response to that reaction. "It's me, Johnny. Just me," she whispered.

His fingers webbed through her hair and his other hand lay on her back. Was he still dreaming? she wondered, or did he know on some half-conscious level that someone here, in this room, had connected with him in a way that only her spiritual side could understand?

The thought made her shiver, and she told herself that couldn't be. She couldn't be close to a man she had tried so hard not to like. She couldn't understand with her heart when her head was still so confused.

"Carrie..."

The whispered word, as soft as a gentle moan, made her look up at him, her tear-stained face encased in lamplight. His eyes were open, and he beheld her with some mixture of surprise and poignant longing.

Her lips trembled as she stared at him, searching for an explanation, but it seemed no time for words. Instead of speaking, she touched his face, savoring the feel of sandpaper stubble against her palm. He captured her hand in his and turned his face to kiss it.

Carrie rose up on her knees and looked into his eyes, her heart fluttering with unhealthy rhythm in her chest. His hand in her hair applied subtle pressure to her head, bringing her infinitesimally closer to him. "You're crying," he whispered.

She swallowed. "You were dreaming," she said on a thin wisp of breath. Her soft eyes fell to the scar on his side and she laid her hand gently over it again. "And... I saw the scar-" Her voice broke, and she drew in a jagged breath. "You could have died, Johnny."

He laid his hand over hers. His eyes were as crystalline as melting icicles, and just as fragile. "But I didn't."

"No," she said, absorbing the wonder of it all. "You didn't." New tears rolled down her face, and she nodded as he cupped her chin and stroked the tears away with a calloused thumb. Slowly, he drew her face closer to his, and she watched as his tongue slipped across his lips, making her own ache for a taste of such balm. "But the wound's still there... and the scars..."

"Then heal me," he entreated, his eyes beseeching hers. "Help me."

"I want to," she whispered. Their lips touched only slightly, then again, and finally, he framed her face with both hands and urged her lips to part, allowing him full entrance to the heart she'd kept locked for so long. Their tongues mated and joined in urgent union, and she felt her heart melding against his in a way she hadn't felt in years. Like the Simon and Garfunkel song weeping from the radio, their kiss was a bridge over troubled waters, a means of leaving the boundaries behind and meeting where only feelings mattered. She wondered if she'd ever experienced a kiss this intense, one that seared straight to her very soul, one that cut her heart in two. No, she thought. Not even with Paul.

Slowly, Johnny rose up and brought his feet to the floor and pulled her onto his lap as the kiss grew deeper in urgency and potency. Her hand traveled up his chest, flirting with the curls of dark hair that shadowed across his nipples, up farther to his heart, pounding like a jackhammer, and to the column of his neck, where his Adam's apple convulsed against her fingertips.

He broke the kiss and drew in a deep breath, and she pressed her forehead against his, still fondling his neck and the base of his jaw. "I'll heal you, too, Carrie," he whispered against her lips. "If you'll let me."

She nodded, knowing from her soul that he had the power.

His lips found hers again and slowly, he lowered her back to the arm of the couch, cradling her head, as his tongue moved in the same rhythm as the throbbing in her core.

His hand moved down her neck, tracing the column with a stroke of his thumb, then farther down, where his dog tags teased against her breasts, their arousal apparent even beneath her blouse.

He opened a button, nuzzled her throat, then trailed a path down to the next button and the next, until he could peel the blouse back from her shoulders.

His head dipped to one bare breast, budded and peaking with need, and he devoured it with a hunger that she doubted she could ever fill. A hunger that came from years of starvation, years of deprivation, not of physical pleasure, but of spiritual sustenance. Emotional joining.

She wasn't sure how he shed the rest of his own clothing or exactly when he managed to lock the door, but awareness sparked through her as he stretched out above her, his hard body fitting against hers, warming all the cold, empty places she'd worn like armor for so long.

His lips found hers again, gently cherishing her as the restraint of his passion tightened his body.

And as his body joined hers, she felt the healing begin. The fathomless, soul-purging, spirit-deep healing that made them more than lovers. It made them whole, but only so long as their union was complete.

They lay entangled in the aftermath, and she held him as his breathing settled, as his arms closed tighter around her, as his eyes drifted shut. She held him as he drifted back into the nightmare of his sleep, to confront the past that had never-could never-be resolved. And as he relaxed in her arms, undisturbed by ghosts or mortar shells or friendships that could never be renewed, she experienced a new kind of hunger that would take a lifetime to fill.

IT WAS HOURS LATER when Carrie awoke and saw that darkness had fallen around them, except for the tiny lamp burning on Johnny's desk. He was sleeping so soundly, she thought as she lifted her head from his chest. She remembered seeing him on his balcony at three in the morning, staring into the night, for it was a more peaceful sight than war. This, she decided, might be the deepest he had slept in days.

Quietly, she slipped out of his embrace and pulled her clothes on, careful not to wake him from his fragile state. She would leave him undisturbed, she thought. And by morning, he would feel renewed.

She found a blanket in the locker room off the gym, covered him with it and went to the radio, where Jim Croce's voice bemoaned the fact that time couldn't be put in a bottle. The quiet might disturb Johnny more than the music, she thought, so she left it untouched. Then she slipped out, locking the door behind her to prevent someone tomorrow from sneaking in on him.

As she left the dark, deserted school, she smiled from her heart. For she felt at peace for the first time in two years.

Chapter Eight

Carrie reached her apartment just in time to see Sally taping a note to her door.

"Sally?"

Her friend swung around, the four-inch rollers in her hair lending a comical note to her appearance, even in the darkness. The cotton smock she wore that made her look five-months pregnant, a fad that Carrie was certain was a gigantic prank by the fashion industry, didn't help matters any. But the expression on Sally's face was anything but funny. "Carrie! I've been looking all over for you! Where have you been?"

Carrie ignored the question and glanced at the note on her door. "Why? What's wrong?"

"Your father called when he couldn't find you," Sally said. "He wanted me to tell you that your mother had to be taken to the hospital-"

"The hospital! Why?"

Sally winced and covered her worried face with both hands. "He said it was a heart attack. Oh, Carrie, I'm so sorry."

"Oh, no." A tidal wave of panic swept Carrie into its arc, and sucking in a breath, she staggered and dropped her purse on the concrete, spilling all the contents. Falling to her knees, she threw her things back in. "Oh, no."

Sally helped her retrieve the purse's contents. "She'll be all right, Carrie. I just know it. You have to think positive."

Nodding absently, Carrie started back to her car.

"Carrie! Let me drive you!"

Carrie shook her head and waved her friend off. "I'm okay," she muttered. "I'll call you as soon as I know something."

She got into her car and fumbled for her keys.

A heart attack! Her own heart tripped as she pulled out of the complex, screeching around corners and running red lights.

She reached the hospital in record time and ran to the information desk. "May Hunter," she said, struggling to catch her breath. "Heart attack. She was brought in here tonight."

"She's in ICU," the elderly volunteer cut in matter-of-factly. "Third floor."

An elevator door was opening, so Carrie dashed toward it and punched the third-floor button. An eternity passed as the elevator made its way up.

She got out, looked frantically up the hall and saw her father sitting in the waiting room. She hadn't seen him in weeks, not since their last fight over Brian, and she saw the age that had crept upon him, dragging his shoulders down, mapping his wrinkled face and making him appear thinner than the last time she had seen him. He sat on a vinyl sofa, his elbows propped on his knees, rubbing his face with trembling hands.

Slowly, she started toward him, uttering a silent prayer as she did that she wasn't too late. "Daddy?"

He looked up and the beginnings of a tentative smile relaxed his troubled expression. "Thank God. Sally must have found you."

She stood still as he rose from the couch, and searched his face for some hint to her mother's condition. "What happened?" she asked. "Is she all right?"

"She's stable," he said, and Carrie blew out a long breath of relief. "They're running some tests right now."

She touched her chest and willed her breath to return to normal, but her lungs seemed too shallow to take in the necessary oxygen. "What happened, Dad?"

He let out a shaky sigh and dropped back onto the sofa. Carrie sat down next to him. "She was making one of those wooden-box purses she likes, you know the ones shaped like a house, and I heard it crash in the kitchen-" His voice broke, and Carrie saw his eyes glisten with unreleased tears. He swallowed and tried to go on. "I ran in there and found her collapsed on the floor."

Carrie leaned her forehead on her fingertips and closed her eyes, trying to tell herself that it was a miracle he had been home when it happened and that all would be well from this point on. But her heart told her it wasn't over yet. "Can I see her?"

He shook his head. "No. They're doing some tests right now. Apparently there's some danger of another heart attack within the next twenty-four hours..."

"Why?" she asked, knowing the question was too simple for such a complex problem. She stood up and looked down at him. "Why did this happen? Didn't you make sure she was resting? Didn't you make her eat right?"

"Of course I did," he snapped. "I've done nothing but look after her."

"You've done nothing but keep her prisoner," Carrie countered. "Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the stress of all you've put her through lately about Brian was too much for her."

"Oh, please!" her father shouted. "I may not be the easiest person in the world to get along with, but living with me is hardly like serving time! I'm the same man she married twenty-five years ago."

Carrie lowered her voice and glanced self-consciously around. "Dad, all she wants is the freedom to love her son, without having to defend that to you. All she needs is a little understanding... a little tolerance."

"So are you saying that I'm responsible for this heart attack?" he asked. "What about you and Brian, huh? Did you ever think that maybe you two could be just a little bit to blame?"

"Maybe we're all to blame," Carrie conceded. Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at her father, and a profound sense of shame seeped through her. "We're acting like little kids trying to one-up each other," she whispered. "I'm thankful that you were there when this happened. You probably saved her life."

His eyes drifted miserably to the corridor where his wife lay connected to tubes and monitors, and Carrie wondered how she'd get through the next few hours waiting here with him, with so much hostility between them. She leaned back and looked at the television in the corner, not seeing the press conference where Nixon tried once again to cover his muddy tracks. Her eyes drifted to the walls around them, and she saw a pay phone near the elevators. "I should go call Brian," she whispered, more to herself than her father.

"Why?" His dull question cut through the tension and she snapped her head back around.

"Why?" she repeated. "Because he's her son, that's why. He has a right to know."

"Well, he can't do anything about it," he said. "He can't come home. What's he gonna do? Call her on the phone and miraculously make it all go away? That'll probably just make her worse."

"No, there's nothing he can do," Carrie returned, unable to believe that this was the same man who had raised her. "But that doesn't mean we should keep it from him." She stood up and turned back to her father. "You know, if and when Mom pulls out of this, I'm taking her to Canada to see him. It would do wonders for her." She saw the distaste for the idea in her father's brooding eyes, and she offered an exaggerated shrug. "I'll tell your son you send your love," she quipped, then left him sitting there alone.

JOHNNY WOKE TO THE SOUND of the radio playing the Doobie Brothers and looked around, struggling to orient himself. It was the first time in days-weeks even-that he'd slept that deeply, and it was difficult pulling himself out of it.

He was in his office at school, he realized, and someone had covered him with a blanket...

Carrie.

She was gone.

He sat up, raking a hand through his hair, and wondered if she was okay or if she regretted what had happened between them. He couldn't believe he had fallen asleep, but such a feeling of lightness and peace had washed over him after he'd made love to her.

He reached for his shorts, pulled them on and slipped his shirt over his head. He had to find her, he thought. He had to make sure that she wasn't bashing herself for being vulnerable. He had to let her know what it had meant to him.

The drive to their apartment complex seemed to take forever, and when he finally reached it, he hurried to her door instead of his. It was still early, he thought. If she was still up...

The note still hanging there caught his attention immediately, and hoping it was for him, he tore it down, backed up to hold it in the dim light of the moon and read it.

Her mother was sick.

The sudden memory of the telegram he'd gotten in the hospital in Saigon a year ago rushed back to him. His mother had died and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.

He had to get to the hospital, he thought. He had to help her through this...

Slipping the note under her door, on the off-chance that she hadn't seen it yet, he got back into his car and drove to the hospital.

HE FOUND THE FLOOR WHERE the ICU patients were kept, and looked in the waiting room for Carrie. A few tired, worried faces turned up to him, but Carrie's wasn't among them.

Looking around, he spotted her at the pay phone, her long blond hair sweeping across her hips, making some deep male instinct within him respond. He could still remember the scent of that hair and the silky feel of it against his fingers and sweeping over his chest. Quietly, he started toward her.

He saw that she was deeply engrossed in her phone call and not wanting to disturb her, he waited silently behind her.

"No, Brian, you can't come home," she was saying. "It would just make things worse. Mom would spend the whole time worrying that you'd get arrested. And the tension between you and Dad-"

She cupped a hand over her forehead and looked down at the floor. Johnny deduced that she was talking to her brother, but the arrest part piqued his interest and made him feel he was shamelessly eavesdropping on a conversation that was none of his business. He took a few steps away, trying to tune out the conversation, but Carrie's voice rose a decibel.

"Brian, please! Just wait a little while. They're saying she's probably going to be fine-" She hesitated, and Johnny could see by the way she shook her head that the caller was arguing. "Brian, it's not your fault. She misses you, yes, but it's not like she hasn't had two years to get used to your being in Canada."

Canada. The word jolted Johnny, and forgetting that he wasn't supposed to be listening, he looked up at her. Had her brother dodged the draft? Was he living in some nice, cushy house in Canada, working in a nice, cushy, secure job, while Johnny had to settle for so much less?

"It won't be your last chance, Brian," Carrie went on. "Please...don't say that." Her voice broke, and Johnny saw the tears welling in her eyes. "I love you, too. Yes, I'll tell her. And don't worry, okay?"

She hung up the phone, laid her forehead against it and closed her eyes, as if to shut out the pain he could see taking hold of her. The sudden urge to touch her, comfort her, wipe those tears from her eyes, erase the sadness from her face, overwhelmed him and Johnny forgot about the mystery of her brother and stepped up behind her. Gently, he set both hands on her shoulders.

Startled, she turned around and looked up into his eyes. "Johnny! I thought you were-"

"Sleeping?" he asked. "Yeah, I slept. First time in... I don't know when."

"I could tell," she whispered.

His hand cupped her face and his thumb stroked the tears from her cheek. "I found the note on your door. How's your mom?"

"Stable, whatever that means," she said, casting a troubled glance toward the ICU. "They won't let me see her yet." She drew in a deep breath and focused on his cerulean eyes again. "You didn't have to come, you know."

"Hey," he whispered. "I lost my mother while I was in a hospital in Saigon. By the time I could travel, it was too late. I wanted to be here with you for this."

His words, rather than comforting her, only brought more tears to her eyes. "I wish everybody would stop talking about it being too late. It's not too late. She's going to be fine."

"I know," he said. "I just meant that you should be glad you're here. She needs you now. You can do a lot of good."

A soft frown drew Carrie's eyebrows together and she swallowed the emotion lodging in her throat. "Thanks, Johnny."

She glanced in her father's direction, saw him sitting forlornly on the vinyl couch, staring unseeing into space. Despite her anger toward him, she couldn't escape the grudging pity she felt for the man who had found himself so alienated from his family, so alone after years of close companionship. "I have to get back to my father," she whispered. "Come with me."

Johnny took her hand and followed her to the waiting area. Her father looked up, and Johnny noted the red weariness in his eyes.

"Dad," she said, her voice unmistakably cool and detached, "this is Johnny Malone, the football coach at school. Johnny, this is my father, Bradley Hunter."

Johnny shook the man's hand and sat down across from him. "I'm sorry about your wife," he said. "I'm sure she's in good hands here."

Bradley nodded without conviction. "We hope so." His eyes met Carrie's, volumes of unspoken questions flitting through them. She looked away.

"So how did your brother take it?" Bradley asked, his voice clipped and abrasive, and Johnny didn't miss the deliberate avoidance of Brian's name.

"You wouldn't be interested," she said.

Silence settled between them like a live force, leeching the air from the room.

Carrie gave Johnny an awkward glance, and he could see that she didn't want to discuss the conversation with her brother in front of him. But there was more, he thought. Something big-some insurmountable wall-between father and daughter.

"If I wasn't interested," Bradley pressed, eking each word through his teeth, "I wouldn't have asked, would I?"

Carrie lifted her eyebrows defiantly and settled her eyes on her father. "He wants to come home."

Johnny saw the redness seeping into her father's face, and he felt as if he'd walked into a family quarrel and couldn't help getting caught in the crossfire. "Did you tell him he can't?" her father asked. "Did you tell him that getting arrested for desertion wouldn't help his mother's health one whit?"

Carrie glanced at Johnny, her eyes almost guilty as they flitted away. Johnny regarded her father again, letting the words soak in. Desertion. It meant cowardice. Abandonment. Turning tail and running. Leaving his buddies to fight and die while he wimped out. It was people like Johnny who carried the burden of those who ran.

He looked at Carrie and for the most fleeting of moments, he hoped her brother did come back, so he could beat the hell out of him himself and hand him over to the cops. He leaned stiffly back on the sofa and drew in a deep breath.

Carrie cleared her throat and tried to go on, as if hoping Johnny wasn't concerned with the problems her brother faced, as if it didn't affect him one way or another. But it did affect him. It affected every one of the men who stayed and fought.

"He's worried it's his last chance," she told her father. "That if he waits it'll be too late..."

Too late, Johnny thought. Like it had been for him when his mother had needed him when she was in the hospital. But Johnny was laid up with a bloody hole in his side, half doped up with morphine and so full of grief for the buddies who hadn't survived the ambush that he couldn't even pray anymore. Not for his mother... not for himself. And by the time he remembered how, it had been too late.

"He should have thought of that before," Bradley muttered under his breath.

Feeling an unexpected kinship with Carrie's father, who seemed to have as much disdain for his son as Johnny did, Johnny rubbed at the stubble on his jaw. The sting of anger pushed up to his throat, and the ache of regret twisted in his heart, along with disappointment that Carrie would stand behind a brother who'd do such a thing. Unfolding from the couch, he came to his feet. "Look, I just came to check on you, see if there was anything I could do," he said quietly, his voice lacking the warmth it had had when he'd arrived. "I better go now."

He could see from Carrie's expression that she knew it was the talk about Brian that had changed his mood so suddenly. "But you just got here."

"I know, but... I really should go." He looked back at Bradley, shook his hand again. "It was nice meeting you, Mr. Hunter."

Johnny started toward the elevator, and Carrie followed, watching his face apprehensively. He avoided meeting her eyes. "Well, thanks for coming by," she said.

"Yeah." He punched the elevator button. "See you tomorrow. Let me know if there's anything I can do."

The doors opened and he stepped in. Turning around, he tried to smile, but the effort it took was too obvious.

The doors began to close, but Carrie reached out to stop them and leaned in. "Johnny, is it my brother?" she asked. "Are you leaving because of what you just heard?"

Johnny shrugged. "That's between you and your family," he said. "It has nothing to do with me."

"But it does." She caught herself, looked over her shoulder, and tried to quieten her voice. "It does because I care how you feel. After tonight..."

"Look, I don't hold it against you," he said. "Your brother obviously deserted, not you. How I feel about that is my problem."

She stepped back and looked at him for a long moment, and finally her hand fell to her side. The doors closed, cutting him off from her.

And he hated himself for letting his feelings come between them, just when the sun was starting to shine back on his life.

CARRIE STOOD OUTSIDE the elevator, watching the numbers change as it descended. A skein of anger ribboned up inside her that Johnny would pass judgment on her brother when he didn't know the man or his values, when he didn't understand the circumstances, when he didn't know the soul-searching and soul bashing that had gone into Brian's decisions.

The farther the elevator fell, the higher her anger level rose, until she slammed her hand against the elevator button. The doors to another car opened and she got on, fuming as she waited for the car to hit bottom.

When she reached the first floor, she didn't see Johnny, so she broke into a trot and hurried out the front door to the parking lot, illuminated only by the street lights on four corners. She saw him in the light of one of them ambling slowly to his car.

"Johnny!"

He turned around and waited for her to approach him, and as she did, she saw him shake his head, as if no more needed to be said on the subject. But she knew it did.

"You're judging him, aren't you?" she asked as she came face-to-face with Johnny. "You don't even know him, and you're judging him."

"I'm not judging anybody," Johnny said. He dropped his hands to his sides. "Look, your mother's in bad shape up there. We shouldn't be down here arguing about something that neither of us can change."

Hot emotion rose to Carrie's face, and she wasn't sure why. She had made love to Johnny tonight, had in all probability fallen in love with him, and now she felt the need to strike out, as if that would neutralize her feelings and make them go away.

"My brother is a good man," she said, tears filling her raw eyes. "You would like him a lot."

Johnny turned away from her and looked toward his car, shaking his head. "Carrie, don't do this, okay? I won't convince you that I can respect some guy who skipped out and left guys like me holding the bag, and you're not going to convince me that there was one damn bit of honor in what he did. So let's drop it, okay?"

"You don't understand!" she shouted. "Brian was drafted, and he went through basic training, the whole bit, but then Paul died! He was my fiance, but he was also Brian's best friend. It was too much for him!"

Johnny uttered a dry laugh. "Too much for him? Bless his poor little heart." His sarcasm changed to bitterness and he took a step toward her. "Do you know how many friends I lost over there? How many guys who were closer to me than a brother could have been? Don't tell me about death!"

"But that's just it," Carrie said, as if he'd just made her point for her. "You suffered all those deaths, and you came through. But all it took for Brian was one. It shook him to the very center of his values, and when it was time for him to ship out to Vietnam, he just couldn't face it. He didn't want to put his values on the line because some officer told him to, and he didn't want to be turned into some kind of brutal killer who-"

"Like me?" The question cracked through the night, and Carrie saw the fury raging in Johnny's eyes. "He was a sensitive guy, so he turned tail and ran, and I stayed and faced the music, so I'm brutal? Is that what you think?"

"No, that's not what I think!" she cried, but her voice lacked conviction. "You're not listening. One thing has nothing to do with the other."

"One thing has everything to do with the other," he shouted. "You're the one who said we were 'soulless shells of men'!" He stopped, took a deep breath, tried to steady the raging tremor in his voice. "When I was a little kid, my father told me stories about his days in the Marines. About how he had served his country, fought for democracy. How the country appreciated him for it. All my life I knew that when I grew up, I was going to be a Marine, just like him. But you know what? It's the guys out there who told Uncle Sam, 'No way am I gonna go over there and represent my country in a war,' who get all the respect and understanding! It's guys like your brother everybody's so damned concerned about, and meanwhile I'm getting spit in the face and who the hell cares?"

"He isn't getting all the respect and understanding!" she cried. "He feels guilty when he runs into guys like you, and he pays every day of his life because he can't come home."

"That's bull," Johnny returned. "It's not like he's living in the Amazon. He's in Canada, for God's sake. He's probably got a good job, better than mine, maybe a family...and what do I get? A temporary coaching position and no future because I can't stop looking behind me."

"That's your fault, Johnny, not anyone else's," Carrie shouted, tears rolling down her face at the pain she had inflicted on him once again. "No one's making you look back. But you won't let go and move on."

"How can I move on?" he asked, astounded. "I left too many dead friends back there to trudge ahead like nothing ever happened. Too many people I was close to, who I'll never see again, because even if they survived, it'll never be the same with them. The truth is that a day doesn't go by that I don't wish I was back over there still fighting!"

Carrie stood still, trying to absorb-to understand-his words, but they were too absurd. Too bizarre. How could he wish he was there? She swallowed, found her voice and took his hand. "How, Johnny? How could you wish that?"

He jerked his hand out of hers and put more distance between them. "Because I feel like it's still going on... like they're all still back there, getting blown up and shot at, tromping through the mud, waiting for mail call...and they need me and I'm not there." His voice broke, and he turned away, wiped at his face and looked down at the dirty concrete beneath his feet.

She wanted to touch him, comfort him, but some angry force inside her still kept her from it. "The nightmares... I heard you tonight... they were awful. Why would you want to go back and relive that?"

Johnny turned back around, and the pain in his face was fathomless. "It's not the horror I want to relive, Carrie. It's the camaraderie. The teamwork. The brotherhood. When we were there, the intensity was so great. Everything was life or death. So you didn't waste feelings or time. You did what you had to do. But here-" he waved his hands at the dark parking lot, where cars were lined up like examples of what he spoke of "-here, everything's so damned insignificant, so useless. You make love, and when you wake up, you're still alone. You get to know somebody, and then you find out you don't know them at all. There are too many subtleties for me, Carrie. And I guess I don't have the energy or the patience to break through them and get to the bottom line."

