Perfect (Second Opportunities 2)

"I didn't expect to see you down here until morning," Katherine said with a surprised smile as she stood up. "I made up a dinner tray for you though, just in case. I'll get it."

"Was there anything important on the news?" Julie asked, unable to keep the apprehension from her voice.

"Nothing about Zachary Benedict," Katherine assured her. "You were a main topic of the state and national news, however—your return home from captivity, apparently safe and unharmed, I mean."

When Julie dismissed that with a shrug, Katherine put her hands on her hips and teased, "Do you have any idea how famous you've become?"

"Notorious, you mean," Julie joked, falling into their habitual friendly banter and feeling vastly better than she had in the last two days.

Nodding toward a stack of newspapers and magazines on the lamp table beside Julie's chair, Katherine said, "I saved those for you in case you wanted them for a scrapbook or something. Look through them while I get your tray, or have you seen them already?"

"I haven't seen a newspaper or a magazine in a week," Julie said, reaching for the magazine on top and turning it over to the cover. "Oh good God!" she exploded, torn between anger and laughter as she gazed at her own face on the cover of Newsweek magazine beneath a lurid headline that read, "Julie Mathison—Partner or Pawn?" She tossed that aside and flipped through the rest of the stack, astonished to see pictures of herself plastered across the front pages of dozens of national magazines and newspapers.

Katherine came back in carrying a tray and put it on the table in front of her.

"The whole town has rallied around you," Katherine said with a brief glance at the Newsweek cover. "Mayor Addelson wrote an editorial for the Keaton Crier reminding everyone that no matter what the big-city press says about you, we know you here, and we know you'd never 'take up with' a criminal like Zachary Benedict. I think those were his exact words."

Julie's smile wobbled a little and she laid the paper aside. "But you know better. As you heard me tell Carl and Ted, I did 'take up' with him."

"At the time, Addelson was rebutting that truck driver's statement that you seemed to be collaborating willingly in Benedict's escape—frolicking in the snow and all that. Julie," she said hesitantly, "do you want to talk to me about it—about him?"

Looking at her friend, Julie remembered the confidences they'd exchanged over the years. They were the same age and had become fast friends almost from the moment Ted introduced them to each other. When Ted and Katherine's marriage fell apart, Katherine had gone back to college and then moved to Dallas. Until now, she'd adamantly refused to return to Keaton, but Julie had visited her often in Dallas at Katherine's insistence. The special friendship that had sprung up instantaneously had somehow survived time and separation, and it was as vital and natural as it had always been. "I think I need to talk about him," Julie admitted after a pause. "Maybe then I'll get him out of my system and be able to start thinking of the future again." Having said that much, she lifted her hands palm up and said helplessly, "I don't even know how to begin."

Katherine curled up on the sofa as if she had all the time in the world and suggested a starting point: "What's Zachary Benedict like in real life?"

"What's he like?" Julie mused, drawing a knitted afghan over her lap. For a moment she stared past Katherine's shoulder, trying to think of how to describe Zack, then she said, "He's hard, Katherine. Very hard. But he's gentle, too. Sometimes, I actually ached inside from the sweetness of the things he did and said." She trailed off and then tried again, with examples. "During the first two days I actually thought he might kill me if I defied him. On the third day, I managed to escape from him on a snowmobile I found in the garage…"

Three hours later, Julie finished, having told Katherine almost everything with the exception of intimate moments, which Julie didn't attempt to hide, but didn't describe in specifics either.

Katherine had listened in complete absorption, interrupting only for clarification, laughing at things that were funny like their snowball fight, gaping in disbelief at Zack's jealousy of Patrick Swayze, frowning at other times—sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with disapproval. "What a story!" she said when Julie finished. "If it was anyone but you telling me this, I wouldn't believe a word of it. Did I ever tell you I used to have a big crush on Zachary Benedict? Later I simply thought of him as a murderer. But now…" She broke off as if unable to put her thoughts into words, and then she finished, "No wonder you can't stop thinking of him. I mean, the story doesn't have an ending, it just sort of hangs there, unfinished. If he's innocent, then the story is supposed to have a happy ending with the real murderer going to jail. The good guy isn't supposed to spend the rest of his life living like a hunted animal."

"Unfortunately," Julie said grimly, "this is real life, not the movies, and that's the way the story is going to end."

"It's still a lousy ending." Katherine insisted. "And that's all there is to it?" Repeating the last thing that Julie had told her, Katherine summarized, "Yesterday at dawn, you both got up, he walked you out to the car, and then you drove away? Just like that?"

"I wish it had been 'just like that'!" Julie admitted unhappily. "That's how Zack wanted it to be, and I knew it. Unfortunately," she added, trying to keep her voice steady, "I couldn't seem to do it that way. Not only did I start to cry, I made everything even worse by telling him I loved him. I knew he didn't want to hear it because I'd blurted it out the night before, and he pretended he didn't hear me. Yesterday, it was worse. Not only did I humiliate myself by telling him I loved him, but he—he—" Julie trailed off in shame.

"What did he do?" Katherine asked gently.

Forcing herself to look at her friend and to keep her voice emotionless, she said, "He smiled like an adult does to a foolish child and informed me that I did not love him, that I only thought I did because I don't know the difference between love and sex. Then he told me to go home where I belong and forget all about him. Which is exactly what I intend to do."

Astonishment and bewilderment furrowed Katherine's forehead into a frown. "What an odd, ugly way for him to behave," she said sharply, "given the sort of man you portrayed him to be until then."

"I thought it was, too," Julie said miserably, "particularly when I was almost certain that he cared about me. Sometimes, there was a look in his eyes, as if he—" She broke off in disgust at her gullibility and said angrily, "If I could go back to yesterday morning and do it over again, I'd pretend I was perfectly happy to be going. I'd thank him for a great adventure, then I'd drive away and leave him standing there! That's what I should have—" She trailed off, imagining the scene in her mind, then very slowly she shook her head, negating the whole idea, struck by a realization that made her feel much better. "That would have been an incredibly stupid, wrong thing to do," she said aloud.