The minute Johnny left to get them drinks, Kate looked across the table. "What are you doing with him?"
Tully laughed. "What can I say? We ran into each other after work and had a few drinks. One thing led to another, and . . ." She looked sharply at Kate. "Do youcareif I sleep with him?"
There it was. The question that mattered. Kate had no doubt that if she bared her soul and told the truth, this horrible night would be over. Tully would shut Johnny down faster than a storm door in a tornado, and she wouldn't tell Johnny why.
But what good would come of that? Kate knew how Johnny felt about Tully, how he'd always felt. He wanted a woman with passion and fire; losing Tully wouldn't make him turn to Kate. And maybe it was time for drastic measures, finally. Kate's hope had endured so much, but this—him sleeping with Tully—would be the end of it.
She lifted her gaze, praying her eyes were dry. "Come on, Tully, you know better than that."
"Are you sure? Do you want—"
"No. But . . . he cares about you, you do know that, right? You could break his heart."
Tully laughed at that. "You Catholic girls worry about everyone, don't you?"
Before Kate could answer, Johnny returned to the table with two margaritas and a bottle of beer. Setting them down, he took Tully's hand and dragged her onto the floor. There, they melted into the crowd, where he took her into his arms and kissed her.
Kate reached for her drink. She had no idea what that kiss meant to Tully, but she knew what it meant to Johnny, and the knowledge seeped through her like some kind of poison.
For the next two hours, she sat with them, drinking heavily, pretending she was having fun. All the while something inside of her was slowly dying.
At some point during the endless, excruciating evening, Tully went to the bathroom and left Johnny and Kate alone. She tried to think of something to say to him, but frankly, she didn't dare make eye contact. With his damp, curling hair and flushed cheeks, he looked so damned sexy it made her chest ache.
"She's really something," he said. Behind him, the band finished their song and turned to their sheet music for inspiration. "I was starting to think it would never happen . . . her and me," he said, sipping his beer, gazing back toward the bathroom, as if he could draw her back by will alone.
"You should be careful," Kate said almost too quietly to be heard. She knew the words, and the warning, would reveal something of her heart, but she couldn't help herself. Johnny might wear the suit of a cynic at work, but at the hospital she'd learned the truth. Inside, where it mattered, he was an idealist. No one bruised as easily as a believer. She should know.
Johnny leaned toward her. "What was that, Mularkey?"
She shook her head. There was no way she could say it again, and besides, Tully was back.
Much later, when she lay in her lonely bedroom, listening to the sound of lovemaking coming from another room, she finally cried.
In the months since their party night at Kells Pub, Kate was not the only one to notice the change in Johnny. As autumn settled into the city and stripped it of color, the mood in the office became sullen and quiet. Mutt kept completely to himself, cleaning and rearranging his equipment, filing negatives in notebooks. Carol, who had been cajoled back to work after Tully's departure, stayed in her own office, with the door shut, barely saying a word to everyone, even when she got her coffee.
No one said a word about Johnny's appearance, but everyone saw that he seemed lately to be simply rolling out of bed and coming to work. His hair was too long and beginning to curl in all kinds of weird ways. He hadn't shaved in days; his beard grew in dark, shadowed patches on his hollowed cheeks, and his clothes often didn't match.
The first few times he'd come to work this way, they'd rallied around him like geese, clucking their worry. Quietly but firmly he'd shut the door to his office, saying he was fine. Mutt had mounted an offensive that began with an offer of pot and ended with, "Whatever, man. I'm here if you wanna talk."
Carol had tried in her own way to swim the invisible moat Johnny had ringed around himself; her attempts failed as utterly as Mutt's.
The only one who didn't try to reach Johnny was Kate, and she was the only one who knew what the problem was.
Tully.
Just that morning, as they'd been having breakfast, Tully had said, "Johnny keeps calling me. Should I go out with him again?"
Fortunately for Kate, it had turned out to be a rhetorical question.
Tully answered it herself. "No way. I want a relationship like I want a lethal injection. I thought he knew that."
Now Kate sat at her desk, supposedly filing their new insurance information.
She and Johnny were alone in the office for the first time in days. Carol and Mutt were out on assignment.
She got up slowly, walked to his closed office door. It made no sense for her to go to him; certainly if the tables were turned he wouldn't have gone to her, but he was hurting right now, and she couldn't stand that. After a long minute, she knocked.
"Come in."