Carrie wiped her tears across her face. "You aren't alone, Johnny," she whispered. "And our lovemaking wasn't insignificant. I left you so you could sleep, because I care about you. You're the first man I've been with since Paul... and I don't take that lightly."

Her voice broke and she looked at her feet, then brought her eyes back to his. "You soldiers weren't the only ones affected by the war, you know. You always forget about the mothers, the fathers, the spouses, the sisters, the lovers... There are things that happen in wartime, things that we have to live with, that change the rest of our lives..." She breathed in a shivering breath, tried to go on.

"Until tonight, I couldn't break free, either. Until tonight, I couldn't look ahead. But, Johnny there's more to what holds me back than you know. There's more..."

"Then tell me," Johnny entreated through his teeth. "I've tried to make you tell me."

"I know," she whispered. "But how can I share it with you when I still can't deal with it myself? I can't expect you to understand how I feel or why I hate the war so much, and maybe even the people who fought in it. But not you, Johnny. Not you."

"You can't separate me from it," he said. "I'm a part of it, just like every other soldier who made it home. Why do I have to spend so much time explaining why I chose to do what was expected of me?"

"Because there are people who didn't!" she said. "Because there were people who couldn't. And it destroyed them and so many more lives than they ever knew! It destroyed so many things!"

Johnny took her shoulders and stared down into her haunted eyes. "What happened with him, Carrie? What did he do? Tell me!"

"He killed himself!" she shouted through her teeth. "He didn't even give it a chance. He killed himself, Johnny. What kind of hell would do that to a person? What kind of hell would make someone break so completely he'd choose dying over trying to make it through? That's why I'm so angry!" she shouted. "That's why I have so much hatred that I don't know what to do with!"

Johnny breathed a soft moan and pulled her into his arms. She went willingly, reminding him that there was significance in her world. There was intensity of emotion. And not everything was wasted. "I'm sorry, Carrie," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."

He held her as though the strength of his embrace could heal her wounds, but he suspected it would take a lot more than a shoulder to cry on. It would take her facing her ghosts, confronting them and laying them to rest. After a moment, he whispered his own concerns against her ear.

"But are you mad at me and all the other guys in uniform, or are you mad at him? You have to decide before you can let it go."

"But what kind of person would that make me?" she asked miserably. "If I blamed him..."

She pulled back, settling her anguished eyes on Johnny and sucked in a sob. "You can't tell anyone this, Johnny," she said. "Please...his family couldn't even tell me. I found out by accident."

"I wouldn't do that," he said. "I would never tell something that private."

He took her face in his hands, forced her to look up at him. His eyes were as misty, as tormented as hers, but this time his pain mirrored her own. "Carrie, if it is Paul you're mad at, if you decide that it's him you hate for what he did, I want you to realize that it wasn't something he did to you. He should have held on, but maybe he couldn't. And no matter how much you loved him, no matter how much you prayed for him and thought about him, you couldn't change it. It's not your fault. And maybe it's not his fault, either."

"We had so many plans!" she whispered on a raspy suspiration. "If it had been out of his hands, I could deal with it. But he did it to himself! And he never came home."

"But I came home," Johnny whispered. "I came, and I'm here now. And maybe I can't take his place, but I can help you heal. You've helped me already."

He kissed her, and her mouth tasted of salty tears and pain and love. The kiss broke through the anguish and emptiness, filling her with a deep balm that told her the past didn't really matter anymore. All that mattered was holding on to this sweet relief for a few moments longer.

The kiss broke too soon, but Johnny didn't release her as he reached under his collar and pulled his dog tags over his head. He looked at them lying in his palm for a moment, then took her hand and dropped them into it. "I want you to have these," he whispered.

She closed her fingers over the two plates. "But Johnny... they're all you have left. The last little bit-"

"It's time to let go," he whispered. "It's time to hold on to something else instead."

He slipped the chain over her head, and she clutched the two metal plates in her hand, holding them against her heart, for they represented life, future, hope.

"Come on," Johnny whispered. "Let's go back up to ICU. I'll stay with you until you go home tonight."

Wilting against him, she slipped her arm around his waist. Laying her head against his shoulder, she breathed in his strength, his fortitude, his passion.

And she realized how much she had let go tonight... and how much she had gained in return.

Chapter Nine

The sun was too bright for late November, its punishing rays beating down on the football team as they ran drills for the upcoming game. Johnny stood back and watched, his eyes straying up the hill to the parking lot where he had seen Carrie pull in after school. He had missed her at school today, since she had taken the day off to be with her mother. He had known the moment her car puttered onto the street in front of the school, and he had known the moment her eyes scanned his team members seeking him out.

She was wearing his dog tags. He saw the sun glisten off the beaded chain, saw her hands close around the flat metal plates that listed his name, Social Security number, blood type and religion. Something warm ached up inside him, and he felt his mouth go dry as she started into the school.

He forced his eyes back to the team that fumbled and stumbled all over the field, and saw Mark Gray leaning against a car on the street, watching. The kid wanted to play, he thought, and it was ironic that because he couldn't, every other black player on the team had walked. There was no way he could bring his team to victory this week, thus maintaining their undefeated status, with so many of his players boycotting.

He walked toward Mark, saw the boy casually bring his cigarette to his lips and inhale, as if he hadn't a care in the world. But Johnny knew better.

"Thought you'd be working," Johnny said. "I heard you were working at a service station."

Mark dropped the cigarette to the sidewalk and ground it out with his toe. "Pumps had to close early. We ran outa gas." He laughed slightly and ran his long fingers through his Afro. "You shoulda seen those people lined up for gas. Mad as hell. We had to call the pigs to come control things."

"So how's your boss feel about all that?"

"Bad, man," Mark said. "He's sayin' he might have to close down altogether. He's independent, you know. Cain't compete with them Shell and Texaco stations up the street. Meanwhile, I don't get paid."

"Well, maybe that's good," Johnny said. "Maybe it's best that you don't have that back door to help you drop out of school."

"Drop out, hell," Mark muttered. "I was kicked out."

"One more day, Mark," Johnny said. "That's all. You can come back next Tuesday."

"Yeah, a lotta good that'll do me," he muttered. He looked over Johnny's shoulder, to the team practicing on the field. "I noticed all the brothers are missing from practice. Coach Vance must be struttin' this week."

Johnny set his hands on his hips and gave the boy a deprecating look. "You know where all the blacks are, Mark. They're boycotting because of you. And we're going to lose the game because of that. It'll ruin our record."

Mark raised his hands innocently. "Hey, don't blame me. I didn't tell 'em to quit."

"You didn't tell them not to, either. Why don't you have a talk with them? You can't do anything about the game, but you might have some influence stopping this walkout they're threatening."

"So all of a sudden I'm supposed to do Altus this big favor?" Mark asked.

Johnny set a rugged hand on Mark's shoulder and forced Mark to look at him directly. "It's not over yet, Mark," he said. "Just trust me. I'm working on this, okay? I'm trying to figure something out."

Mark's brooding expression reminded Johnny of a little boy with hurt feelings, trying hard to pretend he didn't care. "Yeah, yeah," he said.

Johnny turned and started back to the field, cursing the fact that things always got so out of hand. An injustice occurred, someone stood up for a principle, and the next thing you knew, half the school was threatening a walkout and there was a stalemate.

He looked back toward the parking lot and saw that Carrie had come back out of the school. When she started toward him, some hidden percussion instrument in his heart accelerated and he waited, knowing the emotions she had planted inside him were obvious to anyone with eyes.

Last night had taken them beyond intimacy, and now he feared his heart was hopelessly bound to her and that a feeling so blissful could only lead to pain.

As she drew closer, he smelled the scent of her hair on the autumn breeze, warmed to the smile in her emerald eyes as they took him in, melted to the desire rising inside him as she faced him.

"How's your mother?" he asked.

"Better," she said. "Much better. She's over the worst."

Tearing his eyes from her, he glanced over his shoulder and saw gratefully that the team was too busy to notice his attention to her. He stepped closer to her, leaving only a breath between them, and tugged on the dog tags, the back of his fingers grazing the inside of her breast. "You're wearing them," he said. "I like that."

A soft blush climbed her cheeks, and he yearned to lean over and taste that warmth. She took the dog tags and dropped them down her turtleneck. He imagined them tucked between bare breasts, warming to her heartbeat, and desperately he longed to leave the field and take sanctuary there, as well. "I meant to keep them tucked in," she said, glancing self-consciously around at the faces that seemed to ignore them. "Johnny, I really just came by to talk to you. About Mark."

Johnny glanced toward the boy still leaning against the car. "What about him?"

Shading her eyes from the sun, Carrie regarded Mark. "I talked to his algebra teacher yesterday, tried to convince her to hold the test just one day so that he wouldn't miss it during his suspension, but she refused. That's why I came to your office..."

Her voice trailed off, and he started to say something about how they had gotten sidetracked in his office, but flippancy would discount what had happened between them. He didn't want anything to downplay its significance, or the significance of their fight last night and the intimate quiet that had followed as he'd sat at the hospital with her.

"I thought it was time that you and I took some action on our own," she said. "For Mark's sake."

"What kind of action?" he asked.

She smiled and pursed her lips, as though considering whether to invite him to share her scheme.

"Something devious," she said. "But I think it'll work. I was thinking of us setting off a fire drill for the exact time of that test. That way, no one in the class can take it, and she'll have to give it over again. Mark will get to take it the next day when he comes back, the black kids on the team won't feel that such a huge injustice has happened-"

"Everybody'll be happy, huh?"

"Well, not everybody," she said. "If Bill Altus finds out we had anything to do with it, we'll both get fired. And if you don't want to be a part of it, I'll understand. I can do it alone, but..."

"I'll do it," he said without hesitation. "It sounds great."

Carrie's smile lit up his heart. "Now all we have to do is convince Mark to study for the test."

"Leave that to me," Johnny said. "I'll whip the kid into shape."

Their eyes met and held for a moment, and he caught her fingertips with the pads of his fingers. "I missed you at school today. It's no fun without you."

He saw the emotion pass over her eyes. "Yeah. Me, too."

He wet his lips and thought how much he wanted to pull her against him and kiss her without regard for anyone around them. Her soft smile told him that she felt the same, and he couldn't wait to get her alone later, to make love to her slow and long, in a bed-in his bed-so that she'd still be there when he woke.

"Do you think you can get away later? I'd really like to see you."

"Miss Hunter!"

The call from up the hill shattered the moment and they both turned to see one of the cheerleaders starting toward them.

"There's a guy up there who's looking for you. Says it's important."

Carrie shaded her eyes against the sunlight and looked in the direction from which the girl had come. "What guy?"

"The one in that Mustang up there. Beard, blond 'fro, glasses..."

Carrie shrugged and started up the hill. "I don't know anybody like that, but I'll go see what he wants."

A skein of something between irritation and jealousy twisted through Johnny and he grabbed her shoulder to stop her. "I'll come with you."

She didn't object, so he tossed the ball to Norman and told him he'd be right back.

The Mustang in question came into view as they reached the parking lot, and Johnny saw the man sitting behind the wheel, watching them approach. Red car-rental plates graced the front bumper, and Johnny frowned and looked at Carrie.

Carrie gasped and stopped dead in her tracks, and held out a hand to stop Johnny. He frowned at the red tint blushing her cheeks.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Yeah." Her voice strained to sound calm, but Johnny didn't miss the worry and surprise in her eyes. "Uh, I know who he is... you don't have to come with me."

Johnny followed her gaze to the man in the car, saw him lift his fingers in a peace sign, then cover the slow smile on his face.

She answered that smile, then threw Johnny another nervous look. "Really, it's okay. You go back to practice."

"But who is he?" Johnny asked, schooling his voice not to reveal his chagrin.

"He's-he's an old friend."

"An old boyfriend?"

Carrie's smile widened across her face and she glanced up at him. As if she recognized the jealousy in his question and delighted in it, she said, "No, Johnny. Not a boyfriend. Look, I'll see you later, okay?"

He could see that she had no intention of taking him any closer to the man, much less introducing him so that he could find out just what the hell the mystery was.

"All right. See ya." His heart sank as he turned and started back to the team.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw that she had reached the car. The man opened the passenger door and she reached in and embraced him like some long-lost lover returned from the dead.

Johnny stood still and watched, paralyzed, as Carrie broke into tears and framed the man's bearded face. He saw her laugh and mess up the blond Afro, then hug him again.

"Looks like you got competition, Coach."

Johnny looked at Mark, who had ambled up beside him, and gave him a scathing look. A cold draft fluttered through his veins, directly into his heart as Carrie closed the car door and the driver started to pull away.

She didn't even look back at Johnny as they pulled out of the parking lot.

"YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE DONE IT, Bri," Carrie told her brother when they were no more than a mile from the school. "You shouldn't have come home."

"I had to."

She reached over and took off his wire-rimmed sun glasses, and smiled at the familiar eyes she had missed so much over the last two years. He had grown a beard and frizzed his blond hair into a huge Afro that surrounded his head like some cosmic aura. "Oh, Brian, it's so good to see you. But what if someone turns you in? What if you get caught?"

"I'll be careful," he said. "Sometimes you just have to take chances. Mom needs me, so I'm here. That's all I care about right now."

"But how did you get here without getting caught?"

"I used a fake name and flew a commercial airline," he said. "You don't have to have a passport from Canada, so it really wasn't a problem."

"Not yet, anyway." She slumped back in the bucket seat of the rental Mustang. Idly pulling the dog tags out of her shirt, she twirled the chain nervously around her fingers.

"So tell me about the guy back there who looked like he'd like to string me up when he saw me hugging you."

Carrie smiled. "Johnny? Maybe I should have told him who you are. You just took me by surprise, and all I could think about was someone turning you in. I guess Johnny was a little jealous."

"A little?" He laughed. "I'm lucky I got out of there with my skin. Who is he? Somebody special?"

She looked down at the dog tags, ran her fingers over his name on the plate. "Yeah. Pretty special. He's the football coach... and an ex-Marine lieutenant."

Brian shot her a look and her smile faded. "A Marine," he repeated in a dull monotone. Nodding toward the dog tags, he asked, "Then I take it those tags weren't Paul's?"

She shook her head. "I never wore his. I couldn't. There was only one tag left..." Her voice broke, and she realized it didn't have to be explained. Brian knew that the extra tag on its own small chain was there to mark the bodies of dead soldiers. Johnny's tags were still intact, and to her, that represented the victory of survival, the hope that accompanied life.

"So what's the deal?" Brian asked quietly. "Are you in love with him?"

Heat scored her cheeks and she looked at her brother. "Boy, you get right to the point, don't you?"

"Have to," he said. "If he's a part of your life now, I need to know where I stand. In other words, does he know you have a brother who's a deserter, or are you saving that up to spring on him later?"

"He knows," she said.

"Then why didn't you tell him it was me today?"

She shook her head, for she honestly wasn't sure. "Knowing you exist and knowing you're here are two different things, Bri. I didn't know how he'd react."

Carrie looked at her brother again, at his frizzy sandy hair, at the light beard that hadn't been there before, at the tan that testified to the hours he worked in the sun in his construction job. Two years hadn't taken the sorrowful glint from his eye, and she knew she couldn't erase it now. "It doesn't matter what he thinks," she said. "You did the right thing and you know it. I just hope you won't regret coming back."

"It'll be okay," he said. "Probably no one will even know I'm here, unless Dad gets a flare-up of conscience and turns me in." The thought, though unlikely, sobered him.

"Yeah," she whispered. "Don't expect a warm welcome from him."

"I quit expecting anything a long time ago," Brian said. "I knew there was a price for the decision I made."

Carrie studied her brother for a moment, realizing how much he had grown up. He had no apologies to make, probably even no regrets for the choices he'd made. But he paid for them nonetheless. Just like Johnny was paying. "I wonder if any of us ever stops paying," she mumbled.

"Never," he said. "Every decision we make has a huge cost attached. We just have to be sure it's worth it before we act. For me, it was worth it."

She wasn't sure why, but Brian's affirmation quietened her turbulent soul.

"Johnny defends his time in Vietnam with a vengeance," she said, "and yet, he has these nightmares that haunt him and keep him from sleeping.. .and then he'll turn around and tell you that he wishes he were back there...." Her voice trailed off and she leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

"Oh, I don't know," she whispered. "It doesn't make sense. But then again, somehow it does."

Her brother was quiet, and she wondered if he thought her fascination for Johnny was as strange as she knew it to be. He pulled the car into the hospital parking lot, cut it off but made no move to get out.

"This Marine..." he said after a moment. "What did he say when you told him about me? Does he have it in for those of us who wouldn't play the game?"

Surprisingly, she felt a surge of protectiveness toward Johnny. "He doesn't consider it a game any more than you did, Bri," she said. "And all I know is that he's a vulnerable, sensitive man, and he survived. And I guess that's all that matters."

"Yeah," Brian whispered. "It's just...I'd like to meet the guy who pulled my twin sister out of her shell, when we thought you'd never get over Paul."

"You'll meet him," she said. "When the time is right."

She watched Brian get out of the car, saw the anxiety, the dread and the anticipation in his eyes. He shoved his sunglasses back on and rubbed his beard, as if making sure that he couldn't easily be identified by anyone he might run into who had known him before. As she followed him in, Carrie wondered if Brian was making the mistake of his life.

The elevator was empty as they stepped on, and Carrie grinned at her brother as the doors closed. "You know, you really don't look anything like you used to. That Afro is...so big."

He gave her that typical, mischievous grin of his and shook his head around. "Yeah. I like it, too."

She laughed and touched it again, marveling at the feel of it. "It feels like cotton candy. And that beard..."

"You think Mom'll like it?"

Carrie giggled. "I think she'll certainly notice it. But maybe I should go in first and warn her. I don't want to scare her into another heart attack."

"Fine," he said. "And if anybody asks, I'm your cousin."

"Right." The doors opened and they stepped off.

Carrie glanced toward the waiting room, saw that her father wasn't there. Breathing a sigh of relief, she pointed toward her mother's room. When they reached it, she said, "Stay right here. I'll just be a minute."

He nodded uncomfortably and glanced toward the nurse walking toward them. She paid him no regard as she passed.

Carrie slipped into the room and saw her mother watching Somerset, her favorite soap opera, on the television on the wall. "Mom? Hi."

May smiled at Carrie and reached for her hand. "Hi, honey. You didn't have to come back so soon. You must have things you need to take care of."

"Well, I hadn't planned to come back this early," she said, "but I have a little surprise for you."

"Oh?" May tried to sit up in bed, but Carrie stopped her.

"Now, Mom, this is a real big surprise. And I want you to promise me not to get too excited. I don't want your heart going haywire on me, okay?"

Her mother looked at her suspiciously. "Carrie, what are you up to?"

"Promise me!" Carrie said, and a slow smile curled her lips upward.

"All right," May said. "I promise."

"And if this surprise doesn't look exactly the way you remember, you won't let that throw you, either, will you?"

May rolled her eyes. "Come on, Carrie. It's the suspense that's going to kill me, not the surprise!"

"Okay, okay."

Slowly, she went to the door, looked back at her mother. May was trying to sit up again.

"Lie down!" Carrie said. "I mean it."

May dropped her head back on her pillow and scowled.

Carrie pulled the door open and nodded to her brother, and he walked in.

"Mom?"

It was the voice more than the sight of him that made May sit up, despite Carrie's objections. "Brian? Is that you?"

He went to her bed and hugged her in reply. They embraced the way only a mother and son can embrace, and the small woman let her tears fall unhampered as she held him as if she feared ever letting him go again. "You came home!" she whispered, her voice undulating on a sob. "Oh, Brian, you're home!"

When Brian pulled back, Carrie saw that he struggled with tears of his own. "How could I stay away, Mom?"

"Easy," she said, wiping her eyes. "And you should have. You're taking a big risk, and it wasn't necessary. But, oh, it's so good to see you!" She held him again, and her shoulders began to shake with the beginnings of laughter. "Look at your hair! Oh, my God, Brian. What have you done with all that beautiful hair?"

"You don't like it?" he asked, pulling back and grinning the way he always had when his mother tried to scold him. "I did it just for you."

"Don't hang this on me," May said, still laughing. "So how do they do that? Stick your finger in a light socket?"

"Actually, it was news of your heart attack that did it," he said. "When Carrie called, I got so upset that my hair literally stood on end. It hasn't been the same since."

They all crumbled into laughter, and when the door opened, it was a moment before any of them noticed. And then Carrie saw her father standing in the doorway, a small bouquet of flowers clutched in his hand and a blank, expressionless look on his face as he regarded his son.

The laughter slowly died as they saw him one by one, and Brian stood up and faced his father.

The room got so still that the only noise was the humming of the monitors beside the bed, the sound of the air conditioner through the vent and the cigarette smoker on the television who swore he'd rather fight than switch.

"Hello, Dad," Brian said.

Carrie held her breath tight as her father stood staring at Brian. For a moment, she thought he would come farther into the room, reach for his son and put all the heartache and sadness behind them.

Instead, Bradley looked back down at the flowers in his hand. "I guess I gave you too much credit," he said. "I didn't think you were really stupid enough to try coming home."

May gaped at her husband in disbelief. "Bradley, don't start-"

Brian held up a hand to his mother, cutting her off, and went toward his father. "Dad, some things are worth the risk."

"And others aren't," he said, meeting his son's eyes directly. "How much good do you think this visit is going to do your mother when you're sitting in jail for desertion? Do you think that's going to take the worry from her mind?"

Brian looked down at the floor and tried to keep his voice calm. "I'm not going to jail," he said. "I'm going to be careful. Look, Dad, I don't expect anything from you. I came here to see Mom."

Bradley nodded sardonically and tossed the flowers he'd brought to the foot of May's bed. "Then I don't guess I'm needed here."

"Nobody asked you to leave," Brian said.

"Nobody has to," Bradley told him. "But this room isn't big enough for both of us."

Shaking his head, he turned away, closed his hand over the doorknob and slipped back out of the room.

Carrie didn't remember ever seeing such pain on her brother's face, but he swallowed it back and let out a long, soul-deep breath. "I'm sorry, Mom. You don't need this."

"It's okay," May told him, wiping her eyes and pulling him back into her arms. "Don't you worry about him. Let's just concentrate on the fact that you're back. I won't let him spoil this for either of us."

They stayed through the afternoon, talking and catching up, but that sad undercurrent existed no matter how they tried to ignore it. For it wasn't the same as when they were younger, when Bradley Hunter had contributed to the banter, laughed with them, argued with them. Now, it was more than apparent that things had changed drastically. And none of them was naive enough to believe it would ever be the same again.

JOHNNY'S MIND WAS NO MORE on algebra that night than Mark's was, for all night his weary eyes kept straying out the window to Carrie's dark apartment across the courtyard. He wondered if she was still with that bozo who'd driven off with her today or if she was at the hospital with her mother. Wherever she was, he hadn't heard from her, so his hopes for spending time alone with her tonight were dashed.

He glanced toward Mark, who sat at the kitchen bar supposedly working out an algebra problem Johnny had given him, but instead, the boy's eyes were on the television where Room 222 played in the corner.

Johnny went to the set and flicked it off. "Mark, if you're going to pass this test, you've got to keep your mind on the problems," he said. Contradicting his words, his own eyes drifted again to his window.

"Man, there ain't gonna be a test," Mark argued.

Johnny turned back to Mark and held his eyes in a bold, determined stare. "Hey, have I ever lied to you before?"

Mark lifted his shoulder. "Naw."

"Did I promise to make you a winner? And didn't I do it? Haven't you won every game you've played in?"

"Well, yeah, but-"

"And didn't you feel good about yourself for the first time? Didn't I tell you you could make the grades if you tried? And haven't you made them so far?"

A tentative smile tugged on Mark's mouth. "All right, man. You made your point."

"I'm telling you to be ready for the test," Johnny said. "You never know when your luck might change."

"Only way my luck ever changes is for the worse," the boy muttered, but when he jotted down the answer to the problem he'd been straining to solve, Johnny slammed his hand joyously on the table.

"Now, see there? That's the right answer. You've got brains. You just have to get off your butt and learn to use them."

"To do what?" Mark asked. "You don't need algebra to pump gas."

Johnny took the chair across from Mark, turned it around and straddled it as he regarded the boy solemnly. "Is that what you want to do for the rest of your life? Make two sixty-five an hour washing windshields and checking oil?"

Mark grinned. "Yeah. If Al can stay open long enough, I can probably get promoted to manager or somethin' in a few years. I could make a fortune."

