“Sit down, Rebecca.”
“I’m starving.” Terrified he would touch her and she would fall apart, she moved away. “I think there’s still some of that chocolate cake one of your harem dropped off.”
“Rebecca.” His voice was quiet, and his eyes were troubled. She kept pressing a hand to her stomach, he noted, as if something inside hurt. “I think you should sit down.”
“I can make more coffee. I’ve figured this thing out.” She started to reach for the canister, but he stepped forward, took her shoulders gently. “What?” The word snapped out, her body jerking.
Careful, he thought, disturbed by the brittle look in her eyes. “So, you’re from Connecticut.”
She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders under his hands. “My parents live there.”
“That’s where you grew up.”
“Not exactly. I lived there when I wasn’t in school. You don’t want to drink that,” she added, glancing at the pot. “It’s been sitting for hours. I’d said I’d make fresh.”
“What did she say to upset you, baby?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” But he kept holding her, kept looking at her with boundless patience and concern. “She wants me to campaign for a position at her college. It’s a very prestigious position. I’m not interested. It’s a divergence of opinion, and she’s not used to me having an opinion.”
It was simple enough, he thought, or it should have been. But there was nothing simple about her reaction. “You told her no.”
“It doesn’t particularly matter. It never did, on the rare occasions I actually got up the courage to say it. I expect my father will be calling shortly, to remind me of my obligations and responsibilities.”
“Who are you obligated to?”
“To them, to education, to posterity. I have a responsibility to use my talents, and to reap the rewards. It’s just a variation on ‘Publish or perish,’ the battle cry of academia. Let’s forget it.”
He let her move away, because she seemed to need it. Her hands were steady as she measured out coffee, and her face was blank while she filled the pot.
Then, with a shudder, she set everything down. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. This is how I got ulcers.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Ulcers, migraines, insomnia, and a near miss with a breakdown. Isn’t this why I studied psychiatry?”
She wasn’t talking to him, Shane realized, so he said nothing. But he was beginning to burn inside.
“Repression isn’t the answer. I know that. It’s one of the things that punish the body for what’s closed up in the mind. It’s always so much easier to analyze someone else, always much harder to see things when it’s yourself.”
Her rigid hands raked through her hair. “I’m not going to be directed this time. I’m not going to be hammered at until I give. The hell with them. The hell with them. They never did anything but make me into a miserable, neurotic freak.”
She whirled back to him. Her face wasn’t blank now, it was livid. “Do you know what it’s like to be four years old and expected to read Dante in Italian, and discuss it? To sit at the dinner table, when you weren’t shuffled off somewhere else, and be quizzed on physics or converse about the Renaissance—in French, naturally?”
“No,” he said quietly. “Why don’t you tell me what it’s like?”
“It’s horrible. Horrible. To have your own parents regard you as a thing, a rousing success of genetics. I hated it, but what choice do you have when you’re a child? You do what’s expected of you. Then you get in the habit and you keep right on doing it even when you’re not a child. One day you look in the mirror, and you see something so pathetic it hurts to look. And you wonder, why not just end it?”
The anger inside him turned to dry-mouthed shock. “Rebecca.”
Impatient, she shook her head. “Maybe you fantasize about it, even obsess. And you’re clever, you’re so damned clever that you can find the most effective, the most painless way, to accomplish it. And, of course, the most tidy.”
He didn’t speak now. She’d shaken him down to the bone, and he was chilled to the marrow. This woman, this beautiful, precious woman, had considered ending her life.
She rubbed absently at the headache that throbbed dead-center in her forehead. “But you’re too intelligent, too
well programmed, to tolerate that kind of waste. It frightens you a little to realize you could actually do it, so you decide—being a practical person—to study human behavior, psychiatry, instead. A much more productive outlet, all in all.”
“How old were you?” he managed, but had to take a steadying breath before he could go on. “How old were you when you…”