100 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
soft, wavering light from the hurricane lamps on the bar, was still narrow and deeply carved and handsome. But I could feel the unease in him. It was as if, underneath the surface of a placid long-known pool, an unaccountable maelstrom had suddenly started up. I had literally never felt deep uncertainty in Joe before, not even during my therapy; I felt as though a tree or a boulder had suddenly revealed its dense, swarming atoms to the naked eye. Tiny, bright spears of terror spurted up my wrists, and my face tingled numbly. I swallowed my brandy in a gulp and handed the glass back for a refill. “Christ, Cat,” Joe said under his voice. “Somehow this doesn’t seem the perfect place to get drunk.” I drank down the second brandy, and the fear receded a little. “Just don’t leave me,” I whispered to Joe, who was still sipping his Campari and soda and scanning the rooftop. “I know we’re going to have to go mingle, but please don’t leave me.” “I won’t,” he said, and smiled, and more of the strangeness shrank back. “But go easy on the brandy. I don’t want to have to fight Sam Forrest or that tennis player for your honor.” “Since when did you ever have to?” I said, stung. “Just joking, Cat. Lighten up. I’m not going to leave you.” But he did. In a few minutes the main body of the party, which was clustered around the buffet table at the other end of the roof garden, parted, and Colin Gerard called out of it, “Hey, Joe! Come tell these ignoramuses what Trastevere’s greatest poet said about the Trasteverinos!” Joe smiled, and let his arm drop from around my