"'A fortune,'" Johnny repeated on a derisive chuckle. "Mark, the only gas stations that can survive this shakedown are the ones owned by the big oil companies. And those guys don't pay their workers a whole hell of a lot of money."

"They pay enough," Mark defended. "Besides, what are my choices? Ain't nobody gonna be knockin' my door down to hire me, even if I do get my diploma. You want me to be a Marine or somethin'?"

The question was uttered with deprecation, but Johnny didn't find it all that ludicrous. "You could do worse. There are good careers to be made in the service."

Mark tipped back his chair and balanced his feet on the table leg. "Yeah? That why you got out?"

Johnny didn't answer for a moment. Instead, he only stared at the teenager across from him. "I had my reasons," he said.

"Don't tell me," Mark told him, still grinning and cocking his head mischievously. "You gave up your career in the Marines to coach football for some loser high school team."

"They're not losers anymore." Johnny sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Look, Mark, my reasons don't matter worth a damn. The fact that I chose to get out doesn't mean it was all bad. It might be a good career choice for you after you graduate."

Mark's laugh took Johnny by surprise. "Man, after Vietnam, nobody in his right mind would sign up for the service. They'd have to be crazy."

"Oh, yeah?" Johnny asked, suddenly feeling as if he was defending his own family. "What do you know about it?"

"I know that you can't trust the military, man, that's for damn sure. And I know that you can't trust the brass sittin' up there in their offices makin' all the decisions about how many peons out there they're gonna let drop today. It's no different in the service than it is in high school, man. Some self-proclaimed god makes decisions about people's lives, and everybody has to bow down."

"I don't bow down," Johnny said. "And I don't see you bowing down. Besides, it's the peons who become the brass," Johnny said. "Maybe the country needs more levelheaded thinkers like you and me to keep things working right. Did you ever think of that?"

"Yeah, I thought of it," Mark said, closing his book. "It's just that the system ain't set up that way. You know it, and I know it."

Johnny stared at him, expressionless, as the boy rose from his seat. "Then get used to pumping gas, kid, 'cause with that attitude that's about the best you're going to get."

An hour later, after the boy had taken his books and gone home, Johnny sat in the darkness of his living room, dragging on a cigarette and watching out the window for Carrie's light. He needed to see her tonight, he thought. If he could just see her, breathe in her scent, hold her for just a minute, hear her tell him that the man she'd embraced so easily today wasn't his competition...

Maybe he could assuage the emptiness in his soul.

That why you got out?

Mark's words echoed through his head, making the reality more clear than he wanted to admit. Now, looking back, he couldn't see any real good reason that he had left the Marines. It was just what everybody else was doing. A way to close the door on the past two years and move ahead. Only he didn't feel like he was moving ahead, because he still had one foot in a fox hole.

He saw Carrie's light come on and quickly he came to his feet and bent over to smother his cigarette in an ashtray. Already he felt better, just knowing that she was home.

"IT'S GOOD TO BE HOME, sis." Brian dropped the bag of groceries on her kitchen counter and tossed his rental-car keys down. "It was great to see Mom. I didn't expect open arms from Dad, but-"

"He's incredible." Carrie's expression sobered as she began putting away the groceries. "I can't believe he would treat you that way, when you risked everything to come home."

Brian opened a bag of potato chips and took one out. "It's okay. I told you, I expected as much. The main thing is that Mom looks good. Better than I thought. I think she's gonna be okay." He crunched a chip, dropping crumbs onto his beard. "My biggest problem now is making sure I don't get caught."

"Caught," Carrie repeated, opening the can of Tab she'd bought and pouring it into two glasses. "It almost sounds like you did something wrong, doesn't it?" She looked up at her brother, handed him a fizzing glass.

Brian took a sip and shook his head. "I didn't do anything wrong. My conscience is clear, okay?"

"Okay," she whispered. "That's the important thing."

A knock sounded at the door, and she looked toward it, hesitating. "I...do you think maybe you should hide? In case it's someone..."

Brian went quietly to the door and peered out through the peephole. "It's a guy," he whispered. "Your Marine?"

Carrie stepped in front of Brian and looked out. Johnny stood waiting, his hands crammed into the pockets of his jacket. The knock came again and she called, "Just a minute!"

Brian gave a shrug and looked down at her, his expression more serious than the devil-may-care one she'd associated with him since birth. "I'd like to meet him," he whispered. "Do you think he'd turn me in?"

Carrie regarded the closed door, considered the possibility, and decided it wasn't a chance she wanted to take. "I don't know, Bri."

Taking that as the answer he needed, Brian withdrew to the bedroom.

She opened the door and saw Johnny leaning against the casing, his face a study in soft vulnerability. His eyes questioned her, searched her face, looked into her soul.

She leaned against the door frame, too, her body touching his, and she took the hand hanging at his side. His fingers laced through hers. "Hi, Johnny," she said with a smile.

His lips gently grazed her mouth, and she released his hand and slid her fingers through his hair, pulling him into a kiss. It was soft, tentative, but the power it held stole her breath away.

When the kiss broke, his lips still feathered hers and he pulled her hips against him. "How's your mom?" he whispered.

"Better. Much better." She stepped back from the door and pulled him in.

"Good," he said. He closed the door behind him and slid his hands down her back, pressing her closer. "I would have gone to the hospital, but I was afraid if you were with that bozo and I saw him hugging you again, I might have to break his neck."

Carrie grinned and kissed the corner of his mouth. "You didn't have to worry about him, Johnny."

"Oh, no?" He dipped his face and caught her mouth again, drawing her into another kiss that sent shivers to all her nerve endings. "Prove it," he whispered, breathless. "Show me."

One hand threaded through her hair and she held him tighter as another kiss swept her under its spell, and she knew she wanted nothing more than to show him that he was the only one who could make her heart take flight. But Brian was still in the next room, waiting, listening, aware of every intimate moment that passed between them. "I'd like to show you," she whispered against his ear. "I really would. But I can't. Not now."

She felt him stiffening, and he loosened his embrace. "Why not?"

"Because we're not alone."

Johnny let go of her and stepped back, looking around the room.

Carrie knew it was time for the truth, and something in her heart told her she could trust him. "In the bedroom," she said.

Johnny looked at the closed door, then moved his gaze back to her. His lips were tight when he asked, "Someone's in your bedroom?"

She nodded. "That bozo you saw me with today... he's my brother."

A soft sigh issued from Johnny's lips, and she saw the relief on his face. "You mean I've been killing myself with jealousy all day, and it was just your brother? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because he's not supposed to be here."

She watched the understanding dawn on him, and that guarded expression she had grown accustomed to returned to his face. "That brother," he said finally.

"The only one I have," she said. Carrie took his hand and stared down at it, her face tired and troubled. "Don't tell anyone, okay, Johnny?"

Johnny shrugged, but she saw the soft light in his eyes burning out. "I'm no snitch, Carrie."

"I know. I just mean, if anyone knew, he could get arrested."

Some door over Johnny's eyes closed, and she felt as if she'd offended him again in some way. "Yeah, well," he said. "When you skip the country, you have to put up with stuff like that."

Carrie stepped back from him, breaking contact. She looked at him for a quiet eternity, and finally said, "He did what he had to do, Johnny."

"That's okay, Carrie. I can defend myself."

The door had opened and Brian stood in the doorway of the bedroom, hands in his pockets. He stepped toward Johnny, his face sober, cautious.

He glanced at the flannel shirt that Johnny wore, the faded jeans, the scuffed sneakers. "She said you're a Marine."

"Was," Johnny said. "Not anymore."

A cordial smile tugged at Brian's lips. "Being a Marine isn't something you just step out of that easily."

"No?" Johnny asked, lifting his chin stubbornly and not returning that smile. "Neither is the Army, but you didn't seem to have much trouble."

Protectively, Carrie touched Brian's arm as he looked down at the floor. "Johnny, don't."

Johnny nodded, stoicly accepting the reprimand. "Okay, I won't." He stepped back to the door, opened it and looked at Carrie over his shoulder. "I'm glad your mother's doing better. Call me when you get some time."

The door had closed behind him before Carrie had found a way to show allegiance to her brother and loyalty to Johnny at the same time. But there was no way to divide her heart between the two.

JOHNNY COULDN'T GO BACK HOME, for the emptiness and quiet in those little rooms was too intense to face just now. Instead, he got in his car and drove to Meg's apartment just a few miles away.

His knock sounded loud against the late hour, and he told himself that he should have called first. But Meg opened the door and smiled up at him as if she'd hoped it would be him.

"Johnny!"

He leaned against the door and peered past her into the apartment. "Feel like gettin' drunk?" he asked.

Meg laughed. "Why not? I haven't tied one on in about ten years. I guess I'm about due."

They drank a whole bottle of bourbon before the night was through, though Johnny had to admit that he had done most of the drinking and Meg had done most of the pouring.

"S'late," Johnny muttered when the clock struck twelve. "Needa go home."

"Stay here tonight, Johnny," she said. "You're in no condition to drive."

"Neither are you," he slurred. He looked at his sister, sprawled on the floor with the almost-empty bottle in her hand. She looked like a teenager again, with her hair tousled and her face flushed and her voice on the edge of a giggle. "Aren't we a pair?"

Meg took another swig and tried not to laugh, but her lips weren't tight enough to hold the chortle back. "Do you remember the first time you got drunk, Johnny? When you were fifteen or something?"

Johnny rolled his head back and tried to remember. Fifteen seemed too long ago to focus on now.

Meg sat up straight, folding her legs beneath her. She leaned forward, her face animated with the story. "You came home singing that Herman's Hermits song...what was it?"

"'Henry the Eighth'?" Johnny asked, beginning to laugh.

"That's it!" Meg said. "You pronounced it 'En-er-y the aith...'" Her laughter bubbled over, and she set down the bottle. "And you couldn't find your key, so I had to let you in and shut you up before you woke Mom. And the minute you got to the top of the stairs, you tossed everything you'd eaten for the last week!"

Johnny laughed. "Now I 'member. You kept telling me to shut up, that I was retchin' too loud."

They both collapsed, guffawing at the memory. "You had a hangover that lasted two days after that," she said. "And that girl you were dating... Jane Ann..."

"Jerry Ann," he corrected. "Jerry Ann Sullivan."

"She never spoke to you again after that night."

Johnny burst into a spray of laughter again. "Still don't know what I did to that girl. Musta been bad, though."

Gales of laughter overtook them both, and finally, Johnny staggered to his feet. "Well, I gotta go now. Game tomorrow. Gotta get up early. B'sides, you're outa booze."

Meg wiped at her eyes and came to her feet beside him. "No way, little brother. You're not drivin' anywhere like that."

"Gotta," he slurred. "Gotta get home."

"So you can sit in the apartment alone and think about that girl who's got you so mixed up?"

"Yeah," Johnny admitted with a wry grin. "I'm really into sufferin' these days. Thought I'd put on one o' your Conway Twitty albums and cry in my beer... or whatever there is in my 'frigerator."

Meg gave a martyred sigh. "Then I'll drive you," she said. "You drank twice as much as I did."

Johnny stumbled to the door and motioned for his sister to precede him.

"Just like a man," she said as she grabbed her purse and opened the door. "Come over, drink me out of house and home and then run out on me."

Johnny only laughed and set his arm across Meg's shoulder, and wished the earth would stop wobbling long enough for him to get to his car.

CARRIE LAY AWAKE THAT NIGHT, long after Brian had fallen asleep on the sofa, playing the scene with Johnny over and over in her mind. He had barely been civil to Brian, and yet she couldn't seem to work up that much anger toward him, not after the talk they'd had last night when they'd shared the deepest secrets in each of their souls.

There had been a strange fragility in his eyes as he'd stood there, as if he'd needed her but couldn't reach out because her brother needed her, too.

She heard a car door slam in the distance of the parking lot, heard distant voices slaughtering "Henry the Eighth."

Pulling up in bed, she looked out her window into the parking lot and saw Johnny stumbling from his car with a girl tucked under his arm-the same girl she had seen on his balcony when he'd moved in. Both of their voices wailed out in drunken glee.

Her lips stretched tight and her hand closed in a fist around the dog tags she still wore. Furiously, she pulled them over her head and dropped them onto the bed table.

Damn him, she thought as tears pushed to her eyes. Damn him for going to someone else after she'd poured her guts out to him last night! Damn him!

The voices disappeared as Johnny went around the building to his own apartment and took the girl inside. But the images didn't stop flitting through Carrie's mind.

Johnny was with another woman.

Chapter Ten

The final game of the season turned out to be a Herculean fiasco, so Johnny wasn't a bit surprised at halftime when Eric Idlemore had slipped out of the locker room, stripped down to his freckles and streaked across the field during the marching band's performance of the "Teabury Shuffle."

He had been caught at the far end of the field, covered with a blanket and hauled roughly back into the locker room, where his teammates hadn't even discovered him missing.

"Idiot kid's making a mockery out of this game," Bill Altus shouted when Eric scurried away to put his gear back on. "If I see him back on that field today, somebody's butt's gonna be in a sling."

Johnny couldn't help grinning at the principal's choice of threats. "Bill, you let the kid walk the last time he caused trouble. You can't blame him for thinking he's invincible. He really didn't think he'd get punished."

"Well, he damn well will this time. The newspapers got pictures of that, for God's sake! They'll be talking about it all over town."

Seeing that it was almost time for his team to go back onto the field, Johnny gave the order for them to leave the locker room. Only Eric lagged behind.

"That's a three-day suspension for you, Eric," Altus yelled across the room to the boy who was hurrying to get his shoulder pads back on. "Starting now. You might as well pack up and go home."

The huge boy gave the principal an astonished look. "But the game!" Eric cried. "Come on, Mr. Altus. It was just a joke. Everybody's doin' it. It's the last season game, and I just wanted to give 'em somethin' to remember."

"Oh, they'll remember it, all right," Altus said. "And so will I."

Eric turned his pleading eyes to Johnny, as if he knew the coach to be his ally. "Coach, there are scouts out there. I have to play this game! If I don't, I might not get a scholarship-"

"What's the matter, Eric?" Johnny asked, his eyes suddenly sobering. "You afraid this suspension might mess up your future, like it did Mark's?"

Eric's pale cheeks flushed as if he'd been slapped, and he jerked off his shoulder pads and flung them across the room. They landed on a bench with a crash. "So that's what this is about?"

"No," Altus said, waving a finger at him. "This is about you streaking across the football field in front of two thousand people! Now leave that gear here and get the hell home before I take you there myself!"

Leaving Eric to brood in the locker room-and hoping he didn't do it any serious damage in his rage-Johnny went back out to the field to join his team. He glanced at the Scoreboard, hoping it had miraculously changed during halftime. But it still said Visitor 36 Home 0. If only Eric had harnessed some of that decadent energy to run a couple of touchdowns, he thought. With or without clothes...Johnny wouldn't have minded. He felt the life draining out of his team, though the crowd seemed to be rejuvenated by the halftime event, and he wished to God that he didn't have to send his team out there with a fourth of them missing. If he'd been fully equipped, he could have brought them the first undefeated season in their history.

He watched the other team kick off, and his team caught the ball and promptly fumbled it. Without missing a beat, the opposing team recovered the ball and ran forty yards before anyone stopped them. "Damn!" Johnny whispered, turning away from the field. He looked up into the stands and drew in a breath when he saw Carrie Hunter standing in the aisle, her hands full of fliers.

She turned around and their eyes met. She looked at him without a smile, and something told him she wasn't too happy with him. Was it because he'd been rude to her brother? he wondered. Or had she just thought better of their burgeoning relationship now that they'd spent some time apart?

Hating himself for falling so hard for her, thus putting himself at her mercy, he forced his mind back to the game, and his spirits sank even further.

CARRIE HATED ADMITTING IT to herself, but she hadn't really come to the game to hand out fliers with the students in her junior ARM club, who could have done fine without her. She hadn't even come to root for the home team. She had really come to see if the girl she'd seen Johnny with last night showed up at the game.

The game seemed to run on par with the rest of the world that day, for Johnny's team, minus the black players who maintained their boycott, as well as Eric Idiemore, who hadn't returned to the field since his little scene at half time, lost 42 to 0, ruining their undefeated record. As the disappointed crowd dispersed, Carrie stood at the bottom of the bleachers, handing out ARM fliers as the stream of people flowed past.

The wind was brisk and cool, a fresh late-November breeze, and she shivered as she picked him out among the team members slumping off the field. She saw his lifeless eyes-tired, bloodshot eyes that she was sure he deserved for getting so drunk and spending the night with some woman he probably picked up in a bar-scan the stands looking for someone.

When they found her, she held her breath and prayed that he wouldn't look past her and find the brunette who had come home with him last night.

Instead, he stopped in his tracks, said something to Norman, then came through the gate to the stands and headed toward her.

Clutching her fliers to her chest like a shield, she waited for him to reach her. "Tough break," she said, nodding toward the field.

"Yeah," he said. "It's hard winning a game when you don't have a full team."

"Tough coaching when you're nursing a hangover, too, huh?"

Johnny cut a grin and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. "How did you know about that?"

"I heard you come home last night," she said, not returning his smile. "So did everybody else in the complex."

Johnny squared his lips. "Yeah. Sorry about that."

She felt her lips trembling, her heart quivering, and tears stung the backs of her eyes at his flippancy. "So..." she began, knowing that she'd hate herself, but unable to keep from asking. "Was she an old flame or someone you picked up in a bar?"

Johnny's eyebrows came together in genuine confusion. "Who?"

"The woman you were with last night. The one butchering 'Henry the Eighth' with you."

A sheepish grin stretched across Johnny's face, and he cocked his head and set his hands on her waist, pulling her closer. "So that's why you're so mad at me. I thought I was getting some pretty vicious looks down on the field."

"You think this is funny?"

His smile didn't falter. "Carrie, that was no woman last night. That was Meg."

His feigned innocence only insulted her. "Meg?" Carrie repeated through her teeth. "If she wasn't a woman, she was doing a good job of impersonating one."

He actually had the nerve to laugh. "She is a woman, of course. But... Meg is my sister."

"Your sister?" she repeated. "The woman you came home drunk with last night, the woman who was singing with you at the top of her lungs... ?"

He slipped his arms more completely around her and pressed his forehead to hers, without regard to anyone who might see. "The woman who put me to bed and forced me to listen to Conway Twitty singing 'Hello Darlin" for three hours was my sister."

Embarrassment waged war with anger on Carrie's face, leaving her feeling silly and petty. "Damn you," she said, jerking out of his arms and starting away from him.

"Damn me?" he asked. "What for? For getting drunk with my sister?"

"No!" she said. "For making me think-"

"What?" He grabbed her arm and stopped her retreat. The satisfied grin on his face only agitated her more. "Go ahead, say it. For making you feel like I felt yesterday. For making you jealous!"

"I wasn't jealous!" she bit out. "I was angry."

"And why?" His impish grin faded and a serious glimmer replaced the laughter in his eyes. "I'll tell you why. Because you thought we had something going. Because what happened between us the other night meant something."

"Yes!" she shouted. "Yes, damn it!"

"All right, then." He pulled her back into his arms, pressed a kiss on her chin, and whispered, "Then I guess we're getting somewhere."

When his lips nuzzled hers, she didn't pull away. She let him coax her out of her anger, her embarrassment, her jealousy, and finally she slid her free hand to his chest, felt his heart hammering out an urgent message. She parted her lips to him and the kiss moved deeper. A hungry warmth spread through her as their bodies pressed closer, and her racing heartbeat made her dizzy.

"We shouldn't do this here," she whispered after a moment. "We could get fired."

"It would be worth it," he whispered. He smiled against her lips and groaned. "But come to think of it, Bill Altus is frothing at the mouth about Eric Idlemore right now. I don't want to give him something else to rant about. You know, he suspended Eric for three days."

Their lips touched again, and her smile matched Johnny's. "There is justice in this world."

Despite the fact that they'd just recognized the inappropriateness of their necking in the bleachers in front of anyone who wanted to see, he kissed her again, holding her even closer. Her heart ached at the prospect of letting him go, so she lifted the hand that held all her fliers and still clutching them, moved it around to his back.

Slowly, they began to slip from her grip and after a moment, she realized that half of them had fallen from her fingers and were blowing around their feet. "Uh-oh," she said.

Letting her go, Johnny bent down and gathered the fliers. He read the top one as he stood up. "'It's Their Home, Too. Amnesty for Conscientious Objectors.'" The look on his face as he looked up at her reminded her, once again, how polarized their philosophies were. "Is that what you think your brother is? A conscientious objector?"

"Of course, that's what he is," she said, taking the fliers back. "And as such, he should be protected by the law, not prosecuted."

Johnny didn't say anything to that, but she saw the disapproval in his face.

"You know," she said after a moment, "just because I turn to mush every time you kiss me doesn't mean that I forgive you for being rude to Brian last night. He wasn't rude to you."

Johnny shrugged and looked toward the field, cluttered now with empty soda cups, confetti, popcorn and streamers left by the crowd as they'd cut across it. "Carrie, I have a real hard time being a fake. I can't pretend to feel things I don't feel."

"I'm not asking you to be fake," she whispered. "But he's my twin brother. Do you know how close we are?"

He brought his soft gaze back to her. "Just because I'm crazy about you doesn't mean I have to be crazy about him. If that's what you expect, then we have a real problem."

She stepped back from him, angry at the fluttering in her heart over his professing to be crazy about her when her head told her she should be angry for his slighting her brother. "I don't expect that," she said. "I've been around enough to know that nothing's that simple."

"Good." He picked up her hand, tugged her closer.

"Good." A slow smile skittered across her lips, and she whispered, "So you're really crazy about me?"

"Bonkers," he admitted. "And if I don't get some time alone with you soon, they're going to have to put me away. How about tonight?"

She shook her head. "I need to go check on Mom and pick up Brian from the hospital. He had to return his rental car today."

"Brian," he said. "Right." He averted his eyes, reminding himself of all the people, all the beliefs, all the ghosts they had between them. "Then he'll be staying at your place tonight?"

"I'm sorry, Johnny," she said. "I'd really like to be with you, too."

He grinned again and clasped his hands behind her back. "You know, there's always my place."

She looked into his eyes for a moment, considering the possibility of abandoning Brian tonight. Would her brother understand? The idea that he wouldn't seemed too remote, for Johnny's embrace made anything seem possible. "Maybe," she whispered. "We'll see."

He stepped back and threw his hand over his heart. "I can't believe it. I actually got a maybe."

"And a we'll see," she reminded him.

"You know, where I come from, that almost always means yes."

She bit her bottom lip and smiled. "It could be pretty late, you know."

He took her hand and lifted it to his mouth, pressed a kiss on the palm of her hand. "That's okay," he said. "We have all night. So do I hear a yes?"

She swallowed and wondered why she suddenly found it so hard to breathe. That dizziness threatening her rationale swept over her, and she heard herself whispering, "Yes."

"Yes," he repeated with a smile that etched itself on her heart. "She said yes."

Reluctantly, he let her go and looked toward the locker room, where his players waited for him to come with some encouraging words. "Well, now that that's all settled, I'd better go talk to my team. Try to salvage some of their self-respect, since they need to be up for the play-off game after Thanksgiving. It doesn't do much for their egos to get whipped when they played their guts out."

"Okay. I'll see you tonight, Johnny."

He kissed her again, then she watched him walk away, wishing from the very center of her heart that tonight wasn't so far away.

IT WAS AFTER TEN BEFORE Carrie and Brian found themselves back at her apartment, and as anxious as she was to go to Johnny, Carrie felt awkward about telling Brian. He was in a good mood tonight, for their father hadn't made any appearances at the hospital while Brian was there today, so his visit with his mother had been pleasant. He was in the mood to talk, but Carrie had other things on her mind.

After they'd been home for a half hour or more, she slipped off her bar stool across from Brian and gave him a direct look. "Bri, I thought I might step across the courtyard and say hello to Johnny."

Brian looked at his watch. "Isn't it a little late for that?"

She shrugged. "Not really. Besides... he's kind of expecting me."

"Oh."

"Oh, what?" she asked, irritated at the flat response.

"Just, oh. I guess I shouldn't wait up, then, huh?"

"No," she said, glancing away. "I might be late."

A moment of thick silence passed between them, and finally she made herself ask, "What is it, Brian? What's that look all about?"

He shook his head. "I just don't want to see you get hurt, Carrie."

She folded her arms on the bar and leaned toward him. "And why do you think Johnny would hurt me?"

"I don't know," he said. "I just met the guy last night, and he didn't seem all that warm and caring to me. You're vulnerable after Paul, and it would be easy for someone to take advantage of you."

