She Didn’t Ask

Rosey Malone is surprised by a figure from her past.

Originally published in the SHareCon 2012 zine.

She was hiding in a corner, tucked away into the shadows in hopes of stretching her few minutes of freedom. Her father would be furious, as he always was when she eluded her bodyguard, but if only temporarily and for very brief periods, Rosey had learned to challenge the Mighty Malone. A very special man had taught her that, what felt like a century ago.

The cantina was quieter than usual today. Only a few locals hanging around, and one lonely gringo sitting at a table in the one patch of distilled sunlight that filtered through the dirty fly-specked window. For just a moment, the sight of a head of curls she had so often dreamed of, put a catch in Rosey’s breathing, but she dismissed the possibility almost immediately. He had been on her mind, as he often was since the day she had chosen flight and, unknowingly, an imprisoned life, over love with the cop she had known so very briefly.

It was just coincidence that the gringo was curly-haired. The man who sat morosely, head turned toward the door, was too thin, too pale, too sickly to be the vital, energetic lover Rosey had left behind.

Then he turned and smiled at the waitress who delivered a cup, and worn, tired features lit with the warmth of that grin. In that instant, Rosey knew that improbable or impossible as it might be, David Starsky was here, in Mexico, in Jose’s filthy cantina.

Impulsively, Rosey left her chair, but hesitated as the waitress moved away from Starsky’s table and he returned to his anxious door watching. He was expecting someone. Perhaps he was working undercover as he had been when they first met. Reluctantly, Rosey sank back into her chair, but couldn’t take her eyes off the man she had never expected to see again.

She had been such a fool. Within a matter of days of fleeing to Mexico with her father, Rosey had known that. A fool to cling to her father like a frightened little girl. A bigger fool to let David Starsky slip through her fingers. Her dreams, both waking and sleeping, were so often filled with the memories of the too-brief days they had loved. She had wondered many times if he ever thought of her, but had known that she would never have the chance to ask him.

But there he was. Inexplicable his presence might be, but he was here. Like a gift from a benevolent god, he sat just a few feet away. The answers to her questions, and perhaps the same hopeless yearning, inside him. If only she had the nerve to ask, to take the chance that, just maybe, he had come looking for her. That hers was the face he so anxiously waited to see.

With nothing to lose and perhaps an opportunity to recapture the past, Rosey found the courage to take the chance.

“David?” she said softly when she stood beside him, the single word nearly stuck in her throat by how very changed he was. He appeared so frighteningly frail as he stared at her for a moment without recognition, as if all but an ember of the energetic vitality she remembered had been extinguished within him.

“Rosey?” Starsky finally said, that smile that had so enchanted her lighting his eyes and easing the angles of his face. He rose to his feet, ever gallant, but Rosey noticed the struggle it seemed to be for him to leave the chair. Struggle or not, he gallantly held her chair for her, then sat down across from her. No, not sat, sank, as if the simple, gentlemanly gesture had sapped his strength.

Deliberately, Rosey rested her hands on the table, but he didn’t reach for them, just as he hadn’t offered an embrace. Did he remember how it felt to be held in her arms? Rosey didn’t have the courage to ask.

“What are you doing here?” Starsky asked, a small wave of his hand indicating not so much the cantina as the small, poor village outside the door.

“Playing hooky, at the moment,” Rosey confessed, then even more honestly, “Or maybe I should call it hide and seek.”

Starsky cocked his head, a trace of curiosity on his face, but he didn’t ask her to clarify.

“What about you?” Rosey asked to fill the awkward silence. She couldn’t remember any silences between them before, awkward or otherwise. Was her memory playing tricks on her, creating a retrospective perfection that had never existed?

“Just bumming around,” Starsky answered vaguely. “How have you been?”

“Fine,” Rosey replied. It was a lie of the same variety she told herself every day. She was lonely and useless and so very, very trapped.

“Still running every day?” Starsky asked before Rosey could turn the subject to his too-thin face and carefully hunched shoulders. To the deliberate caution of every movement that had replaced the strong and casual grace that haunted her dreams.

“Yes, of course,” Rosey replied. But now she never ran alone, and never ran free. A dozen circuits of the compound with the footfalls of a guardian or two forever blending with her own. A bitter reminder of when the man she was falling in love with had run beside her. “Are you still running your twenty miles?” she asked, remembering the outrageous lie and how convincingly he had told it. So many lies, and so much truth.

A shadow passed over Starsky’s face at the question, the hollows beneath cheekbones and at temples becoming more pronounced without his smile to distract the eye. “I’ve scaled back a little,” he admitted, his eyes on the finger that traced the outline of an ancient water/whisky ring on the table.

Rosey remembered the feel of his hands on her body. The tight anticipation he had conjured in her with his kisses and confident caresses, and the joy of being mounted and claimed by him.

Did he remember? Had she meant so little to him that he didn’t recall the taste of her mouth, the texture of her skin? The pleasure he had found inside her? He had wept for the loss of her love, but perhaps they been only crocodile tears after all.

Starsky’s eyes were on the door again, an aura of anxious anticipation surrounding him even though his body remained utterly still. Waiting and watching. For something. The same way she had anxiously awaited him in the hope he would rescue her from her golden prison. In all the lonely months she had yearned for him, had he ever remembered her?

The question was on her lips, desperation granting her unaccustomed courage, when Starsky’s face suddenly lit up. For the first time, Rosey truly saw the man she had loved, the vitality and the joy and the love of life. And none of it was for her. She could see that, for David Starsky, she had ceased to exist. This once-upon-a-time lover of hers now had eyes only for the tall, slim blond who approached their table.

“Sorry it took me so long,” the blond apologized, settling, braced on both feet, beside Starsky. His face and body were both alert and wary as if he expected to have to leap to his friend’s defence.

“Hutch, you remember Rosey? Rosey, this is my…partner, Ken Hutchinson,” Starsky introduced them, a proprietary inflection to his voice and his eyes as he looked up at Hutchinson.

Rosey had met him only once, and hadn’t had any idea who he was then, but his golden good looks weren’t the kind a woman forgot. Even if he wasn’t her type. Even if she was in love with his dark, gypsy mirror image. She didn’t, however, remember how icy his eyes had been, polar caps that met hers and offered a challenge she did not understand.

“Of course. A pleasure to see you again, Miss Malone,” Hutchinson said, though his expression declared the opposite emotion. There was a warning in his eyes and a definite proprietary ownership to the hands he placed on Starsky’s shoulders.

Awkward silence again, echoing with the past that she had thrown away, aching with the future Rosey now knew would never be. There was no need to ask. The possessive hands and the willing submission of the body beneath them said it all. The love she had so foolishly thrown away had been given to this partner who obviously had the sense to cherish it.

“I don’t want to rush you,” Hutchinson said, a pause inside which Rosey could hear the endearment that lived in his eyes when he looked at Starsky. Eyes that had thawed, the sky blue glowing with love and pride. “But we should get back to the hotel. You need to rest.”

“Yes, Mama,” Starsky said, but there was no sarcasm in his voice, and only love in his eyes as, without hesitation, he accepted Hutch’s help to rise from the chair. “It was nice to see you again, Rosey.”

Rosey stood, too, the questions that had haunted her night and day clamouring to be spoken. Do you remember died on her tongue, the answer already given by the ease with which Starsky stood under Hutchinson’s possessive hand. If he did remember her, it was as a brief and closed chapter of his life.

Rosey sank back down into her chair, watching them leave as despair overwhelmed her. For months she had lived from empty day to empty day on memories, her sanity preserved by hope and faith in impossible dreams. What fantasy would sustain her now?

The End