"I may be vulnerable," she said, "but I'm not stupid. I know what I'm doing. Trust me."

He nodded and looked down at the coffee cup before him. "All right. I guess I can't protect you forever."

"If I need protecting, Bri, you're the first person I'll come to, okay?" She pressed a kiss on his cheek and he smiled.

"Give the lieutenant my regards," he said sarcastically.

She smiled and cocked her head at him. "Brian, I really like him. I wish you wouldn't make up your mind about him just yet."

He sighed and shook his head. "He made his up about me before he even met me."

She couldn't deny that what he said was true, but nothing could hinder the exhilarated anticipation swirling inside her as she headed for the door. For now, it didn't matter if the two of them got along. Tonight, Johnny was just hers.

HE OPENED THE DOOR FOR HER even before she knocked, and she smiled at the poignant, expectant look on his face as he slid his arms around her waist and pulled her into a soul-wrenching kiss that made her awkwardness flee along with her inhibitions.

She heard the door close behind her and vaguely became aware of the Righteous Brothers piping from the stereo in his living room, adding a soft ambience to the night.

"I thought you'd never get here," he whispered as he backed her against the wall and wove his fingers through her hair. "I saw your light a half hour ago."

"I wanted to come the minute I got home," she breathed, "but I couldn't."

His mouth captured hers again in a searing, stirring kiss, and she slid her hands down his back and tugged his shirt from his jeans. He took her lead and slid her own shirt over her head, leaving only his dog tags hanging between her breasts, and backed her into his bedroom.

The rest of her clothes fell with hurried grace, and Johnny pulled her against him, delighting in the feel of her bare breasts pressed against his chest and the soft curves of her hips beneath his hands. He dipped and closed his arms around her waist, lifting her as his mouth closed over one breast, suckling, and he savored the way she moaned and arched against him. She fell back onto the bed, and he fell with her, anchoring her into the soft mattress as his mouth sought hers again.

And then they were one, both in spirit and in purpose, moving toward the light that only the two of them could see-the light that stole the darkness from their souls and celebrated the joy of living.

Finally, clinging to each other for fear of shattering completely if either of them let go, they reached that light and felt it washing over them in soft, warm contentment.

They lay together afterward, tangled in the sheets of Johnny's bed, still clinging one to the other as the impact of such deep satisfaction, coupled with a yearning, lasting hunger, held them in its spell.

"Stay here with me," he entreated, stroking her hair as he held her tightly against him. "Don't leave me tonight."

She raised up on one elbow and dropped a kiss on his cheek. "I'll stay," she said.

He looked up into her green eyes, touched her face and ran his finger over her lips, down her chin, across the column of her neck, to one breast still budded and peaking at his touch. "The first time I saw you," he said, "I was stricken by your eyes. Green eyes. I love green eyes."

He lifted the dog tags from their chain, turned them over in his hand, then let them fall against her breast again.

She lowered her head against his and touched his face with a longing she didn't know how to express. A tear rolled from her eye and fell onto his cheek.

He looked at her, his eyes questioning.

"After Paul, I didn't think that I could ever feel this way again..." she whispered.

He shook his head. "I don't want to talk about him now."

"No, it's okay," she said, tracing his bottom lip with her thumb. "This is so much different. I'm different. With Paul, I was still so much of a child. But with you..."

He wiped the wetness from beneath her eyes and pulled her face back to his. He kissed her again, lowering her back to the pillow, and she felt his renewed tumescence against her, stirring her embers back to life.

This time, he made love to her slowly, with agonizing tenderness that brought tears to her eyes again. This time, he tried only to please her rather than to satisfy himself. This time, he let her know that she was forever hopelessly bound to him. That there would be no forgetting for as long as they lived.

When he fell asleep, she laid her head on his chest and held him, savoring the sound of his heartbeat beneath her ear, the feel of his breathing in her hair, the warmth of his peace in her soul.

And she realized she dreaded morning, for she didn't want to let him go.

Chapter Eleven

Monday morning, the day of Mark's test, the third day of his suspension, when the black population of the school was getting more intense about the walkout they had scheduled for later that week, Carrie and Johnny met in the corridor just as Mark's algebra class was sitting down to take their test. Knowing that either of them could lose their jobs if they were caught, they set off a smoke bomb in the hall just outside the office. Immediately, the alarm sounded and the fire department was called. Students rushed into the halls and out onto the campus lawn as the fire fighters dashed in to put out "the fire."

And Mrs. Henderson's algebra test was cancelled.

None of the faculty seemed suspicious, but Mark knew the moment his friends came by the gas station after school that day and told him what had happened that somehow Coach Malone and Ms. Hunter had been responsible. They had warned him to study, hadn't they? They had promised him that it wasn't over yet. Swearing his friends to secrecy, he told them what he suspected and before he knew it, the talk of the walkout had died down and everyone felt Mark had been vindicated.

Besides, Eric would miss the test now.

The knowledge of what had happened was enough to rig the black players back to practice that afternoon.

It was two days later on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, that Johnny saw Mark's algebra grade of B minus. Deciding to tell Carrie immediately, he went to her classroom after school and caught her preparing to leave for the hospital. He leaned against her door, not entering her room entirely, for he knew that if he got too close, he'd have to pull her into his arms and once again, compromise both their jobs.

"Mark made a B minus," he said with a smile.

He loved the way her eyes lit up when she turned and looked at him. "We did it," she said quietly, punching a victorious fist into the air.

He brought a shushing finger to his mouth. "Let's just hope word doesn't get out."

She lifted her big bag packed full of papers, set it on her desk, then started toward him. "I think we're okay. We may not have ended the Cold War, but we gave a kid a break. That, in itself, may have stopped the walkout. Bill doesn't know how lucky he is."

Johnny glanced up and down the hall, assessing whether or not it was safe to slide his arms around her. Deciding that it was, he went farther into her room and pulled her into his embrace. "It really didn't fix anything, you know," he said. "Mark's suspension is still on his record, and he still has to pass all the other tests. And even though Eric got his in the end, he still walked the first time."

She closed her eyes as he began to nuzzle her neck, and whispered, "We can't fix everything. But we did our best, and I'm pretty darn proud of us."

"We should celebrate," he said against her ear. "Tonight. I liked waking up with you Sunday."

"I almost came to you last night," she whispered. "But it's so awkward, with Brian there.

He smiled. "Come tonight. To hell with Brian."

She sighed and pressed a kiss on his eyebrow. "I don't know, Johnny."

"When's he leaving, anyway?"

Carrie stiffened a degree at the question. "When my mother is well enough," she said. "And when he does, I may not see him again for another year or two, so I'm not all that eager for him to go."

"I know." Johnny drew in a deep breath, and lowering his eyes to her blouse, he saw the outline of his dog tags tucked beneath the fabric against her breast. He touched her chin, then feathered his finger down to the metal plate. "So I guess you're going to see your mom now, huh?"

She swallowed at his intimate touch and wished they weren't standing in her classroom. "She was released this morning, but I think my dad is in for a major change in her. She spent the whole day yesterday waving a copy of The Feminine Mystique in front of his face and showing him she wasn't going to take any more guff from him. Betty Friedan would be proud. Anyway, I'm going to pick Brian up at the apartment, and then-"

"Hey, Carrie!" Sally's voice reverberated down the almost-empty corridor, and Carrie and Johnny sprang apart, dropping their hands to their sides. In seconds, Sally appeared at the doorway. "Why didn't you tell me Brian was home? I thought I'd die when Barbara called and told me!"

"Brian?" Carrie's face suffused with color and she stared dully at her friend, then threw Johnny a look of distress. "He's not home."

Sally cocked her head, unconvinced. "Don't lie to me, Carrie. Barbara said she heard it from a nurse friend at the hospital. One of Brian's ex-girlfriends. She ought to know him when she sees him."

Carrie shook her head, denying the possibility. "Sally, you tell her that Brian's in Toronto. He wanted to come home to see Mom, but he couldn't. It was someone else she saw-"

"Carrie..." Sally's expression collapsed into hurt reprobation. She crossed her arms and stared at Carrie, then Johnny, who diverted his eyes to the floor. After a moment, she gave up. "All right," she said quietly. "I guess I get the message."

"Sally..." Carrie touched her friend's arm, torn between blurting the truth and hiding it to the bitter end, but she couldn't make herself risk exposing her brother.

"It's okay, Carrie," Sally said, her face reddening. "If you don't consider me a friend anymore, I understand. If you don't want to talk to me about what's going on between the two of you, fine. I can pretend, like everybody else, that I haven't noticed the way you drool over each other every time you pass in the hall. And if you think I can't be trusted with news about Brian, I can handle that, too. After all, we've only know each other for fourteen years."

Carrie rubbed her forehead with her fingertips and closed her eyes. "I'm not trying to hide anything from you." She opened her eyes, saw the distress in Sally's and wondered if she should go ahead and tell her. "If he did come home, Sally, he could get in a lot of trouble."

"Not through me." Sally swallowed, started to say something, then turned to the door. Just before she walked out, she looked back. "You know, I would have loved to hear about you and Johnny from you. I would have loved to know that you've finally found light at the end of your tunnel. You used to tell me things like that. But back then, you trusted me with your secrets."

Carrie gave her a guilty look, then glanced uncomfortably at Johnny. "Sally, sometimes I don't even know what's going on inside me. I'm not hiding anything from you. And as for Brian, I'm really, really worried about him. You understand that, don't you?"

For a moment, Sally looked at her, as if she wondered if Carrie's words represented the slightest hint of confession. Finally, she nodded. "Yeah, I guess I do. Don't worry. I'll put the rumor to rest. At least, the one about Brian. You'll have to handle the one about you and Johnny."

Carrie watched uneasily as Sally disappeared, leaving her alone with Johnny.

He smiled. "Looks like we're an official item. I think I like that."

"What else can we expect?" she muttered. "We weren't exactly hiding it at the game the other day."

"Did you want to hide it?" he asked.

She shrugged and went back to her desk. "I don't know what I want." She reached into her drawer and withdrew her purse. "But I do know that I've got to get to Brian. I have to warn him that someone knows. Maybe I can get him back on the plane this afternoon."

She met Johnny's eyes, almost hoping he could offer her some hope, some kind of support, but he didn't. Instead, he only leaned against her desk, watching her with myriad judgments and opinions etched in the hard lines of his face.

"Johnny, don't you understand how serious this could be?"

He nodded and slid his hands into his pockets. "Yeah, I do."

"And you don't care."

He drew in a deep breath. "You know how I feel about your brother."

"Yeah, I know," she said. "You'd like nothing better than to see him in jail."

"Carrie, that's not true."

She grabbed the bag from her desk and pushed past him toward the door. "I don't have time for this, Johnny," she said. "My brother needs me right now."

Johnny didn't stop her as she went out the door.

"I'M NOT GOING." Brian's final, decisive word ignited Carrie like the smoke bomb she and Johnny had set off earlier that week.

"You have to!"

Brian shook his head, leaned back against the wall in her kitchen and tapped a fingernail on one of the silver studs lining the seam of his jeans. "I don't have to. I came here for Mom, and she's not well enough yet. Besides, Thanksgiving is tomorrow. I'm staying at least through that."

Carrie grabbed her brother's arms and shook him, staring up into his stubborn features. "Brian, it's not worth prison! Mom's only going to worry more if she knows you're taking chances. Please-"

"I said no," Brian bit out, shaking off her hands. "It'll only give Dad one more reason to think I'm a coward. I have to stay."

He grabbed her keys from the counter where she'd dropped them when she came barreling in and tossed them to Carrie. "You gonna drive me over there?"

Carrie groaned. "I guess so, Brian."

He lifted her chin with a crooked finger, making her look up at him. "Don't worry," he said. "We've known Sally and Barbara since grammar school. They won't call the fuzz on me."

"And what about that nurse you used to date?"

Brian grinned. "The girl loved me. She'd never snitch."

Carrie didn't find his flippancy amusing. "Brian, I'm serious. That's three people we know about. How many others that we haven't heard about yet? You haven't been all that careful, you know."

Brian rolled his eyes, as though her worries were entirely unfounded. "It's not like I murdered somebody, Carrie. Don't worry."

He put on his mirrored shades and opened the door.

Unable to lift her spirits as high as his, Carrie followed him out of her apartment.

CARRIE HAD NO SOONER pulled onto her parents' street than she saw the two police cars and a black sedan parked behind her father's car.

Fear blanched her face. "Oh, God-I told you! You never listen to me!"

"Turn around, Carrie," Brian said, pointing to an empty driveway several houses from their parents'. She whipped the VW in, knocked the stick shift in reverse and pulled back into the street.

"What are we gonna do?" she asked when she had merged back onto the main stretch.

"Correction. What are you gonna do?"

She stole a look at him, saw the way his face had paled. He rubbed his beard roughly, then dropped his forehead to his palm. "You're going to drop me off somewhere and go back there-innocently-and find out what the hell they know." He bit his lip and slammed his hand on the dashboard with a vicious curse. "S.O.B.s are probably scaring Mom into another coronary."

Carrie scanned the busy street for a neutral place where Brian would be safe until she came back. "How about that diner?" she asked, pointing to the small restaurant whose parking lot was filled with cars. "It's crowded, so you could get lost in there. No one would suspect you."

"Damn it, I'm not a criminal!" he said. "I shouldn't be chased down like some kind of dope dealer." He rounded on her suddenly, his eyes raging. "Who did this? Sally? Barbara?"

"Or Dad," Carrie said through her teeth. "He was so dead sure you were going to get caught."

"No, he wouldn't do that... would he?" Brian laid his head back against the seat. "Well, even if he didn't, he sure as hell won't cover for me. They've probably got the airport and the state lines staked out by now."

"I told you," she repeated.

Brian slammed his hand against the dashboard again. "Will you please stop saying that? Damn, you're acting like I invited this!"

"You shouldn't have come home!"

"But I did!" he shouted. "And I'm here and that's all there is to it."

"Stop yelling at me!" Carrie jerked her car into a parking space and looked over at her brother, her lips compressed in an angry line.

"You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it was that boyfriend of yours who turned me in."

"Johnny wouldn't do that!"

"Oh, wouldn't he? He couldn't even shake my hand when I met him, Carrie. The man would have spit on me if you hadn't been in the room."

"Get with it, Brian," Carrie said. "That's not true and you know it."

"Hey, I don't know anything. You're the one who's sleeping with him!"

Raging silence passed between them, and Carrie stared at her brother, unable to believe that they had come to this. Her eyes filled with tears, and she folded her arms over the steering wheel and dropped her head on them.

He set his hand on her shoulder, gave a tight squeeze. "I'm sorry. Neither of us is taking this very well."

She lifted her head and wiped her eyes. "This stinks, you know it? It's not fair."

"You're telling me."

Carrie sucked in a cleansing breath and checked her eyes in the mirror. Her mascara was smeared, and she wiped it away. "I'll find out how much they know, Brian, but when I come back, I'm getting you out of here, and I don't want any arguments from you. If they catch you, you'll go to prison."

"I know that." Brian's voice was barely audible. He got out of the small car and bent down to look back through the door. "Be careful, sis. I don't want you going to jail, too."

"I will. I promise."

She watched him disappear into the diner, then backed out of the parking place, turned the car around and headed back to her parents' house. In less than ten minutes, she was on their street. The police cars were still there.

Just act naturally, she told herself, trying to steady the trembling in her hands. If Brian weren't in trouble, and you saw police cars in the driveway, how would you act? She'd be worried, she answered herself. She'd be worried, anxious to find out what was going on. That was easy enough, for the worry was eating a hole right through her heart.

Forcing herself to hold together, she got out of her car, went to the door and pushed it open without knocking. Her father looked up at her, his face as hard and guarded as it had been the last few times she had seen him. She glanced around the room, at the two uniformed and one plain-clothes officers who came to their feet as she walked in.

Bradley eyed the door behind her, as if expecting Brian to come in with her. When she closed it, he seemed to wilt.

Disappointed, Dad? she wanted to ask. Instead, she cleared her throat. Her voice was hoarse and shaky as she asked, "What's wrong? Where's Mom?"

"Your mother's sleeping," her father said. "But sit down. Mr. Abernathy here is with the FBI, and he wants to talk to you about Brian."

Her cheeks stung, but she hoped they couldn't tell in the dim light. She sat down and fixed seething eyes on her father, warning him that she'd never forgive him if he led these men to Brian.

"What about Brian?" she asked cautiously. "He's all right, isn't he?"

"We have information that he's back in town," the plainclothesman, the one who seemed in charge, replied. "That he's been staying here."

"Over my dead body," her father muttered, and Carrie flashed her eyes to his. He came to his feet and paced across the room, then propped his elbow on the mantel and looked at the family portrait hanging above it. They'd had it made when she and Brian were both twelve, when he still wore braces on his teeth, when he still had his hair cut in a barber shop, when he was still someone her father took pride in.

"I disowned him the day he deserted," Bradley said truthfully, "and even if he did have the guts to come back here, which he doesn't, he would never be welcome back under this roof."

Carrie's lips trembled and tears filled her eyes. She hated him, she thought. She really hated him.

"It's been two years since he tucked his tail between his legs and ran," her father went on, turning back to the two policemen and the agent, who watched him as if they could see right through him to the bitterness in his heart.

Carrie's tears won their battle over her, and she sprang to her feet. Her eyes locked with his, and she opened her mouth to scream something at him...something that would hurt him as much as he had hurt Brian.

But before the words had formed, her father added, "And that's the last any of us has seen him. Isn't that right, Carrie?"

Her heart lurched at the unexpected lie, and she gaped at him, unable to answer.

They waited-all of them-for her to say something.

After a moment, her father spoke again. "My daughter doesn't think a lot of me for the way I feel about him. He's her twin, after all."

Again their eyes were on her, and this time she recovered and cleared her throat. "Uh...I've spoken to Brian by phone...last week after my mother's heart attack...but there's no way he'd ever come back here."

The man dressed more like a mortician than an FBI agent jotted something on his notepad and stood up. Like puppets, the other two followed. "You realize, don't you, that harboring a fugitive is a crime?" he asked Carrie.

She looked at her father, saw him turn back to the portrait. "Of course, I realize that," she said. "I love my brother, and I'd give anything to get him back here. Legally. But he's not here now."

They didn't believe her. She saw it in their disgruntled faces as they started for the door. She heard it in their dull voices as they warned her father to contact them if he heard from Brian.

She waited at the door until their cars had all pulled out of sight before she released her breath and turned back to her father. His face was drawn, aged, exhausted from the effort it had taken to cover for his son.

"You lied for him."

Bradley Hunter rubbed his eyes, leaving them red. "He'll get caught anyway."

"But not because of you." Somehow, that knowledge made it all a little easier to bear.

"No, not because of me," he said. "Because of him. Because he came home, when he knew what would happen. Because he ran away in the first place... and put us all through this..."

Those tears burst back into Carrie's eyes, and she told herself she couldn't expect more from her father. He had taken a step. That was enough. She went closer to him, stood on her toes and pressed a kiss on his cheek.

She started out the door, but he stopped her. "Make sure they don't tail you," he said quietly. "If the president of the United States will bug a psychiatrist's office, then there's no telling what the FBI might do. And I don't want my son in jail."

Carrie nodded, offered her father a weak smile and went back to her car.

JOHNNY STABBED AT THE baked potato in his oven and cursed when he found it was still hard in the middle. Maybe he hadn't set the temperature high enough, but after an hour, he had expected it to be done.

A puff of heat scathed his face as he closed the oven door, and he jumped back and cursed again.

The doorbell rang, and throwing the dishtowel he'd used as a pot holder over his shoulder, he opened it.

Carrie stood before him, a look of terror in her red eyes.

"Carrie. What's wrong?"

"Johnny, you've got to help me," she said. "I don't know where else to turn."

Johnny pulled her into the apartment and closed the door. "Anything. Just tell me."

"It's Brian." She went to his window and peered past the courtyard to the parking lot beyond her apartment. "The police and some FBI agent were at my parents' looking for him. Brian's waiting for me right now, but I'm afraid they're following me. If I go, I'll lead them straight to him."

Motionless, Johnny looked at her for a moment, weighing his distaste for the whole affair against the despair he saw on her face.

She turned back to him, her eyes alive and fire bright. "Johnny, I know how you feel about Brian, but he's my brother. He doesn't deserve to stand trial or serve prison time for following his conscience."

Johnny pulled the dishtowel off his shoulder, slammed it on the counter. For a moment, he stared at it, then finally moved his eyes back to Carrie. "If I helped," he said grimly, "it would be for you. Not for him."

"Then do it for me," she pleaded.

He pulled her into his arms, crushing her against him. Her trembling cut through to his heart and he knew he had no choice. "What do you want me to do?"

"Go to the diner where he's waiting. Then meet me at the mall at the south entrance of Macy's."

"Then what?" Johnny asked.

"I don't know," she said, her voice cracking with emotion. "I have to hide him until we can figure out a way to get him back to Toronto." She hauled in a deep breath and arched her eyebrows. "Will you do it, Johnny?"

He wiped the dampness from her cheek with the back of his finger. "Why not? I figure we've already been partners in crime once. Might as well go for broke."

And as he got his jacket and prepared to go where she told him, Johnny wondered if there was anything he could deny her. All she really had to do was ask.

THE DINER WAS FILLED with noise and a thin cloud of cigarette smoke, and a corner juke box blared out "Crocodile Rock." Johnny stood in the entryway, scanning the tables for Carrie's brother, knowing that when he saw him, he wouldn't even try to hide the disgust he harbored in his heart. It wasn't for Brian he was here, he reminded himself to keep from turning and leaving without accomplishing his mission. It was for Carrie.

He saw the back of a blond Afro in a corner booth, and deciding that was Brian, started between the tables that were packed too closely together. As he grew closer, he saw Brian look at his watch, then scratch at his beard as he moved his gaze to the window that looked out on the parking lot.

That's right. Sweat it out a little, Johnny thought. See what it's like to feel the heat beating down on you.

He reached the table and Brian looked up at him, cautious recognition altering the worry in his eyes. "What are you doing here?"

Johnny slipped uninvited into the booth and leaned back, glancing around at the diners oblivious of the crises others suffered in the world. He almost envied them. "Your sister sent me."

"Why?" The emphasis Brian placed on the question was almost amusing.

"Because she's trying to save your ass."

"And she thinks you can do it?" Brian asked bitterly.

"Hey, I'm just doing her a favor. If you can't live with that, it's your problem. Go to prison. As a matter of fact, go to hell."

Johnny started to slide out of the booth, but Brian caught his arm. Johnny jerked it free and waited.

"Sit down," Brian said quietly. "Tell me what's going on."

Reluctantly, Johnny sat back down and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Idly, he shook one out. "She said the cops were looking for you. They know you're in town."

"How do they know?" Brian asked. "Who told them?"

Johnny removed the cigarette from his mouth and gave Brian a look of abhorrence. "Hey, man. I told you, I'm just delivering a message and doing a friend a favor. Do I look like I have all the answers?"

"Yeah," Brian quipped. "Maybe you do."

Johnny leaned forward on the table and narrowed his eyes. "Are you accusing me of turning you in?"

"That depends," Brian said, not backing down an inch from Johnny's threatening glare. "Did you?"

Johnny put the cigarette back in his mouth, lit it and considered Brian through the smoke. "If I'd done it, pal, don't you think I would have brought them here with me? You think I'd be sneaking around trying to help you weasel out of this?"

Brian dropped his face in his construction-scarred hands. "Oh, God. Just go. Get the hell out of here. I'll figure my own way out of this."

"Yeah, and meanwhile Carrie will cry her eyes out and hate both of us for not trying harder." He tore the cigarette from his mouth with scissored fingers and blew out a stream of smoke to the side. "Have you ever seen your sister cry, man? Do you have any idea what it does to a person to see that kind of thing?"

"Of course, I've seen it," Brian said. "She's my twin sister. We grew up together."

"I know it," Johnny said, tapping the cigarette in an ashtray. "But she puts on a strong front for you. I'm talking about her other side. The side that's breakable. She came to me that way today, and that's why I agreed to help."

Brian extracted a frustrated breath and shook his head with defeated resignation. "All right. What did she tell you to do?"

"She told me to take you to meet her. She's afraid of being followed, so she wants you to meet her in the mall parking lot." He dropped the lighter back in his pocket. "What's beyond me, though, is how she thinks that's going to divert the heat if they really are tailing her. They'll see you the minute you get into her car."

"So?" Brian asked. "You got a better idea?"

Johnny cocked his head and settled his thoughtful eyes on the man across from him. "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I think I do. Question is, are you willing to let me help you?"

Brian's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Why would you do that?"

"Because I'm in love with your sister, man. And I don't want to see her fall apart when you get busted." Johnny picked up the cigarette, took a long drag and blew out the smoke. "So are you with me or not?"

Brian considered his answer for a long moment before he spoke. "Given the choice between a prison term and you, I'd say it's a toss-up. But I guess you win."

"Carrie wins," Johnny corrected. "Maybe that makes us both losers."

CARRIE PACED AT THE south entrance of Macy's, watching the parking lot through the glass for some sign of Johnny. It was taking too long, she thought. Way too long.

She checked her watch, then scanned the parking lot again. What if it had been a mistake to send Johnny? What if he'd started a fight with Brian, attracted attention and gotten them both arrested?

The absurdity of that calmed her for a moment, for she knew it was unlikely, but then new fears tore at her mind. Brian might have made Johnny mad. He could be stubborn and incorrigible, and she doubted Johnny would have much patience for that. Not when he compromised his principles just by being involved.

His principles. Her heart thudded in her chest as it occurred to her that she didn't know just how far his principles might carry him. He'd experienced the worst kinds of human horror, and his feelings toward Brian for running from them might even be more bitter than he'd admitted. He had come right out and said that it was guys like Brian who'd left him holding the bag. What if he had decided to turn the tables?

Someone walked up behind her and she swung around. Johnny stood there absolutely alone. Her heart sank.

"Where is he?" she demanded. "You didn't leave him there, did you?"

"Take it easy," he said, his voice sharp with irritation. "He's in the car. I parked on the other side of the mall, just in case you were followed."

"Oh." Shame burst through her that she could ever have doubted him, and she dropped her head against his chest. It took so long. I thought-"

"That I had let you down?" His voice flattened and he took her shoulders and pulled her away from him. "That maybe I decided to take justice into my own hands?"

"No, not that," she lied. "I just...I imagined all sorts of things." She straightened and took his hand.

He withdrew it and slid it into the pocket of his windbreaker. "I can't believe after all that's happened between us, you could really think that I'd do something like that." He looked away from her, his expression guarded, angry.

"Johnny, I didn't really think it. I've just been going crazy, standing here waiting for so long." She touched his face, wishing she could drive away that pain, wishing she had never put it there in the first place. "I really appreciate what you've done. You don't know how much it means to me."

He looked at his feet, struggling with his anger, and she knew that it would take much more than an apology to set things right. "I won't ask any more of you," she said quietly. "I've got a plan. I'm going to drive him to Canada."

"You're what?" Johnny turned his irritated eyes back to her. "Are you crazy?"

"Probably," she said. "But I can do it."

Roughly, Johnny pulled her away from the door and behind a rack of Hang Ten T-shirts where no one could overhear. "Carrie, the gas lines are a mile long. If you managed to get enough to get you to Canada-and there aren't any assurances that you could find places to fill up along the way-those tires on your car wouldn't make it. Not to mention the fact that your transmission would probably lie down and die halfway there."

"I have to try," Carrie insisted. "I can do it."

Johnny shook her gently, forcing her to listen. "Carrie, I have another plan. A better one. My sister and I have a lake house about a hundred and twenty miles from here. We can be there in a couple of hours. Before you go off half-cocked and attempt something you haven't thought out well enough, let me take you and Brian there. It'll give us a day or two to think, and maybe we can figure out a way to get him out of here."

She regarded him with disbelief and poignant surprise, and touched his arms.

"You hate him," she whispered. "And right now you're not exactly thrilled with me. Why would you do that?"

Johnny shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. "Considering that five minutes ago you thought I had turned on you, I really don't know. My first instinct is to say to hell with you, but then I'd have to deal with the idea of your sitting on the side of the road in a busted VW, somewhere between here and Canada."

Tears came to her eyes, and she hated herself for hurting him. "Johnny..."

"Don't say it, Carrie. Some things can't be smoothed over with words."

He started walking, and Carrie wiped her eyes, cursed herself, then caught up with him. And she told herself that she would make it up to him. But first she had to deal with Brian.

THE TRIP TO THE LAKE HOUSE was unbearably quiet as the tension in Johnny's Malibu radiated between them. No matter what Johnny's motives for helping Brian, he wasn't hiding the contempt he felt for him... or Carrie, for that matter. And despite Brian's willingness to accept the help Johnny offered, his disdain for the situation was clear, as well.

Carrie kept looking over her shoulder as they drove, measuring the headlights of the cars behind them in the darkness, trying to gauge whether or not some FBI car was on their tail. It all seemed so ludicrous, she thought. Here they were, people who had followed their consciences all their lives, hiding out from the FBI like partners in a crime ring.

But as soon as Johnny turned off the main road, it became apparent that no one followed them. They wound through the trees on a road wide enough for only one car, and she glanced over to see Johnny's somber face, dimly illuminated by the lighted control panel on his dashboard. He was still hurt that she'd doubted him, so she reached over and took his hand.

He moved it to the steering wheel.

Accepting the rejection quietly, she folded her hands back in her lap and settled her remorseful eyes on him. "Are we almost there?"

"Yep." The clipped answer sent a shiver through her and she shook her head mutely.

She glanced to the back seat where Brian sat with his head laid back against the seat. His eyes were closed, but she doubted he was asleep.

The lake came into view, a small man-made reservoir glistening in the moonlight. The house, set back in a grove of trees, was small and run-down, but it looked promising.

Johnny pulled in front of it, cut off the engine and opened his door. The dome light flashed on, its unwelcome light illuminating them all. "Don't expect much," he said. "I haven't been here for a few months, so it's probably pretty dusty."

"It's fine." Carrie threw a hopeful look over her shoulder to her brother. "Isn't it, Bri?"

"Yeah," Brian muttered. "It's fine."

Johnny got out of the car, and Carrie grabbed the handbag she'd packed with a change of clothes and slipped out her door as a brisk wind whipped through her hair and made her shiver. She pulled up the seat for Brian to slip out.

"There's some canned food in the cabinets that I left when I was here," Johnny said. "At least we won't starve."

He unlocked the door, pushed it open. Flicking a light switch just inside, he illuminated the dusty bulb in the center of the room.

Carrie came in behind him and saw the double bed made up in the corner, the tiny kitchen area, a table and chairs, a portable radio plugged in on the counter. "It's perfect," she whispered.

Brian closed the door behind them and peered out the window at the peace and tranquility of the lake, his eyes scanning the landscape in expectation of some intruder with a flashing blue light.

Johnny opened the cabinet and withdrew a can of coffee. Bending over, he pulled the percolator out of the bottom cupboard. "I'll make some coffee," he said. "Then we can try to wipe up some of this dust."

"Then what?" Brian's words, uttered not with animosity but genuine confusion, made both Carrie and Johnny turn around.

Johnny's eyes were weary and hard when he answered. "Then we try and make it through the night. I can't promise you that by morning I can beam you back to Canada. But at least you're safe here tonight."

Brian's shoulders dropped as he let out a deep, ragged breath.

Carrie touched Johnny's arm, but he didn't look at her. "Thanks, Johnny," she whispered.

Johnny only shrugged away from her and went back to making the coffee.

ON THE RADIO, PAUL RODGERS sang "All Right Now," but things didn't seem all right. Johnny had hardly looked at Carrie all night, and the only words that had been exchanged were those that couldn't be avoided. The strain on Brian's face revealed the fact that he was nearing an explosion, and Johnny's brusque attitude didn't help matters.

The temperature had dropped unexpectedly, and a small fire crackled in the fireplace, offering a circle of warmth in which they all were forced to sit, quietly eating the popcorn Carrie had made after their sparse meal of pork and beans. The hours they'd spent together, trying to be cordial without being friendly, trying to get by without getting along, had taken their toll on them all. Tension strained like thin lifelines between them, and they sat on the floor in a triangle: the warrior, the deserter and the woman they both loved.

From outside came a high-pitched sound, as if something had been scraped against the cabin. Carrie shoved a strand of tawny hair back over her shoulder and gazed at the door, her green eyes round and wide as she strained to listen. "What was that?" she asked.

Brian strode toward the door to peer out the window, the leather soles of his moccasins making a shuffling sound on the floor.

"It's the wind," Johnny told Brian, propping his elbow on his bent knee and chewing a pine needle he'd torn from the branch of a tree. "They won't look for you here. Don't be so damned paranoid."

Brian pulled down the shade and gave Johnny a wooden look. "That's easy for you to say. It's not you they're after." He turned his back to the door and pushed his fingers through his Afro. "You don't know what it's like to be caged in."

Johnny leaned back on the wall behind him and shook his head, abysmal weariness deepening the lines on his face. "That's right," he said. "I only know what it's like to spend Thanksgiving in a foxhole with VC taking my men out one at a time. You got it rough, pal."

"Johnny..."

Johnny shot Carrie a daggerous look, and Brian stepped toward him. "You've got some kind of martyr complex, you know it? And I'm getting sick and tired of your sanctimonious attitude about what I am. It was your idea to bring me here."

"Maybe I should have done what Carrie thought I did," Johnny said, his face reddening. "Maybe I should have let you fend for yourself."

"Johnny, don't..." She touched his back, but Johnny only stiffened.

"You think he would have made it another day?" he asked her. "A man who's never really had to face up to anything in his life? A man whose greatest accomplishment is that he managed to go AWOL and not get caught before he crossed the border?"

Brian's murderous eyes swept across the room. "Hey, you made the choice to go to war!" he shouted. Even in the dim light, Carrie could see his face growing ruddier above his beard and his eyes glistening with hatred and conviction. "You had the same choices I had-"

"Yeah, and I chose to be a man and do what I had to do! I didn't haul ass like you did."

"Stop it!" Carrie screamed. "Both of you. Just stop it!"

Johnny stood up and turned his embittered eyes to her, saw the tears threatening to spill. He hated Brian for putting her through this and himself for adding to it. And in some wounded corner of his heart, he almost hated her, too. But the edges of that emotion were blurry, and they faded and blended into other feelings he wasn't prepared to confess. Not now. Not here.

Brian kept staring at him, his lips stretched taut as barely suppressed rage burned in his eyes. "You're a real big hero, aren't you, Johnny?" he taunted, his voice quiet, but rippling with emotion. "Look where it all got you. Does the big hero feel good about who he is and where he's been? Can he sleep at night without ghosts ripping him apart?"

The insightful words cut a trench through the hollow of Johnny's soul and clenching his teeth, he looked down at Carrie, his dejected eyes accusing her. "You told him about my nightmares? You told him that?"

She started to defend herself, her reasons for telling Brian, but Johnny didn't wait for her answer. He would explode, he thought, if he had to stand there and hear why she had told her brother his deepest secrets.

"You told him," he whispered through his teeth.

She reached out to him but he jerked away and headed for the door. It slammed behind him, shaking the small house, his heart and the very foundation of what he felt for her.

It wasn't more than a moment before the door opened again and Carrie stepped out into the night, Johnny's windbreaker draped over her arm. She approached him timidly and offered him his jacket. "It's cold," she whispered. "Put this on."

He took it, but made no move to put it on. The leaves on the oak tree above their heads rustled, and the sound of the wind lapping the water against its bank made the night seem more at peace than it really was.

They stood there quietly in the frosty breeze, neither saying a word. Despite his need not to, he looked at her, his jaw locked in pain.

Two tears rolled down her cheek, and she wiped them away. Her eyes were soft and pleading as she gazed up at him. "I told him because I wanted him to understand how hard it was for you," she whispered. "You're both caged in. You're both suffering. Can't you see how alike you are?"

"God!" Johnny's shout echoed over the water, and he lifted his fists, as if to strike out at some invisible force in the air. Frustrated, he dropped them to his sides, wadding the jacket in his hands. "We're nothing alike," he said, settling his eyes on her with livid, fiery certainty. "Not one damn bit! And the only reason I didn't turn him in myself the first time I laid eyes on him-is that I love you, Carrie! I love you!"

Carrie sucked in a sob and covered her mouth with her hand. More tears rolled down her cheeks and her face twisted in boundless pain. "I love you, too, Johnny," she whispered.

Her answer-so unexpected, so unreluctant and so sad-doused his anger, turned it inward and made him hate himself even more. It wasn't supposed to come out like that, he thought. Not for the first time. Not in anger.

He ground his teeth together and settled his softening, misty eyes on her. The corners of his mouth trembled as he tried to speak. "Damn it, I didn't-"

His voice broke off, a shredded wisp of sound, and he lifted his hand and stroked his fingers through the silky strands of her hair, laying his forehead gently against hers. Swallowing, he tried again. "I didn't mean to yell it like that the first time I told you," he said. "And I didn't imagine seeing tears in your eyes when I finally did. And I sure as hell wanted to give you something more than heartache for Thanksgiving."

He pulled her against his chest, felt the emotion shaking out of her, and buried his face in her cold hair.

Carrie looked up at him. With trembling hands, she wiped away her tears and drew in a cleansing breath. "When you hurt each other, you hurt me," she said. "Brian's a part of me. I believe in what he did. It was the only thing he could do. I fought tooth and nail to convince him not to go to Vietnam, and I thank God every day that he didn't."

Defeated, Johnny dropped his hands to his sides, letting her go, but staring at her with despair and frustration. Where did that leave him? he thought. Right back where they'd started? On different sides of a value that no one could define? But Carrie went on.

"But that doesn't mean that you were wrong, either," she said. "My understanding of his decision doesn't invalidate my understanding of yours. It's taken me a long time to admit it, Johnny, but I know you did the only thing you could do, too. You saved lives and you fought with honor because you believed in that uniform you were wearing. I know you are a hero, regardless of whether Brian or anybody else can see it."

Moonlight glistened off the mist in Johnny's eyes as he gazed down at her. She took his hand, dropped a kiss on his scarred knuckle and held it to her heart. This time he didn't pull away.

"Johnny, for the last two Thanksgivings, Brian has been alone in Toronto, you've been fighting to survive, and I've been wallowing so deep in grief and anger over Paul that I couldn't think of one thing to be thankful for. Well, damn it, I have a lot to be thankful for tonight. We're all here, together, and I've seen enough to know that it probably won't ever happen again."

"So what do you want us to do?" Johnny asked quietly. "Pretend like we're long-lost buddies and start a game of poker?"

"No," Carrie said. "I want you to treat each other with the same tolerance and respect that you expect from others. You don't want to be judged? Then don't judge Brian."

Johnny turned back to the lake and leaned an elbow against the trunk of the tree whose shadow mottled the moonlit surface of the water. The air smelled of chimney smoke, and it reminded him of the last time he'd been here with his whole family...before his father died...and his mother... probably the last time he'd ever felt truly peaceful in his life.

Carrie took his jacket out of his hand and set it over his broad shoulders. "Wear it, Johnny," she whispered. "I don't want you to get sick."

He slipped his arms into the sleeves, then frowning, reached down to the front of her open coat and began to button it;

Her eyes held back a well of tears as she smiled up at him. "I really do love you, Johnny."

He wet his lips and pulled her into his arms. "And I really do love you," he whispered, his words lingering like a cloud on the frigid night air. "I love you more than I dislike him."

The wind picked up, whipping the chill around them as they clung to each other, and Carrie pressed a kiss on his chin.

"Then try to understand him," she entreated. "Just a, little. For me."

He buried his face in her hair and crushed her against him, holding her with an almost desperate grip. "I'll do my best," he whispered.

"That's enough."

THE KING BISCUIT FLOWER HOUR featured Carly Simon's You're So Vain album later that night, and listening to it, Carrie drifted into a sound sleep, curled beneath an old quilt on the double bed. Brian sat across the room, staring out the window at the lake, and Johnny hunched near the fire, whittling an old piece of pine he'd found outside.

Neither spoke, for enough had been said. And neither wanted to disturb Carrie, since she was likely to be the only one who slept that night.

The wood began to burn low, and Johnny tossed the last log on, threw in the piece he'd been chiseling and stood up, dusting the splinters off of his jeans. He'd have to chop more wood, he thought, but it was too cold to go out with just his windbreaker. Quietly, he went to the closet, looking for the military parka he'd left there with his uniforms. The sight of them all hanging there like forgotten corpses, his boots neatly standing in the corner, his gear stacked on the shelf overhead, made the knot in his stomach tighten. Idly, he glanced down at the civilian clothes he hadn't even gotten that comfortable in yet and scoffed at the jeans, the flannel shirt, the desert boots. Grabbing the parka and shrugging it on, he went across the floor and opened the door. "I'm going to chop some wood," he said, not looking at Brian as he slipped out.

The air was cold, around thirty-five, he guessed, and he felt his skin chapping as the night-dampened wind whipped through his clothes. He found the old rusty ax hanging on the porch and went out to the woodpile where too-big chunks of logs lay waiting to be split. He had cut them when he'd been here in August, thinking he would spend a lot of time here this winter.

He positioned the wood on its end and raised the ax. The dry wood split quickly, and the force of physical exertion felt good.

Behind him, the door to the house opened, spilling a triangle of light into the darkness. The light disappeared and he looked over his shoulder and saw Brian coming toward him. Setting his mouth in a hard line, Johnny swung the ax again and again.

Brian had nothing to say. Standing in the cold in only his shirt, he bent over and began stacking the split pieces of firewood Johnny had cut. Accepting his help, Johnny dropped the ax and retrieved another log. When he turned back around, Brian was holding the ax.

"I'll chop this time." Brian's breath made a misty cloud in the night, and Johnny nodded.

They kept chopping long after there was need to, and when they had built a stack that would last the entire weekend-and then some-Brian leaned on the ax handle, his breath expelling puffs in the cold.

"I'm leaving before Carrie wakes up," he said.

Johnny only stared at him in the darkness, wondering if Brian expected him to talk him into staying. What did he care, after all, if the man disappeared into the night?

Finally, when Brian didn't volunteer more, Johnny made himself ask, "Where are you going?"

"Back to Toronto, or to jail, whichever comes first." He heaved in a deep breath and looked back toward the dirt road that had brought them in. "I thought I could hike down to the highway, and then maybe hitch a ride."

"That's one way," Johnny conceded. "But you'll probably get caught."

"Maybe not." He brought his green eyes back to Johnny.

Johnny looked down at the ground and thought how panicked Carrie would be when she woke up and found her brother gone. She would blame him. And if Brian got caught and Johnny hadn't tried harder to come up with a better solution, she'd never forgive him.

But it was more than that. He didn't want to see it happen himself. Despite his feelings for the man, he didn't want it to end this way.

"The reason I'm telling you," Brian said, raising his chin high, "is that I wanted to thank you...for helping me. Considering the way we both feel about each other, I know how hard it must have been."

Not quite sure how to take the thanks that he hadn't expected and didn't really want, Johnny bent over and grabbed an armload of firewood and nodded toward the house. "You won't get far this time of night. I have some Jim Beam in one of the cabinets. We could go back in and have a drink before you go."

Brian nodded tentatively. "All right. For a little while. But I have to go before she wakes up. Otherwise, she's going to go nuts trying to get me out of here herself, and she'll just wind up getting into a lot of trouble. It's not worth it, you know?"

Johnny shrugged. "I'm just worried about how she's going to feel when she finds out I let you go."

Brian chuckled softly, but there was no joy in the sound. "Hey, man. You can handle her. I'll give you that much." He kicked a log, then glanced at Johnny again. "You take care of her, man. She deserves the best."

"Well, I'm not all that sure that's what I can give her," Johnny admitted, "but I'll give it a good shot."

Holding their fragile truce between them, they went back into the house. Johnny added some of the new logs to the fire, built it into a blaze and took off his jacket. Going to the cabinet, he withdrew the Jim Beam and two coffee mugs.

Brian pulled a chair beside the fire and rubbed his hands together, trying to chase the chill from his bones. Johnny handed him a mug, opened the bottle and filled it halfway. Then, pulling his own chair closer to the fire, he sat down next to him. Tilting the chair back on two legs, he balanced with one foot on the hearth.

The first drink burned his throat and Johnny winced. "When I was a kid," he said quietly, "my old man used to pour himself a shot of Jim Beam before bed at night when we were here, and he'd pour me an apple cider. We'd sit here and have our nightcap and talk about his war days."

Brian glanced over at him, and Johnny saw how much of Carrie sparkled in his eyes. "When I was a kid," Brian said, "my dad used to take me deer hunting at this camp he belonged to. He spent most of the day sitting up in those stands, telling his war stories, too."

Johnny met his eyes pensively and took another swig. It didn't feel so bad going down this time. "Your dad fought in the war?"

"Yep. Navy." Brian took another drink of his own, swirled the glass and watched the liquid rotate. "I'd sit there in awe of my dad and all his heroics, feeling all patriotic and proud, and then a buck would come along-"

Johnny held his cup with both hands and dropped the chair to all fours.

"And my dad would tell me that it was mine. I could have it." He chuckled, shook his head and stared vacantly into the fire. "I never could shoot. Damn if I didn't try, but I just couldn't do it."

Johnny looked at his glass, bottomed it and assessed Brian over the rim. "So what did your old man do?"

Brian shook his head. "He got this real disappointed look on his face, told me he didn't understand why I had come if I didn't intend to shoot. Thing is, I just went to be with him and to hear all those stories..."

Johnny grabbed the bottle, refilled his own glass and offered to fill Brian's, too. "I never was too big on hunting myself."

Quiet passed between them, but this time it wasn't a tense quiet, but a pensive one.

"In Nam," Johnny said after a moment, "the sky is just as blue as it is here. The grass is just as green, and on a good day, the wind even sounds the same. You start to think maybe you're home on a Sunday afternoon... goin' fishing. But it doesn't take long to figure out it's just mother nature playing a dirty trick on you. There were days when I thought if I just had a place to go to get away from it all, I'd run so fast..."

He scowled into the fire, staring at the dancing flames, and it was only then that it hit him that he'd just admitted something not that far removed from what Brian had done. He raised the cup again, finished it off.

"But you didn't run," Brian whispered. "Like you said earlier, you stayed and fought."

Johnny's laugh was cold and numb. "And look where it got me," he said, moving his eyes back to the man with whom he was beginning to feel a strange kinship. "No training, no plans, no future. And everywhere I turn, I have to explain myself and why I spent two years doing what the Marines told me to do."

"You shouldn't have to explain anything," Brian said. "And neither should I. If I had it to do over, I'd do it the same way."

"And so would I," Johnny said.

This time Brian refilled the cups. "But I don't think I owe the country prison time just because I didn't hand my life over to them."

Johnny looked at Brian and the edges of the world seemed to come into focus a little more clearly. Maybe they weren't all that different. Maybe they both had some measure of honor. Maybe they'd each followed their conscience. And maybe Brian didn't deserve prison any more than Johnny deserved to be shunned.

Carly Simon wailed on and after a while, Johnny stood up and went to the closet, opened it and revealed his uniforms hanging there, freshly pressed and waiting to be worn. Only he had no place to wear them.

"Take your pick, man," he said. "Cut off some of that hair, shave the beard, put on one of these uniforms, and you can walk onto a plane tomorrow and fly home to Toronto. Nobody'd look for you in a Marine uniform. And if anybody asks you your name, give 'em mine."

Brian came to his feet, an astonished, perplexed expression in his eyes. "You'd do that for me, man? Loan me your uniform? Your name? Why?"

Johnny smiled and tried to think of a reason. Because he'd had one too many refills? Because he couldn't help respecting the man who'd stood up for his convictions, just as Johnny had stood up for his? Because he didn't want to see Brian go to jail?

He looked down at Carrie lying on the bed, cuddled beneath the blanket, and chuckled. "Because I figure it'll score me some big-time points with your sister."

Brian matched his grin and went to the closet, extending his hand to Johnny. "You've got yourself a deal."

The two men, the deserter and the warrior, shook hands for the first time since they'd met.

Chapter Twelve

Carrie woke before dawn and peering around the dimly lit cabin, she tried to orient herself. Johnny's cabin, she thought. They had come here to hide Brian and she had lain down to rest her eyes. Now, hours later, neither Johnny nor Brian was in sight.

"Damn rusty blade," she heard her brother utter from the bathroom. "Don't you have anything better?"

She heard the medicine cabinet open, then close again. "Take it or leave it. It's been sitting there for four months."

Carrie slid out from beneath the covers and off of the big bed and started toward the bathroom, a curious frown on her face. When she'd fallen asleep last night, Johnny and Brian were not even speaking. She couldn't imagine what they were talking about now.

She went to the bathroom door in bare feet and saw Brian standing at the mirror with half his beard shaved. The other half had been trimmed as close as he could get it, and bristly pieces of hair covered the sink.

"Brian! What are you doing?"

Brian swung around and Johnny grinned. "Trying to get rid of this beard," Brian said, "so I can pass for a Marine."

Carrie shook her head, trying to clear the fuzziness from her brain. "Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. A Marine?"

Brian grinned at the astonished look on her face. "Yeah. Johnny's loaning me his uniform so I can get on a plane and fly out of here."

"What?" She looked at Johnny, a smile making its way into her sleepy eyes. "Really?"

Johnny cast off her gratitude with a shrug. "We've been waiting for you to wake up so you can cut his hair."

"Cut his hair?" Carrie threw her hands over her mouth and laughed. "You've got to be kidding. The guy who said his hair was a symbol of defiance toward the oppressive establishment who got the world in the mess it's in? The guy who said he'd rather die than conform?"

Brian cast her a wry grin. "Die, maybe. Prison, no. Just cut it, Carrie, and try to make it as painless as possible."

ONE HOUR LATER, BRIAN LOOKED like a new man standing in Johnny's spare dress blues, his face shaven clean and his hair neatly trimmed.

Carrie dusted a spray of fallen hair off of his shoulder. "When you get back, grow back the hair, but keep that beard off. Lord, you look so handsome."

Johnny grinned. "Thought you hated men in uniform."

Carrie gave him a soft wink and slipped her arm through his. "It depends on the man, I guess."

His eyes locked with hers, the smile there offering a promise that she knew would be fulfilled later. His heart stumbled, then recovered, and forcing himself to slip away from her, Johnny got his extra duffel bag that he hoped would make the picture more legitimate and handed it to Brian. "We'll drive you to the gas station up the road and call you a cab," he said. "They'll never be looking for a Marine lieutenant arriving at the airport in a cab."

Carrie didn't know what had triggered the change in Johnny's attitude, or Brian's, for that matter, but she resolved not to break the spell by asking. Feeling half elated and half dejected that she didn't know when she would see her brother again, she followed them out to Johnny's Malibu.

In just five minutes, they had reached the abandoned gas station-another OPEC casualty, though the pay phone still functioned-and Johnny kept the car idling and reached over the back seat to extend his hand to Brian.

Brian shook it with a warmth that Carrie still found incongruous. "Thanks, man," he said simply.

Johnny didn't answer. Instead, he propped his chin on his fist and let his gaze drift out the window.

Carrie got out of the car and pulled up the seat for Brian to get out. "I'll be right back," she told Johnny. Already, tears were glistening in her eyes.

"Take your time," he whispered.

Slowly, she followed Brian to the phone, waited as he looked up the number of the cab company in the nearby town and ordered a cab.

When he hung up, he turned back to her and smiled at her tears. "Hang in there, sis. Tell Mom I love her and I'll call when I get there... let her know I'm all right."

Carrie nodded, but the lump in her throat prevented her from speaking.

"And tell Dad that I'm sorry...."

The mention of her father reminded Carrie of what he had done yesterday, but it seemed like so long ago. "You know, he covered for you yesterday," she whispered. "He lied to the cops."

"Really?" Brian frowned down at her and she saw the misty regrets welling in his eyes. "I thought he'd like nothing better than to see me rotting in jail."

"You thought wrong," Carrie whispered. "So did I."

Carrie slid her hands awkwardly into her pockets and glanced back at the car where Johnny sat smoking a cigarette. "So how'd you do it?" she asked. "How did you turn him around?"

Brian lifted a shoulder, dropped it. "All it took was a little respect."

"Seems like you got some in return."

"Yeah," he said. "I did. He's a good guy, Carrie. Hang on to him."

"I'll try."

He reached down and hugged her so tightly that her heart almost broke. She wiped her tears away and gazed up at him. "Wear your sunglasses at the airport, okay? Don't want anyone recognizing those knockout eyes."

"I will. Don't worry. Everything's going to turn out fine."

She pressed a kiss on his clean-shaven cheek, touched his face tenderly with both hands, then forced herself to back away. "Well, I'd better go now."

"Yeah," Brian said. "I really hate long goodbyes."

She nodded, wiped her tears again and started back to the car. Just before she opened the door, she turned back to her brother. "I love you, Bri."

"Me, too," he said.

As she and Johnny drove away, she looked out the back window at Brian standing at the empty gas station, hands in his pants pockets, wearing that Marine uniform as if it belonged on him. He waved as they pulled out of sight.

SOME GNAWING PAIN ACHED IN Johnny's own soul as he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Brian standing there in his uniform. It wasn't that Brian was wearing it that bothered him. None of the old antagonism reigned in him now. It was something else, he thought. Something he couldn't put his finger on.

Maybe it was that he wasn't wearing it.

The same old emptiness that came over him when he thought about the service twinged up inside him, and Johnny wondered when it would go away. He was an ex-Marine. He had worn the uniform proudly, but he couldn't wear it anymore. Now he was a temporary football coach for a team of daydreaming, mind-wandering, defiant teenagers. His job would be done the minute they lost their first postseason game, then he would be diminished to P.E. teacher and assistant baseball coach in the spring. Some life. Some damn life for someone who'd spent his whole childhood preparing to be a soldier.

"Thank you, Johnny." Carrie's whispered, emotion-laden words shook him out of his reverie, and he glanced at her.

"For what?"

Her cheeks were damp from the tears that had already fallen, but new ones sparkled in her eyes. She looked so fragile that he wanted to take her into his arms and hold her until the bad feelings disappeared. He just wasn't sure he had that much time.

"For giving Brian another chance," she said. "You saved him. And I still don't know why."

Johnny pulled the car to a stop in front of the lake house and opened the door, but made no effort to get out. "I learned something about Brian last night," he whispered. "Something you tried to tell me, but I wouldn't listen."

"What?" she asked.

"That we're not so different. Even our values are pretty much the same." He rubbed his weary eyes and thought how tired he was after another sleepless night. "Maybe it's time we both stopped paying."

Carrie leaned across the seat and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. "You two stayed up all night, didn't you?"

He nodded. "Yeah, we did. Had a little too much to drink, too."

She stroked his stubbled face with her hand and pressed her forehead against his. "Why don't you go lie down, rest awhile?"

He pressed his lips against hers. "And what will you do?"

"Take a shower," she whispered. "Go for a walk. Worry about Brian getting on the plane all right."

Johnny stretched his arms over his head and yawned. "Okay, but wake me up if you get lonely."

Carrie smiled. "Just call me if you do."

JOHNNY HADN'T REALIZED just how lonely he would be until he lay in the bed where she had slept just hours before and listened to the sound of her shower running in the bathroom. Unbidden, images of her rolling her head against the stream of water reeled through his mind, and he imagined the water glistening on her shoulders, drops of it rolling over her breasts, trickling down the flat plane of her stomach...

His groin tightened and closing his eyes, he turned over and fluffed the pillow. But he couldn't stop remembering how sexy she had looked the time he had seen her with her hair wet, standing in her robe, with heaven-knew-what underneath. Would she smell the way she had smelled that night? Would her skin look just as soft, just as compelling? He turned back over, looked toward the door and heard the shower cut off. Listening, he heard the floorboards squeak slightly as she stepped from the tub.

His breathing quickened and that tightness grew even more pronounced. And he decided that he wasn't that tired, after all.

CARRIE TOWEL-DRIED HER HAIR, then dropped the towel to the floor and pulled her shirt back on, buttoning only two buttons. In her bag that she had left in the living area of the cabin, she had brought a fresh change of clothes. She had forgotten to bring it into the bathroom with her, she reasoned, but a voice in her head questioned that excuse. The truth was, she was disappointed that Johnny had opted for sleep over being with her. But he was tired, she told herself and the night had been long for him. She wondered if he had any idea how much she loved him at that moment for what he'd done, and she ached to show him. But the best way to do that now, she supposed, was to let him sleep.

Telling herself that she really didn't intend to wake him, that she didn't hope he would respond to the scent of her shower steam and wake to the sight of her half dressed, tiptoeing across the cabin for her clothes, she opened the door.

Johnny was leaning on the casing, waiting for her with an indolent, sexy smile on his face, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans, and their eyes met in startled supplication.

"I thought you were sleeping," she whispered.

His eyes lowered to her half-buttoned blouse, to her bare legs, then rose to her wet hair tangled and streaming over her shoulders, leaving wet spots on her shirt.

"How could I sleep?" he asked on a breathless whisper. "When I kept picturing you in that shower with your breasts bare and the water trickling down those legs, and your hair soaking wet...anticipating you standing here, just like this."

Carrie swallowed and wet her lips, and saw the way his hungry eyes followed the path of her tongue. Slowly, he dipped his head and kissed her neck, and she closed her eyes and breathed a long sigh.

His hands fell to her hips and slid up beneath the long tails of her blouse, molding to her nakedness and arousing shivers across her skin. She touched his chest, felt the rough texture of the smattering of hair, but ached to feel more.

His mouth found hers, and his tongue made bold entrance, teasing and flirting with hers. His hands moved upward, to the soft, still damp breasts peaked with desire. Gently, he moved her out of the bathroom and pressed her against the wall, the desire in his lower body creating a desperate craving in her own.

"I love you, Carrie," he whispered against her lips, the words coming on a shaky suspiration.

"I love you," she returned as his fingers undid the two buttons holding her blouse together. Slowly, the fabric opened and his mouth fell to her breasts.

Wrapping his arms around her bare hips, he lifted her and carried her to the bed as he suckled on one hard, straining nipple. Ripples of delirium undulated through her, and gently, he laid her on the bed, shed his jeans and crushed her into the mattress, his hard weight arousing her more.

His mouth gravitated back to hers, urgently seeking to fill the hunger that consumed them both. Their union was instant, debilitating in its delirium, devastating in its tenderness. Together they rode the wave of here and now, not thinking about tomorrow or yesterday, or the others in then-lives. They existed on a plateau of their own for that short span of time that would forever dominate their memories and their hearts, and for a while, they believed that nothing could ever penetrate the walls of their special fortress...

TOGETHER THEY SLEPT afterward, and Carrie woke with her mind sharp and her heart fine-tuned to the man she lay beside. Quietly, she slipped out of bed, dressed and stoked the fire in the fireplace. She turned back to him, saw the way the light from the flames sent sharp shadows dancing across his bare back, and she smiled.

He stirred, and she saw his eyes open slightly as he rolled over to find her.

"Hi," she said.

His hair, now longer than it had been when she met him, was ruffled and boyish.

He smiled. "Hi, yourself. How long did I sleep?"

"A few hours," she said. "You must be hungry."

He sat up, rubbed his eyes. "That's affirmative. I forgot we didn't even eat breakfast." He looked up at her. "And it's Thanksgiving today."

"Yeah." She breathed a deep sigh and tilted her head. "We could go out and get a hamburger. I really need to call my folks and tell them Brian's all right. Then we could come back here and spend another day if you want."

Johnny grinned at the pleasure her suggestion brought him, but suddenly that smile collapsed and he fell back on the bed. "Uh-oh."

"Uh-oh what?"

"I was supposed to have Thanksgiving dinner with Meg tonight. She was making a big fuss and everything. God, if I don't go, she'll be so disappointed." He looked up at Carrie suddenly, as the idea occurred to him. "Hey, if we go back, you could come with me, and then we could drive back down here tomorrow. We could spend the rest of the weekend, and I could introduce you to the lake and see if the boat still floats..."

Carrie would have swum to the Bahamas with him today if he'd asked her.

"It sounds wonderful," she said with a smile that warmed his heart. "Let's do it."

IT WAS HARD TO BELIEVE that Meg was the same woman who had sung "Henry the Eighth" with Johnny in the parking lot. Tonight she played the role of doting mother hen as she hurried around the small table, searching for places to set the food that could have fed an entire battalion in wartime.

Carrie helped her while Johnny carved the turkey.

"I'm taking it to the Supreme Court if I have to," Meg was saying. "I swear to God, the ink on that man's dissertation was still wet. I've been teaching there for eight years, I've had twelve articles published in national academic journals, I've hung around despite a hundred thousand other job offers, and I still don't make as much as he does."

Carrie gave her a sympathetic look of disgust. "That's reprehensible," she said. "Let them explain it in court and see if it holds up against your constitutional rights."

"And yours," Meg was saying. "I happen to know that Johnny is making more than you right now."

Johnny looked up, almost cutting himself on the blade. "Meg!"

Meg waved off her brother's protest. "She has the right to know, Johnny. It isn't fair, and you know it."

Johnny raised his hands innocently at Carrie's stricken leer. "Hey, don't blame me. I didn't know. Just where do you get your information, Meg?"

"I've been doing my research."

"So have I," Carrie admitted. "I didn't know Johnny made more, but I knew that Norman Vance and the shop teacher did. I went to Bill about it last year, and he hem-hawed around and made some noise about giving merit raises and the fact that my turn would come when I earned it. It's an easy out, but I could have fought it. I guess I was too busy fighting other things at the time."

"Easy out, nothing," Meg said. "It's unmitigated baloney, and it's got to stop. Merit raises." She scoffed and set a bowl of mashed potatoes on the table. "You should have called the National Organization for Women. They're helping me with this."

"If Norman Vance got a merit raise," Johnny sneered, "there is something wrong. But what do you expect a guy like me to do? We all ought to be paid a helluva lot more than we are. Am I supposed to refuse pay raises because the women aren't paid as much? It's a democracy we live in."

Meg shook her head and rolled her eyes at Carrie. "My brother obviously doesn't realize that it's a man's democracy, not a woman's. As far as we're concerned, we're still second-class minorities who are supposed to do everything twice as well to get paid half as much."

"Yeah," Carrie threw in. "And still go home at night and cook dinner, wash clothes, clean house and raise the kids. Do you know that last year my mother went to the bank for a loan to buy a car, and even though she had her own job at the time, they wouldn't give her the loan without my father cosigning? Yet two years ago, my brother walked in without a credit history and with a job making less than she did, and walked out with a loan."

"That's discrimination," Meg said. "I hope you didn't stand for it."

"Actually, I threatened to have the ARM sock it to them with a lawsuit. But it didn't do any good. They wouldn't budge, and when I mentioned it to the other ARM leaders, they said they had more important things to do. I finally just let it drop."

Johnny chuckled, but his voice was strained. "It could be worse, you know. Instead of a woman, you could be a Vietnam vet, destined to a life of teaching P.E."

Both women gave him exaggerated looks of mock sympathy. "You're right. I guess you can't help it if you happen to be on the wrong side of an oppressive, male-dominated society."

"You know, I've never quite thought of myself that way," Johnny quipped. "Thank you for pointing that out to me."

Meg's dinner was a feast that brought them all near the point of falling asleep in their plates, and Carrie couldn't help wondering at the domestication of the independent woman who had prepared it while simultaneously ruing the inequities of womanhood.

After dinner, Meg opened another bottle of wine and pulled out their family scrapbooks.

"Johnny, you didn't tell me you were a hippie," Carrie teased when she found a picture of Johnny at seventeen with his hair down past his shoulders and a headband tied around his forehead.

"Oh, yeah," Johnny said. "Before college, I was a longhaired, antiestablishment, if-it-feels-good-do-it bum."

"Did you make love before you made war?" Carrie asked.

She knew the question was a mistake the moment she uttered it, but it was too late to take it back. The openness in his eyes faded and he dropped his gaze back to the picture, turned the page. A photo of him in his first uniform demonstrated the change from boy to man.

"Sometimes I made love before war," he said, all tolerance gone from his flat tone. "And a few times I've made love since war. But I never made war, Carrie. I fought it, but I didn't make it."

Carrie's face reddened, and she gave Meg an embarrassed glance. "Johnny, I was kidding. I didn't mean-"

"Yeah, I know what you meant," he said.

He closed the book, stood up and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. "I'm going out to smoke a cigarette."

And before Carrie could say more, he was out the door.

Carrie looked at Meg, her face burning with embarrassment at their volatile exchange. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "He's so sensitive. And he's tired. He hasn't had much sleep..."

Meg shook her head. "Don't apologize. He's just had it rough since he's been back."

"Yeah, and I haven't exactly made it easier for him." Frowning, Carrie reached for the scrapbook again. Opening it, she found a photograph of him at around ten, dressed in his father's huge Marine uniform with the pants legs and sleeves rolled up, saluting at the camera with a look of pure pride on his youthful face. She sighed and looked back at Meg. "When I think back about some of the things I've said to him, some of the things I accused him of... Do you know that the first day he was back, he heard me calling Vietnam vets 'soulless shells of men'?"

Meg's expression changed to surprise. "That was you?"

"He told you." She wasn't surprised, really. In a way, she was glad he'd had someone to talk to about it. Her eyes filled with tears, and she turned the page and saw Johnny as a little boy, standing next to Meg in a family portrait between his mother and father. His father wore his own dress blues, much like the ones that had gotten Brian home today, and she saw the resemblance between father and son. It was in the eyes, she thought. That gleam of pride. That sparkle of purpose.

"You seem to have changed your opinion," Meg said, moving to sit beside her on the couch. "I guess that's the important thing. When he's talked to me about you, he's talked about your eyes and your smile and the roller-coaster ride his emotions have been on since he met you."

Carrie laughed in spite of her tears. "I've learned so much from him," she whispered. "Today, I saw him make a huge sacrifice for my brother, out of compassion and respect. And I realized that no one's given him that kind of break. Least of all me."

Meg took the scrapbook out of Carrie's lap and flipped through the pages herself. "Johnny wanted to be a Marine ever since he was out of diapers. He knew the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' before he knew 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.'" She laughed. "He got sidetracked a little in college, when everyone was so down on the military. But he couldn't keep himself from enlisting, no matter what everyone said. He's the only person I've ever known who knew unequivocally what he wanted to be when he grew up."

"Until now," Carrie said, touching a photo of a young Johnny laughing for the camera. She realized she had never really seen him laugh like that.

"Yeah," Meg said. "No one was more surprised than I was when he got out. But he was so tired and so torn up." She looked toward the door, as if she could see through it to her younger brother slumped in weary defeat. "I think he came back here hoping he could turn time back a little to that proverbial fork in the road. He thought if he could try the path he didn't take, he'd find something better."

"And all he found was me," Carrie whispered.

Meg smiled and pushed Carrie's hair back from her face. "Well, that just may be what he was looking for."

JOHNNY STROLLED ACROSS the groomed lawn to the pond off which the moon glistened in ripples, and asked himself why he'd let Carrie's innocent comment get to him that way.

Because it didn't feel innocent, he thought. It felt like there was still antagonism there, resentment, anger. Until she got completely past it, he wasn't sure they had a future.

He heard someone whistling, a distant sound carried by the wind, and vaguely, he realized the tune...

What a Day for a Daydream.

He looked across the pond, saw the black man in the wheelchair-Brady, he thought, surprised that he remembered the name-the man he had met here months before, the night he had first kissed Carrie at Sholey's. Taking a drag on his cigarette and flicking the ashes, Johnny ambled around the pond toward him.

"You come out here every night?" Johnny asked.

Brady laughed. "Hey, you're the soldier with the home-comin' blues," the man said.

Johnny pumped the man's hand as if they were long lost buddies, and leaned on the rail overlooking the pond. "Yeah, that's me."

"You still got lady trouble?" Brady asked.

Johnny hedged. "Well, I've got a lady..."

"Then you got trouble," Brady said.

Johnny didn't know if it was the brisk night air or the laughter Brady incited within him, but he realized things weren't quite as bleak as they had looked a moment ago. Maybe he was crazy, he thought. Maybe he was just looking for a reason to get mad.

"So how you doin' now?" Brady asked more seriously. "You adjustin' yet?"

Johnny grinned. "Well, I can drink cold beer now without it burning my throat. I can walk across a street with traffic whizzing by. I can hear a firecracker go off or a car backfire without jumping out of my skin. And sometimes, if I'm lucky, I can even sleep through the night. I guess I'm adjusting."

"But what about that Dracula called public opinion?" Brady asked. "You dealin' with that okay?"

Johnny dropped his cigarette, ground it out with his shoe. "That's not so easy," he said. He looked at Brady and gave him a curious frown. "Tell me something, man. When you think of yourself, what do you see?"

Brady's smile faded. "I still see a man with two legs. A tall man. I was six foot three, you know."

Johnny shook his head. "I mean the uniform. Do you picture yourself in uniform?"

"Hell, no," Brady said on a chuckle. "There ain't no love lost between me and the Army. It took more from me than it could ever give back."

"See, that's the thing," Johnny said, staring off across the water, trying to find the source for the gnawing in his soul. "The Marines took more from me than they could give back, too, but I still see myself in that uniform. Every day that passes feels like wasted time, and I haven't adjusted to that yet. I was a good officer. I was a good Marine." He looked down at Brady, noted the way the man gazed up at him, his dark eyebrows drawn together.

"And you know what?" Johnny asked. "I don't think I joined for what they could do for me. I had all these illusions that I had something to give them."

"So why'd you get out, man?"

The question took Johnny by surprise and he looked down at the black man who seemed as old as his father would have been, but was probably no older than himself. Suddenly, he didn't really know the answer. "I guess I was fed up," he said. "Burned out. It seemed like the thing to do."

"And now?" Brady asked. "You still think it was the thing to do?"

Johnny offered a genuine shrug. "Hell if I know."

"Man," Brady said, amusement coloring his tone. "I ain't ever heard o' nobody goin' back in once they got out, but maybe you should think about it."

Johnny gave him a foreign look, as if he'd just offered the most ludicrous suggestion he'd ever heard. "Reenlist? You've got to be kidding."

"Maybe, maybe not," Brady said. "I guess that's just up to you, ain't it? You just gotta do your own thing."

Johnny's expression faded as his eyes settled on a moonbeam rippling across the water. And he wondered if the idea was so preposterous, after all.

I'M LOSING HIM. The thought occurred to Carrie as he walked her to her door at their apartments, and she could feel the distance between them and see it in the pensive frown he wore. This morning she had felt so close to him, and tonight he was drifting away.

He watched as she fumbled for her key. Unlocking the door, she opened it. "Don't go yet, Johnny," she said. "Come in."

He nodded and followed her inside.

She turned on a lamp, painting the room in warm yellow hues. "I love Meg," she said, turning back to him as he dropped wearily down on the couch. "She's great."

"She liked you, too," he said.

Carrie sat next to him, tucking her feet beneath her. "But you don't seem to like me much tonight," she said. She reached up, pushed his hair out of his eyes. "Are you sick of me, Johnny? Have we spent too much time together today?"

Johnny's distant expression instantly vanished and he looked at her with surprise. "Of course not. I could never get enough of you. I just have some things on my mind."

"What?" she asked, stroking his stubbled jaw. "Tell me, Johnny."

Johnny pressed a kiss on her lips, making her melt with need for him, but he pulled away and breathed a heavy sigh. "It's a lot of things. Finishing the football season. Seeing Brian in my uniform this morning. Hearing what you said about making love before war..."

"I didn't mean that. Johnny, I was teasing you."

"But deep down you meant it," he said, looking at her with eyes that held too much back, though he wanted to give himself away. "You've had this hostility toward me since you met me." He stood up, putting that distance he needed between them, and paced across the room. "You're attracted to me, and maybe you do love me. But I don't think you really know who I am."

"Of course, I know who you are," she cried. "You're the man I've fallen in love with. Johnny, don't pull back from me now."

Johnny turned around, and his face melted into soft vulnerability. "How can you know who I am, when I don't even know myself?" he asked, his voice taking on a more desperate edge.

"What don't you know about yourself?" Carrie asked. "What's confusing you so much?"

"The fact that I'm not a Marine anymore!" The floodgates of his emotions seemed to open with the words, releasing a wave of feelings he'd been too afraid to feel. "The fact that I can't wear that uniform anymore. The fact that I can't do what I've been preparing to do for my whole life, so I'm just hanging around marking time! But I'm too young to be washed up!"

Carrie sat stock-still, unable to forge a response to the confession that shook the very foundation of their love. "Johnny, what are you saying?"

Johnny crossed the room and took her shoulders, gazed into her eyes and tried to find the words to make her understand. "I'm saying that for the last two days-hell, for the last two weeks-I've realized how much you mean to me. And I want to make a life with you, Carrie. I want a future with you. But how can I think about that when I don't know what I'm going to be doing six months from now? How can I commit to a life with you when I can't commit to anything else?"

Tears rolled down her cheeks in dismal anticipation of what was coming, but Carrie sat still, waiting, letting him get it out.

"I finally realized this morning when I saw Brian in that uniform, that I belong in it. When I came back from Nam I felt beat up, exhausted, disenchanted. But I wasn't disenchanted by the Marines... I was disenchanted because of the war and all the death and all the misery. I just wanted out."

"And now you want back in," she whispered, the realization sinking her very heart.

He looked at her for a long moment-a moment she knew she would never forget for the rest of her life, a moment that superseded every other dramatic moment of her life-and she saw the moisture glistening in his eyes.

"If I did," he asked, "what would that mean for us? Would it make a difference? Could you ever be happy as a military wife, feeling the way you do?"

Carrie's face twisted in pain, and she sucked in a deep sob and looked at him through blurring eyes. "I don't know, Johnny," she whispered. "I just don't know."

Miserably, he pulled her into his arms and crushed her against him. And he wondered if this was the beginning of the end of them.

"You don't have to answer now," he said. "I can give you time to think."

She clung tighter to him, shaking her head. "Don't leave me, Johnny. Don't make me face this alone."

His lips met hers in desperate need, and he tasted her tears on her lips and felt her emotion in the way her body trembled beneath his hands. He could feel her need as the kiss deepened, piercing his heart.

He loved her that night with the desperate intensity of a man who knew their time was coming to an end. She loved him with the fierce longing of a woman who wasn't ready to let go.

And each of them wondered if they possessed the courage to give the other what they needed.

LATER THAT NIGHT, as Carrie lay next to Johnny in her bed, listening to the sound of his heavy, rhythmic breathing, she stared into the dark and tried to face the decision he had asked her to make.

Could she spend the rest of her life with Johnny, if it meant being a military wife? She racked her mind from the corner chambers to the empty, dusty ones she avoided at all cost. And still she came up without an answer.

Careful not to wake him, she slipped out of bed and went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. Clutching the cup as if it could warm her chilled heart as it warmed her hands, she went back into the bedroom, sat down on the foot of her bed and quietly pulled out the drawer in her dresser in which she kept Paul's picture. Walking to the window where the moonlight cast a rectangle of light on her shag carpet, she looked at the photograph. Her eyes roamed the familiar face, but there seemed little familiarity in her heart anymore. Still, the anger smoldered subtly within her, unable to let its last sparks die away.

Setting the picture on her lap, she leaned back against the window and looked over at Johnny, sleeping soundly in her bed. He had become as much a part of her as the beliefs that dictated her life. She thought of the pictures of him she had seen tonight in his family's scrapbook, wearing his uniform and smiling with a kind of pride she hadn't seen in him since she'd met him.

Oh, God, she prayed with her heart. Why does it have to mean so much to him? Why can't he put it behind him?

But it did mean something, and in her heart, she knew she couldn't deny it.

I want to make a life with you, Carrie.

Those words, if uttered in a different context, might have made her heart flip in ecstasy. But she had never expected them to come with such a decision.

She took her cup back to the kitchen, and her gaze fell to a box of ARM fliers on her counter, pleading for amnesty for people like Brian. She would fight for that until the day she won. But how could she do that as a military wife? How could she fight for her brother's rights when everyone in the ARM knew she was married to a Marine?

When that battle ended, there would be more. She'd fight to end the Cold War. She'd demand nuclear disarmament. She'd march and picket and yell until the government stopped pouring money into defense and started concentrating on the problems at home.

That was her way of fighting for her country.

And it contradicted Johnny's way.

But there was more, she thought, digging deeper into herself. She went back to her bed and slipped in beside him, feeling his warmth as she pressed against his back. There was the fear. The heartache. The potential for even more pain than she'd known before. Another war could erupt tomorrow, and Johnny would have to go...

And once again the vigil would begin and she would die one day at a time.

Could you ever be happy as a military wife?

The question reeled through her hollow soul as he turned over in his sleep and reached out to her, as if his subconscious knew she'd be there. She laid her head on his chest and tried to block out the echoing question that reverberated through her mind. And for the life of her, she couldn't deny the answer.

JOHNNY WAS ALREADY AWAKE, lying next to Carrie in her bed, watching her with a sweet yearning in his eyes when she awoke that morning. The way he looked at her, the way his hand came up to stroke her clean, untainted cheek, the way his eyes told her how much he cared...all conspired to turn her heart inside out.

"Did you sleep well?" he asked.

She shook her head and sat up. "No. Not really."

"No?" He sat up, too, and leaned back against the headboard. The troubled look he had seen on her face last night was back, and his heart slowly sank into his stomach. "Carrie, about last night... We can let it go. We don't have to talk about it today. We'll go to the lake house and-"

"No." She felt cold and crossing her arms in front of her, she chafed her bare arms, as if it would help her stave off the pain. "I can't, Johnny. Not now."

A look of fear crossed his eyes and he leaned closer to her. "Don't give up on me now. What I said last night... I was just thinking. It wasn't a decision yet. It was just... brainstorming."

Carrie shook her head and tried desperately not to cry. It wouldn't make things any easier if she did. She pulled out of bed, slipped into her robe and went to the dresser to brush out the tangles in her hair. But it was a stall, and they both knew it. Finally, she turned back to him.

"You need to validate yourself, Johnny. You need to know that you didn't waste the last few years of your life. You need to know that all the years you planned to be a Marine weren't wasted dreams. And the only way I can see for you to do that is to go back in."

Johnny came to his feet, caught her face in his hands and made her meet his eyes. "Carrie, even if I do, it doesn't have to be the end of us. We can have a good life."

"No, Johnny." Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked them back and looked away. "I can't do it. But you have to."

Johnny stared down at her, pain etched in the hard lines of his face. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, Carrie. I don't have to do anything, and you can do anything you want to. If I don't mean enough to you, tell me that. But don't call it quits with me and make it seem like some noble sacrifice that's for the best. I don't buy it."

Carrie twisted her face in pain, and tears spilled over her lashes, streaming down her face. "Don't you see? You belong there. It's all you think about. It's what you want, deep down where it counts, Johnny. I don't want you to choose between the Marines and me."

His own eyes glistened with pain and confusion. "But you are making me choose," he shouted. "I don't want the Marines if I can't have you beside me!"

"But I can't go through it again!" she screamed. "What if there's another war? I went through hell with Paul." She raked her fingers through her hair and tried to calm her voice. "I didn't get a letter from him for three months before he died. Three months, when I didn't know if he was dead or alive. I kept thinking that his family would have been notified if something had happened, but there was no word at all. For three months I hardly slept. I couldn't eat. I watched the television day and night for some clue as to what had happened to him, scoured the papers, bugged the hell out of his parents. And then finally word came that he was dead. And some part of me died with him, Johnny."

She pulled in a sob, dropped her hair and let it fall into her face. "I don't know what I'd do if you got shipped off to another war. The Middle East is getting worse all the time. They could ship you there, and you'd have to fight. I just couldn't stand it again." She pushed her hair back from her face and forced herself to say what she dreaded saying.

"I was up a lot of the night thinking, Johnny, and it all kept coming back to one answer." She twisted her face and made herself look at him. "It has to be over between us, Johnny. We've reached a crossroad. You have to go back down the path you chose, but I can't follow you there."

Johnny's face reddened as he stood motionless, staring at her. "Then you're a coward," he bit out. "And I don't want a coward for a wife."

And before the explosion of emotions could spread and consume them both, Johnny gathered his things and left.

Chapter Thirteen

Johnny gave Central High School its first state championship, then notice that he was leaving his job when they broke for Christmas vacation. Carrie went to great lengths to avoid him, but when he caught her gaze in the cafeteria or passed her in the hall, he saw the pain in her eyes and knew she was doing her best to make it easier on him. It made him angry. So angry that he made no attempt to change things.

Deciding that you could have some things you wanted in life, but not everything all at once, least of all the important things, he reenlisted and got his orders to ship out to Quantico in Virginia and report for duty the day after Christmas.

But Christmas dawned cold and gray, and a lightning storm blew up, making it a tough ride for Santa and his reindeer. It was almost dusk when Johnny sat down at his kitchen table, trying to compose the letter he would leave with Carrie's gift on her doorstep, in case she wasn't home for him to tell her himself.

Carrie, I wanted to say goodbye before I left, but I had a feeling you wouldn't be there. Before I go, you have to know that I love you.

He stopped, clicked the Bic that seemed to have run out of words and took a drink of the stale, cold coffee that sat beside him. Was he doing the right thing? he asked himself.

Would he regret this for the rest of his life? Rubbing his face with both hands, he tried to imagine what would have happened if he hadn't made the decision to reenlist. But nothing was very clear. Slowly, he began to write again.

I may be happier in the Marines, Carrie. I may be fulfilled in my work, I may even see hope for a productive future, but I don't think I'll ever fill the emptiness for having left you behind.

Wiping the sting from his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, he forced himself to go on.

I believe in the system, Carrie. Even though it let me down in Vietnam, even though the country didn't appreciate any of us who fought there. I still believe in the need for guys like me, and the contribution we can make to defend our country. Maybe the country doesn't need defending, you say. Well, did you ever think it was guys like me who fought for your freedom, too, and your right to protest and rally and fight to express your opinions? It's guys like me, willing to get our hands dirty and feel a little pain-sometimes even a lot-who make that system work.

The words came easily, cathartically, and his pen moved quickly across the page.

But I believe our love can work, too, even though we don't always believe in the same things and we don't always agree. The fear of separation isn't nearly so terrible as a self-imposed, permanent separation. But I guess you have to find that out for yourself. When you do-if you do-I'll be waiting. And you know where to find me.

He stared at the page, full of sloppy scribbling that came closer to expressing what, was in his heart than anything he could have articulated verbally. Finally, he signed it, "Merry Christmas, Johnny."

He stood up and pulled on the coat of his uniform, picked up his suitcases and the gift that he'd bought for Carrie, and stepped out into the rain. He loaded his suitcases into his car, then holding the gift and the carefully composed letter, he went to her front door.

Standing out in the rain in his dress blues, with his shoes spit-shined and his brass freshly polished, he clutched Carrie's Christmas gift to his heart and wondered if he should give it to her, after all, or just let it go.

Something inside tugged at him and he forced himself to go to the door, knock on it. If she answered, he would keep his voice calm, controlled, and he would wish her a Merry Christmas and offer her the wrapped box. He would watch her open it and hope she would smile when she saw the tiny emerald sparkling on the end of the gold chain. He'd spent too much money on it-much more than he could afford- but it was something he had to do. Even if it was just an excuse to see her one last time before he left.

CARRIE HEARD THE KNOCK on her door, but she sat still on the sofa, her arms curled around her legs and her face tucked into the circle of her own sparse warmth. It was Johnny, she was certain, and he had come to say goodbye. But she couldn't make herself face it.

Her eyes strayed to the scrawny Christmas tree in front of her glass patio doors, and tears rushed to her eyes. She hadn't had the heart to decorate it completely, and so a few ornaments hung haphazardly on the wilting branches and the rest sat in a box on the floor beside it. It was the first year in her memory that Christmas-tree lights had been discouraged due to the energy shortage, and most of the city, like her, had stopped short of real decorations, wondering what the point was. The barren darkness reflected the darkness in her soul, but she had tried to pretend to be in the spirit. She had spent Christmas with her parents, who were getting along better than they ever had before. Her father had even gone so far as to talk to Brian on the phone. Her mother's favorite gift this year was Bradley Hunter's suggestion that, perhaps, they would visit Brian sometime in the spring.

But Carrie's talk to Brian had left her confused and even more depressed. When she'd confided in him of Johnny's decision to reenlist, he'd said, "That's good. Everybody needs to follow their own dream. But that doesn't mean it has to be over for you. Anything worth having is worth taking a risk for."

I don't want a coward for a wife....

Johnny's words came back to her, and she told herself that was exactly what she was. A coward. But there was nothing she could do about it.

For the rest of that long, cold, wet Christmas, she hadn't been able to get Johnny off of her mind. He was leaving her for good. The finality of it chilled her bones and emptied her soul.

She heard the knock again, and this time she pulled up off of the couch and padded to the door on stockinged feet, peered through the peep hole and saw him standing there in his uniform, looking so proud that she wanted to pull him inside and hold him until some of that confidence seeped into her own soul. But that couldn't happen, she told herself. There was no way to bridge the impasse they had created between them. If she loved him, she had no choice.

She touched the door, spread her hand on the hard wood and didn't make a sound. After a moment, she heard a rustling sound against her door, and then the sound of Johnny's shoes as he walked away.

Carrie waited until she was sure he had gone before she opened the door. He had left a wrapped gift on her doorstep, with a note folded beneath it. Looking around guiltily, she picked it up, stepped back into her apartment and closed the door.

She read the note, drawing in a ragged sob and spreading her tears across her face. With trembling hands, she tore off the wrapping and opened the small box. The glistening emerald on the gold chain made her heart ache, and she took the gift out and laid it in the palm of her hand.

"Merry Christmas, Johnny," she whispered. "I love you, too."

THE AIRPORT WAS CROWDED with travelers returning home after Christmas, but Johnny sat alone in his terminal, watching the activity on the runway as planes came and went. He had picked Meg up at her apartment and insisted that she drop him off at his terminal and drive his car home, where she planned to sell it for him. She had wanted to come in and see him off, but he dreaded the goodbye. Now he almost wished he'd let her come.

His eyes strayed to the gate entrance, to the people saying goodbye to their loved ones, but no one came to him. His heart couldn't relinquish the hope that Carrie would come running in at the last minute, throw her arms around him and tell him that she wanted nothing more than to be his wife, no matter what that meant. But he knew that wouldn't happen. Just as he knew that she had been home when he'd knocked on her door.

The boarding call came across the intercom, and Johnny grabbed his carry-on bag and started toward the ramp. He didn't know what compelled him to look back over his shoulder as he got on the plane, but nothing had changed. Carrie wasn't going to come.

The walk down that ramp was the longest walk of his life, for he knew that he was leaving behind a vital part of himself. And if he tried for the rest of his life, he doubted that he'd ever get it back.

WEEKS LATER, TOWARD THE END of January, Mark Gray sat alone in the deserted gym, slumping in the bleachers and clutching his dog-eared midyear report card in his hand. He'd read it a thousand times, folded it and looked at it again. But he still couldn't believe it. Coach wouldn't have believed it, either.

He opened it again, read back over the grades, and shook his head. A's and B's.

Unbelievable.

He needed to celebrate. He needed to show someone. He needed to thank someone.

But Coach Malone was long gone. Mark dropped his head down, and tried to buck the feeling of depression that fact brought about. Coach had done what he had to do. He was a Marine.

But where did that leave Mark?

He got up and ambled out of the empty gym, wondering how he would manage to keep up his grades without Coach constantly riding him. What difference would it make if he did? It wasn't like he could afford college.

He meandered outside, leaned against the wall and fished in his pocket for the joint he'd carried for weeks without lighting once. Now he saw no reason not to.

He lit the home-rolled cigarette and held it between his fingers, staring pensively down at the smoke curling up from its tip.

A lot had changed since he'd last gotten high. He had become a winner for the first time in his life. He'd learned that he had some intelligence stored away, untapped though it had been. He'd made friends out of people he never would have tolerated before.

Coach Malone-Lieutenant Malone-had given him all that. And somehow, he felt he owed it to the man not to smoke that joint. Stubbing it out on the bricks of the school wall, Mark flicked it as far as he could see. He didn't need it anymore. It would only drag him down. And he planned on being somebody.

Somebody like Johnny Malone.

SCHOOL WASN'T THE SAME without Johnny, for Carrie felt his absence in every corridor, in the cafeteria and even in the faces of the students she saw everyday. Her heart wasn't in her work anymore, for nothing seemed worth it. She had given Johnny the courage to make the choice he had made, but that gift had cost her her own happiness.

It was on a day when she was at her lowest, when she sat at her desk grading hopeless papers from students who didn't care about anything but dating and drugs and finding ways to forge fake IDs so they could buy booze, that Mark Gray came into her empty classroom. "Hey, Miz Hunter. You okay? You been lookin' a little peaked lately."

Carrie looked up and propped her chin on her hand. "Hi, Mark. Yeah, I'm fine."

Mark ambled into her classroom and plopped on the top of one of the desks at the front of the room. His Afro was shorter, making him appear a little less wild, and he brandished the report card he'd gotten that day. "Thought I'd come by and show you this," he said. "My report card."

Carrie braced herself and took it. As she scanned the grades, a slow smile dawned across her face. "A's and B's?"

Mark tried to suppress his proud grin and gave a nonchalant shrug. "Hey, if Coach Malone had come here sooner, I'd be acing all them suckers by now. But I can live with a few B's."

"So can I," Carrie said, her eyes brightening with hope. "I think that's great, Mark."

"It still won't get me a job with IBM," he said, downplaying his success, "and I ain't likely to get a scholarship to college, either, with my record. But hey, maybe that ain't for me."

"Of course, it's for you," Carrie said. "You're smart, Mark. You've just found that out. You don't want to stop using your intelligence before you've even started, do you?"

"No," Mark said. "But I can't afford college. My ole man barely makes enough to put food on the table. I got to find a way to put myself through, if I decide to go."

Carrie stood up and looked at Mark, concerned that he would wind up throwing it all away because he had so few choices. "Mark, you've come so far already. Six months ago, I didn't honestly think you'd ever graduate. And now look at you. You have so much potential."

"I know," Mark said, pulling up and walking around her room, picking up items and looking at them, then setting them back down. "But potential don't pay the bills."

"So you work your way through college. People do it all the time. You could get financial aid, a job on campus...."

Mark raised his hand to fend off her suggestions, and his ebony eyes grew more serious. "To tell you the truth, Miz Hunter, I been thinkin' real hard about joinin' the Marines. Like Coach did."

Carrie got up and rounded her desk toward the boy who had spent so much of his life floundering. He was so young, so naive. "Mark, the Marines aren't for everyone. All the military branches are risky. Johnny was a unique example, and maybe-"

"He's the best example I got," Mark cut in. "I figure, if it's good enough for Coach, it's good enough for me. Ain't that many people joinin' up now, even with 'em offerin' to pay for college when you get out. It's like the plague or somethin'. But hey, I don't care what nobody thinks."

Carrie's face paled, and she looked at Mark with eyes more earnest than he'd ever seen them.

"And what if there's another war?" she whispered. "What if they want to ship you out and make you fight for something you don't even understand? What if they force you to do things that you never would have believed you could do? What if it means risking your life?"

Mark's solemn gaze drifted to the window, to the kids dribbling a basketball on the court outside. She could see the images his mind confronted flitting across his expression, the consequences and the bloody risks. Finally, he brought his eyes back to hers, and the softest smile she'd ever seen on the rough, tough black kid touched across his mouth. "Sometimes you just got to take risks," he said. "Sometimes it's worth it."

Carrie felt the tears stinging the backs of her eyes and she bit her lip and blinked them back, though she couldn't hide the abysmal sadness dwelling on her face. "And sometimes it's not," she whispered. "Just think hard about it before you make up your mind, Mark. It's the most life-altering decision you'll ever make."

Mark came to his feet and slid his report card into his back pocket. "I still got five months to make up my mind," he said. "First, I got to graduate."

Carrie smiled. "Take my advice, Mark, and enjoy these last five months of your childhood. Because when you become a man, nothing will ever be easy again."

She didn't know if he had the maturity to understand the truth of her words, but when she was alone again in her classroom, she found herself staring out the window to those kids on the basketball court, wondering when her own youth had surrendered to the crushing burden of adulthood.

It seemed that her life had become full of abrupt goodbyes that she wasn't equipped to cope with. It seemed she was forever caught in a web of loving men she could neither see nor touch.

She had never wanted to say goodbye to Johnny, and yet she had sent him on his way, knowing that every step he took closer to his destination was one step farther away from her.

She had never expected to give up Brian, and yet she had helped to send him away more than once.

And she had never realized how final her goodbye to Paul had been when she'd put him on a bus and promised to wait for him. And she had waited... and waited...

The problem, she supposed, was that she had never really said goodbye to any of them. She had hidden away from Johnny and had believed Brian's departure was temporary.

And Paul...

She had been too angry at him to say a real goodbye and lay him to rest and put his death behind her. She had clung to that anger as if it helped her cling to the man himself. Maybe it was time to let him go.

For the next few days after her talk with Mark, Carrie floated along in a haze of despondency, never able to lift her heart out of the murky waters of despair. Something had to be done, she thought, for she couldn't go on like this. It was up to her, and her alone, to cast off the sadness of an unfulfilled past and move ahead with her life.

It was for that reason that she found herself standing on the edge of Paul's grave one late afternoon, as the sun burst in a brilliant display of colors before it descended behind the trees. Her palm sweated against the stems of the wild roses she clutched in her hand, and her heart pounded with anxiety, as if she faced the man himself rather than a tombstone. She hadn't been here since the truth had come out. Since she'd learned the way he died.

She hauled in a deep breath and gazed at the inscription etched on the stone... "Lance Corporal Paul Branning Stevens, 1949-1971. He gave his life for his country."

So simple. So uninspired. And so untrue.

Or was it? some weak voice inside her asked. Was it, indeed, untrue, when the life Paul had handed over to the Marines had never been given back to him?

Her nostrils flared as she thought of all the things she had dreamed of saying to him, of all the accusations she had cultivated in her heart. But now that she was here, she couldn't think of a single one.

Instead, she felt the misery he must have felt before he'd pulled that trigger on himself. She felt the despair that she was certain had eaten a hole through him. She felt the shame that had made him unable to face himself, let alone her.

And she realized it wasn't betrayal at all.

A heavy, potent, heartbreaking sense of forgiveness bled over her, and she bent over and laid the flowers on his grave. "I forgive you," she whispered, wiping a tear from her cheek. "And I hope you can forgive me. But I'm not angry anymore."

Hugging herself, as if she were the only one who could offer herself solace, she stood over the grave, letting the quiet fill her heart, letting the peace filter in, letting forgiveness fill the void that the anger had eaten away.

Her thoughts drifted from the fading distant image of Paul to the sharp, vivid face of Johnny. She couldn't think of him now, she told herself. That wasn't why she'd come here.

She heard a car coming up the drive and looked up to see a Belvedere slowing across the cemetery. It stopped, and she watched someone get out.

It was a soldier, dressed in army green. He stood with his back to her, staring out over the expanse of death before him. Slowly, he started to walk.

It took a moment for him to find the tombstone that had drawn him here, and she watched as he stood frozen over it, his head hung low and his hands crammed into his pockets.

The breeze picked up as twilight leached color from the sky, and Carrie saw the soldier's shoulders quake as emotion overtook him. Was he a veteran of Vietnam, too? Had he become an outcast in his own land? Had anyone ever welcomed him home, she wondered, when he first came back from the war? Or had he confronted an angry young woman like her, so sure she had all the answers...

But she wasn't the same woman Johnny had seen that day. She had changed. She had grown. Now she knew that she had only begun to ask the questions that mattered. And she didn't pretend to have a single answer.

She picked up one of the roses from the bunch she had laid on Paul's grave and started across the groomed lawn to the soldier standing so absolutely alone.

He didn't hear her approach, so she stood quietly behind him, reading the tombstone. It belonged to another dead soldier, another statistic in the generation the government had sacrificed so needlessly. Another young man who had given all he had to give.

She took another step closer, and the soldier turned around.

His face was wet with tears, but he made no move to wipe them away, as though he feared the gesture might call more attention to his state.

"I don't know you," Carrie whispered, "and you don't know me. But I can see that the war took something from you, too."

He wet his lips and stared down at the grave, unable to answer.

"How long have you been home?" she asked.

"Few months," he muttered. "A few lousy, stinking months."

"You're still in the Army?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yeah. Out this month."

She looked down at the flower in her hand and wondered what had come over her to approach a complete stranger in a graveyard, intruding on such a personal moment. What made her think the pain she read on his face was even remotely like her own? Deciding that was just another of those questions to which she didn't have an answer, she held out the flower.

The soldier stared at it for a moment, then moved his questioning eyes back to her face.

Almost reluctantly, he took the rose. "Why?" he asked.

Carrie smiled and lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "Consider it a belated welcome home," she whispered.

He frowned down at the pink blossom in his hand, and she saw new tears pushing to his eyes. "Thanks," he said. "Thanks a lot."

Nodding, she started back through the tombstones to her car parked on the quiet drive. She didn't look back until she was behind the wheel.

The soldier was watching her, still clutching the rose. As she pulled away, she saw him smile.

THAT NIGHT, UNABLE TO KEEP her emotions harnessed in all by herself, Carrie called Meg, and they went out to dinner and to see The Way We Were-a poor choice, for the story of broken love and unresolved destiny tore her heart even more.

Meg had filed a lawsuit against her school for equal pay for women, and though she spent much of the evening talking about her struggle, she touched the subject of Johnny once.

"He still misses you," she said. "He asks about you every time he calls."

Carrie dipped her head and stared into her coffee. "Is he happy?" she managed to ask.

"He's satisfied," Meg said. "That's something. He's in the right place, Carrie. But I wouldn't really say he's happy."

Carrie drew in a deep breath and met Meg's eyes. "The other day one of Johnny's students came to me, looking for advice about his future. By the time he left my office, I think he had decided to join the Marines." She issued a laugh, but there was no humor in it. "The ironic thing is, I probably could have talked him out of it. But Johnny was the best role model he ever had, and I just didn't know how to dispute that."

"Maybe there was no need to dispute it," Meg said. "Maybe your ideas are changing. Maybe you're getting a little broader minded."

"Yeah," Carrie muttered. "I just wonder why that makes me so miserable."

INSTEAD OF GOING AWAY, the pain only increased exponentially. Carrie felt it when she saw the military ads on television, beseeching young men to "Be a Leader of Men," and warning them that "Uncle Sam Wants You." She felt it when Brian returned Johnny's uniform to her through the mail, and she took it out of the box and actually pulled the jacket on and hugged herself for the warmth she hadn't felt since Johnny left. She felt it when she took off his dog tags and laid them in her dresser drawer. He had new ones by now, she thought, and he wouldn't need these anymore.

Trying to kick the lethargy pulling her down, she tried to dive into her work with ARM. But even that seemed to get her nowhere. They started a mass letter-writing campaign to congressmen in favor of impeaching Nixon. But Carrie had lost her fight. As hard as she worked, a sense of futility washed over her. Nixon would get off scot-free. The country would be mad as hell, and there might even be a state of anarchy for the rest of his term. But he would never get what was coming to him because the system really didn't work.

It was at their quarterly strategy meeting in March, when they were mapping out their work for the entire next quarter, that Carrie brought up a new cause that had been eating at her. "I think we need to start some support groups for Vietnam vets," she said. "And we need to create some sort of positive media campaign to boost the images of the guys who've come back from the war. They're having trouble getting jobs, some of them need counseling, they feel alone and abandoned. If we got on the bandwagon and helped a little, I think we might make a difference."

Jacob Miller, one of the other diehard members who had been in ARM from the beginning, turned on her as if she had just betrayed the group, his face as red as the skintight nylon shirt he wore. "How can you say that? Those are the guys we've been fighting against for the last five years! We'd be hypocrites if we started coddling them now."

"I'm not talking about coddling them," Carrie said. "And it wouldn't be hypocritical. We're all about helping the citizens of this country. Well, those veterans are citizens. They didn't ask for what happened to them over there. And they didn't bargain for what they got when they came home."

"But it would go against everything we're doing for the conscientious objectors now. We can't lobby and organize for both groups without contradicting ourselves."

"That isn't true," Carrie argued. "They don't contradict each other. They're two problems created by the same war. They're both our brothers, our fathers, our lovers... We can't really separate them and call ourselves Americans."

"Good speech," Jacob said, starting an exaggerated solo applause that only made her seethe with anger. "But it isn't like the ones you used to make, Carrie. You're losing your edge. Must be that Marine you've sold out to."

That night she cried herself to sleep, wondering if she was, indeed, losing her edge, wondering if she was, indeed, a hypocrite, wondering if she, indeed, believed in any of the things she'd been fighting for.

Because what still dominated her heart, what would always dominate her heart, was Johnny Malone and the fact that she'd let him walk out of her life.

THE SCHOOL YEAR ENDED, and by the time Mark Gray came to say goodbye to her-his head freshly shaved, military style, and his body adorned in a crisp new uniform that lent a whole new aura of dignity to him-Carrie had decided that the Marine Corps was the best choice for him, after all. It was the pride in his carriage she couldn't deny, just like the pride she had seen in Johnny. She hoped Johnny was as happy as Mark appeared to be.

The Watergate drama continued to unfold throughout the summer, and rumors of what was on the mysterious presidential tapes abounded, until Walter Cronkite reported that a twenty-minute erasure had been found on one of them during a crucial conversation about Watergate with Haldeman. Rose, Nixon's secretary, claimed she had accidentally erased five minutes, but it was clear that someone else had tampered with that tape, as well.

Despite Carrie's disenchantment with ARM and their narrow-minded views, she found herself getting angrier over the blatant crimes committed by the president and the fact that he hid behind executive privilege to keep from releasing the last tapes the court had ordered. In the first week of August, the other ARM leaders came to her after the House Judiciary Committee had recommended impeachment on three charges, and asked her to go with them to Washington, D.C. While congressmen and White House advisors worked on Nixon from the inside, they told her, they could work on the outside, demonstrating for Nixon's resignation to save the country from the agony of impeachment proceedings in the House and a subsequent Senate trial. Carrie decided that if she could make any difference at all, it would be worth the trip.

Besides, she realized as she was packing her bags to leave, Johnny wasn't far from Washington, D.C. Maybe enough time had passed to look him up when she got there, she thought. Maybe now, after all this time, she'd have the courage to face him.

Maybe she could get him out of her system once and for all, when she saw him in his element. Then maybe the reality of the situation would make its way home to her.

She hoped so, because it seemed her last chance for getting on with her life.

Chapter Fourteen

The steps of the Capitol were mobbed with protestors on August 7, two days after the transcripts of the most incriminating of the White House tapes were released. Only the day before had the reality of the president's crimes come into focus, and now hundreds of angry voters had turned out for the ARM demonstration calling for Nixon's resignation.

"Enough is enough!" Carrie shouted over the PA system that had been set up to reach all the way down Capitol Hill. "When is the president going to realize that he's lost his ability to govern this country? He's paralyzing us by riding this storm out, and we have to convince him that allowing this to go to either the House or the Senate is just prolonging the agony!"

A wild cheer went up from the crowd, and Carrie, with her hair clamped by a barrette at her nape to battle the heat, lifted her chin and went on. "Somehow, we have to get it across to the president that his time has come and we want him out!" The roar crescendoed, and Carrie's voice rose louder. "We want him prosecuted!" Screams of approval, whistles of elation, came up from the crowd. "We want him in prison and out of our government!"

Carrie's face flushed pink with the power she wielded over the people cheering her on, but she knew it wasn't for her they cheered. It was the idea of the history being woven before their eyes, the history they had all become a part of.

She sent up a chant that the crowd picked up, "Re-sign, re-sign, re-sign!" And then she surrendered the podium to the next speaker and went around to the side of the crowd to grab more fliers to pass out.

The crowd swelled and cheered, and she saw the ABC camera crews threading through the people, filming scenes for the six o'clock news. They were making a difference.

But still her heart wasn't entirely in it.

Her gaze caught on a uniformed army officer in the crowd, and her mind drifted back to that morning, when she'd called Johnny's number a hundred times with no luck. The disappointment at not seeing him yet ate at her conscience, for ARM had paid for her trip, her meals, her room. She owed it to the movement to keep her mind centered and her heart detached. But some things weren't that easy to accomplish.

She walked down the steps of the Capitol to the outskirts of the crowd and saw a cluster of three Marines watching the speaker and cheering with the others. She wondered if they were stationed at Quantico, if they knew Johnny, if they could tell her how to reach him.

Slowly, she stepped toward them, trying to imagine that it was him standing there, that he had come for her, that he would turn around and take her into his arms.

But as she reached the Marines, her spirits deflated. They were nothing like him, she thought. And it was silly to think that they might know him.

Trying not to let her spirits fall too far, she stood still and looked back up at the speaker. It was Jacob Miller, one of the other ARM founders, dressed in a brown suit, his thumbs hooked under the wide lapels. She'd heard his speech a hundred times before. To the others, it sounded fresh and alive and full of conviction. But to her it was just a bunch of words strung together.

Turning away, she looked down the hill, trying to find some shade. And then she saw him.

It was the uniform that caught her eye first, but then she saw that he was looking at her. He started toward her, and a soft, tentative smile transformed his face.

Her heart jolted even before she could see his features clearly. Something about the way he carried himself, the urgency in his step told her that it was Johnny.

She began running toward him and he met her halfway, and before either of them realized what they had done, he had thrown his arms around her in a crushing embrace that told her the old feelings hadn't died, but had grown too big for either of them to handle.

He put her down and she looked up into the bluest, most serene, wonderful eyes she had ever seen, and she sucked in a breath that seemed to fill her with more life than she'd known since he left. "I thought I had imagined you," she whispered. "I was thinking about you when I looked up...."

Johnny smiled tentatively, and she could see that he struggled with the emotions battling on his face. "Meg said you'd be here."

"I called," she said quickly. "Last night and again this morning. I must have tried a hundred times." She settled her eyes on his casual uniform, from the hat sitting so regally on his head, to the rank insignia on his sleeve, to the Marine creases in his shirt, to the trim fit of his khaki pants. Slowly, her eyes met his again, and she felt hers filling with tears of relief, as if she were viewing the first colors she'd seen after eight months of near blindness.

"I've missed you." She hadn't meant to say that, she thought, and she felt silly the moment she did.

He frowned slightly, tilted his head and started to speak. He stopped quickly, looked off for a split second, then swallowed and tried again. "I've missed you, too," he said on a shaky whisper.

Carrie went into his arms again and standing on tiptoe, closed her arms around his neck. His scent was so familiar that it filled her with sweet relief. He smelled clean, masculine, like woodsy outdoors and almost worn-off aftershave, and she thought it was the most ambrosial scent in the world. His face touched hers and she closed her eyes, savoring the feel of his skin against her cheek, the feel of his arms securely around her, the feel of his warmth driving the chill from her heart.

"You feel so good," he whispered, drawing in a long sigh. "So good."

She realized her tears were falling too fast, too hard, and she was wetting the shoulder of his uniform. She wondered if the Marines had some kind of rule about wet shoulders, and pulled back slightly.

"Are you finished here?" he asked.

She wiped her face and nodded, unable to speak.

"Can we go somewhere?"

Again, she nodded.

Johnny tucked her arm under his and held her tightly against him as they started down the stairs, oblivious of the demonstrators and protestors around them, oblivious of the noise, oblivious of the strange looks Carrie got from her own ARM members. All that mattered was that Johnny was holding her again.

An hour later they stood in his off-base apartment, staring at each other with eyes so eloquent that words could never have expressed what lay in their hearts. He framed her face with his hands and lowered his mouth gently to hers.

Her heart burst the moment he kissed her, and new tears streamed down her face, wetting her lips. He broke free and trailed a path of kisses up the wet route of tears on her face. She closed her eyes and stood motionless as he dipped and nuzzled her neck. He stopped at the tiny gold chain holding the emerald he had given her for Christmas, touched it with one fingertip and looked up at her. The look was filled with a thousand questions, a million hopes, an infinite number of wishes that he didn't dare articulate. Instead of asking those questions, expressing those hopes, declaring those wishes, he claimed her lips again.

Slowly, his hand came up to release the buttons on the front of her dress and gently, he opened it, sliding it off of her shoulders. She watched the way the pupils in his eyes grew, making the color of his eyes change from blue to black, making the color in his face change, as well. She loved him, she thought, with every fiber of her being. She could love him for the rest of her life. And if he asked her to stay this time, to follow him to the far ends of the earth, she would.

But he didn't ask. Instead he held himself back, terrified of frightening her away, and moved slower than his desire dictated.

I love you, he wanted desperately to say. I want to know this isn't a nostalgic fling. I want it to be forever.

But he couldn't say those things, for something was better than nothing, even if it meant suffering the pain that was inevitable when she left him. He couldn't think of that now.

He lifted her into his arms, carried her to his bed and laid her down, his eyes savoring the sight that brought calm and joy to his aching, ailing soul. And he made love with her until the sun went down, and held her until the sun came up. And then he loved her again.

It was midmorning the next day when they turned on the television and heard the news that the president had scheduled a televised address to the nation at nine that night, and that he was expected to resign.

"I have to call my hotel," Carrie said quickly. "I can't believe it."

Johnny listened quietly as she confirmed what she'd heard on the news, and when she hung up, she turned back to him. "They want me to be there with them tonight when he makes his speech on television. It's sort of a victory party." She crossed the room, slid her arms around his neck and held him tightly. "Will you go with me, Johnny?"

Johnny's chuckle was heavy and strained. "I'd be a little out of place, don't you think?"

"Please, Johnny," she whispered. "I have to go, but I'm not ready to leave you yet."

Johnny pushed the hair back from her face, despising the word yet that came so easily from her lips. "All right," he whispered. "I'll come."

THE BALLROOM OF THE HOTEL was packed with ARM members and supporters when Carrie got there that night, walking proudly on the arm of her Marine. Ecstasy reigned so high that few had much to say about the uniformed man who had infiltrated their ranks. All eyes were focused on the dozen televisions in the room, where Nixon addressed the nation from the Oval Office for the thirty-seventh time in his presidency, explaining that since he no longer had the support of Congress, he felt it necessary to "resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow," at which time Gerald Ford would be sworn in.

The celebration was ambivalent. They had won, yes, and a new era had begun. But there was a feeling of distrust in the air, a feeling of suspicion, a feeling of betrayal. It would take a long time for the nation to heal.

They spoke of that healing later that night as Carrie, Johnny and three other ARM leaders sat in Carrie's hotel room, drinking a champagne toast to their victory.

"But the healing's already begun," Johnny said, knowing that nothing he had to say would interest Carrie's colleagues, who had spent the entire evening ignoring him at all cost. But he didn't care. He wanted Carrie to hear, because his time was running out. "The House Judiciary Committee's recommendation to impeach and Nixon's resignation all go to show you that the system works. It may be slow and it may take a lot of patience and a lot of faith, but eventually, it does work."

Carrie had to agree. "A few months ago, I wouldn't have believed it."

Johnny held her gaze, wondering if she had other opinions that had changed over the last several months. If she had, she hadn't told him.

One of the ARM members stood and stretched her arms over her head. "Well, I've got to get to bed. Don't forget, we have an early flight tomorrow, Carrie."

Carrie caught her breath. "What?"

"Didn't Jacob tell you?" the woman asked. "When we found out our work was done, he booked our return flights for tomorrow morning."

"Oh." Carrie swallowed, glanced at Johnny, then looked at the floor. "Okay."

The other three members filed out of the room, leaving Carrie alone with Johnny. Ask me to stay, she thought, unable to meet his eyes. Ask me to marry you again, and I will.

But he didn't ask.

Instead, he shrugged, and she wondered if it was her imagination that the corners of his lips trembled the slightest degree. "I guess that just leaves us the rest of the night," he whispered.

She looked at the floor and tried desperately not to cry.

He stepped toward her, hooked a finger under her chin and made her look up at him. "We could go get something to eat," he said. "Take a walk. Have you ever seen the Lincoln Memorial at night?"

She shook her head, and he laced his fingers through hers and held her hand tightly in his.

"It's a long time until morning," he whispered. And when he kissed her, she thought that morning was just a few minutes away. For an eternity wouldn't be enough time with Johnny.

THEY ARRIVED AT THE AIRPORT an hour early and sat quietly together, Carrie resting her head on Johnny's shoulder, staring out at the planes coming in for landings, and the others just taking off, leaving loved ones behind.

He had given her every opportunity, he thought, to tell him she wanted to stay and spend the rest of her life with him. But she hadn't said it.

And Johnny knew then that no amount of suffering he'd ever lived through in his life compared to the depth of sadness that knowledge settled on his spirit. She wasn't staying. He was going to lose her again.

Her friends checked in just before boarding time, and Carrie ignored the first call. Her hold on Johnny's arm seemed to tighten, and he prayed that he'd have the strength to let her go when the time came.

When the final boarding call came, Carrie looked up at him, her face twisted as she tried to hold back her tears. But they fell anyway. "Well, looks like this is it."

"Yeah." He didn't trust his voice to say more.

She frowned, breathed in a broken sob and laid her head on his chest as she embraced him. "I love you, Johnny."

Then don't leave me. He tipped her face up to his, saw the anguish in her eyes. "I love you, too."

Then ask me to stay. She saw the beginning of a tear glisten in the corner of his eye. "Goodbye," she whispered.

The corners of his mouth trembled as he dropped his hands to his sides and looked away, unable to bear the sight of the futile tears in her eyes. Anger rose up inside him, for he knew her love was real, knew she suffered pain like his. But still she wouldn't stay.

The boarding line trickled down to two people, and Carrie started toward it, warning herself not to look back. But as she reached the entrance to the ramp, she couldn't help looking over her shoulder at him.

He stood straight and proud in his khaki-colored uniform, but that pride and esteem she had noticed before was now juxtaposed by a deep, hovering sadness that resided in his eyes. It mirrored the sadness in her own heart, a sadness that would never be quelled. Not as long as she lived.

Quickly, she turned away and started down the ramp, walking faster as her emotions overwhelmed her. She reached the place where the line had bottlenecked at the entrance to the plane, and collapsing against the wall, she covered her face with her hands and wept for what she was leaving behind.

Her head ached with the force of her regrets, and the people ahead of her stepped onto the plane. She looked back one last time, as if she left a huge portion of herself back there, a piece that would die the moment she set foot on that plane.

Still, forcing herself to take the necessary steps and knowing she would regret them for the rest of her life, Carrie followed the other passengers aboard.

SHE'S GONE.

The reality of that paralyzed Johnny, making it impossible for him to turn around, walk out of the airport and go on as if nothing had happened. His heart hammered like a separate force within him, beating out a message of chastisement and regret that he hadn't pleaded with her to stay, that he hadn't begged her not to leave.

Paralyzed, he stood at the window, watching the plane as it slowly backed out of the terminal, turned around and started down the runway. The tears that had been holding in his eyes since he'd let her go fell to his cheek and idly, he swept them away with shaking fingertips. He held his breath, unable to take his eyes off that plane as it paused to wait for clearance. And when it picked up speed and lifted off, his heart crashed through his stomach and his teeth ground together with the force of his pain.

She had left him. She had really left him. He'd had no right to hope...

Someone touched his shoulder and he swung around, unable to hide the raw anguish on his face, but ready to lash out at anyone who crossed him.

Carrie stood before him like the answer to a prayer, her face wet with the tears rivering down her cheeks and a soft smile playing on her lips. "I can't leave you," she whispered.

"Thank God." He crushed her against him, holding her with the force of his mending heart. "Oh, thank God. Thank God."

He didn't know how long he held her...it could have been ten minutes or an hour. For now, the feel of her clinging to him, crying in his arms, offering herself to him was enough to last him a lifetime.

Finally, when her voice was stable and she was able to catch her breath, she pulled back and looked into his eyes.

"Marry me, soldier," she whispered on a wobbly voice. "I don't think I can stand it if you don't."

He pulled back and looked at her, his tormented eyes assessing her for proof of her reality, for he'd imagined this moment so many times before. "Are you sure? Can you live with the idea that I'm a Marine? The knowledge that a war could blow up, I could be sent away? I have to know you're sure."

She silenced him with her fingertips over his lips. "I'm sure that you belong in the Marines, Johnny," she whispered. "And I'm sure that we belong together. And whatever that means to the rest of our lives, I'm sure that it's right. Because I don't want to live another day without you."

He drew her back against him and kissed her with the force of every emotion she had incited in him in the past year, making her melt in the sweet gentleness of his arms.

And it was the first true peace either of them had known since they'd been apart.

Epilogue

October 1974

The pastor of the church where Carrie's family had belonged all her life smiled like a grandfather as he beheld the bride dressed in a calf-length, white chiffon dress, with tiny white rose buds and baby's breath strung through her long hair. But it was Johnny's proud smile that made her feel more beautiful than she'd ever felt in her life.

She had wanted to marry him weeks ago, but the moment he'd heard of Ford's amnesty program for draft dodgers and deserters, proclaiming that it was time "to heal the wounds that have festered too long," Johnny had insisted on waiting until Brian could celebrate with them. It wouldn't be right, he'd said, to marry her without her twin brother standing up for her.

She had seen her father and brother embrace each other for the first time in three years last night at the rehearsal, and now she felt that all of the pieces of her life were falling into place.

She smiled and turned to her future husband as Johnny uttered the simple, personal declaration they had written into their ceremony, taken from a verse by Shelley.

"'Teach me half the gladness/That thy brain must know,'" Johnny said, so quietly, so intimately, that only the wedding party could hear. "'Such harmonious madness/ From my lips would flow/The world should listen then-as I am listening now.'"

Carrie prayed that her voice wouldn't abandon her as she whispered Wordsworth's lines that seemed to have been written expressly for them.

"'That neither evil tongues,/Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,/Nor greetings where no kindness is-" she smiled at the trembling of Johnny's lips and thought how vulnerable the warrior who'd fought and outsmarted death, the man who'd taught her how to really love, the man who could have conquered the world since he'd conquered her heart, looked today in full dress "-nor all/The dreary intercourse of daily life,/Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb/Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold/Is full of blessings.'"

The pastor stepped forward, Bible in hand, and offered the traditional vows-minus the part about obeying-which they repeated to each other. When he asked for the ring, Meg, beaming with defiant pride that she'd been chosen to be Johnny's Best Woman, though she preferred the term Best Person, handed the gold band to Johnny.

If there were any rules in a seventies wedding, it was that there were no rules, so Carrie handed her bouquet to her brother, standing so tall and clean-cut in his rented tuxedo, for he was her chosen Man of Honor. He winked at his sister as he took it, and watched as Johnny slipped the band over her finger.

"I now pronounce you husband and wife."

The organ chimed as Johnny kissed his bride, then threw his arms around her waist and swung her around in a circle. Laughter rose up from the congregation and a cheer of joy filled the building from the back of the church, where at least a hundred Central High School students had packed the pews.

Johnny set Carrie back down and still holding her, he reached out to shake the pastor's hand. Meg latched onto Brian's arm to make their march behind the bride and groom. Sally and Barbara followed, pairing up with Doc and Larry. Zeke hovered in front of them, flashing a camera as he backed out of the church.

They hurried down the aisle, shaking hands and offering hugs as they went, and as they passed the football team, another cheer erupted.

Finally pulling themselves away from the well-wishers, they had almost reached the door to the church when a Marine stood up in the back row.

Johnny and Carrie's steps slowed as they saw Mark Gray, transformed from boy to man in just a few short months. They came closer to him, and Johnny stopped, forcing the wedding party behind them to stop, as well. Smiling, he extended his hand to the young man who had come so far in the past year.

Mark didn't take the offered hand. Instead, he stood taller and prouder, and raised his hand in a Marine salute.

Johnny answered it with a somber, noble salute of his own.

"You told me you'd make me a winner," Mark said quietly. "And that's what I feel like today. Thanks, Coach."

"I had a lot to work with," Johnny said. Their hands came down in a brotherly handshake, and Johnny pulled Mark into a masculine embrace.

Letting the young Marine go, Johnny turned back to his bride, the woman who had helped him to put away the ghosts of his past, the memories that held him back, the nightmares that kept him from living.

And he had helped her put away her baggage, as well.

They reached the front steps of the church, and Johnny saw ARM members picketing with signs that called for government programs to help Vietnam veterans.

Carrie shook her head and laughed, the deepest, most joyous laugh he had ever heard from her. "I told them we expected a big turnout," she said. "They never miss an opportunity to pass out fliers."

Johnny pulled her into his arms. "That's okay, just so long as you don't take one of those signs yourself and leave me alone at the reception."

Carrie framed his face with her hands. "No need," she said. "I can lobby all I want in Washington as soon as we get back to Quantico."

Johnny laughed and scooped her up, carrying her down to the hall where their reception would be held. They were the first ones there, for the rest of the wedding party had gotten lost in the crowd on the steps of the church.

Carrie slid her arms around Johnny's neck and kissed him in a way that she hadn't been able to in the church, with hundreds of people watching. Despite how long she had waited to do the wedding right, to invite everyone they both knew, to celebrate their love publicly, now all she could think about was getting him alone.

They had a lot of loving to do, a lot of living, a lot of laughing. As difficult as their lives had been or might ever become, they would make it together. They were both survivors, fighters, believers. They would cling to each other, neither ending the journey they had embarked upon together.

Johnny knew that all the inequities, all the injustices and all the bitterness of his past didn't seem so insurmountable anymore. For the first time in years, he felt whole. He felt right. He felt at peace.

Because he was finally home.