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Chapter 3

The bar at the Sheraton, like most hotel bars, featured the standard lounge singer backed by a three piece combo, waiters in crisp black and white, soft, ambient lighting, and low-backed barstools of butter-soft leather. But despite the mellow ambience, Lisa Reisert felt edgy. She toyed with her glass, watched the sweat from the ice cubes drip down to saturate the cocktail napkin, and chewed on her straw. Then she tossed her straw aside, picked up her glass and quickly drained the contents. She closed her eyes and relished the burn as the gin slid down her throat. She honestly didn't like the taste of gin, but figured if you were serious about drinking, gin and tonic was about as honest as you could get. You couldn't pretend you were drinking it because it tasted good; you knew you were in it for the buzz.

As usual, she had set herself a strict two-drink limit, and this marked the end of the first one. She glanced around, looking for the bartender. Just as she caught his eye, the man sitting next to her spoke up and tried to buy her next drink. She refused and pulled a twenty from her purse and laid it beside her glass.

"Didn't mean to offend you." His voice was soft and matter-of-fact.

She glanced over at him, feeling somewhat more relaxed now, and saw a slightly built man in a rumpled charcoal suit. His hair was dark blonde and longish, cut in a style that made her think he was probably only a few years older than she. She couldn't see much of his face; he seemed to be staring into his glass with a kind of detached bemusement.

"I'm not offended," she said. "Not in the least." Then, slightly astonished at her own curiosity, she asked, "Are you staying here in the hotel?"

"No."

After a long moment, Lisa picked up her glass. "I guess it's my turn to apologize. I didn't mean to be intrusive."

"You weren't." His shoulders moved in a very slight shrug. "This is a hotel. It's a natural question. No, I'm a native. I come here… well, probably for the same reasons you do. I've seen you before, you know."

"I beg your pardon?" But she thought she knew. Six months ago, her face had been front-page news. TV cameras had followed her mercilessly, with journalists nipping at her heels trying to get a sound byte for the evening news from the woman who had foiled a terrorist plot to assassinate the director of Homeland Security and his family. A consistent refusal on her part, and on the part of others involved, to speak to the press had caused the publicity storm to subside fairly quickly.

Now she waited for this man to make the connection, for him to comment, and she braced herself to deflect him.

Instead, he said, "I've seen you at the health club. We belong to the same gym. I've seen you working out. You do a pretty intense workout."

Lisa looked at the man more closely. She watched him twist his glass, still half full of amber liquid. Scotch, she was almost sure. She noticed that his fingers were long and elegant. "Were you following me?"

He glanced up at her then, and smiled. He had, she thought, a very nice smile, set in a face defined by an angular but delicate bone structure. "No, of course not. The gym is just down this street. This is kind of a natural destination for those of us who aren't quite ready to go home after our workout. That's my story, anyway. What's yours?"

As much as possible, Lisa avoided paging through her own story, much less sharing it with others. She was, frankly, tired of it. She had changed jobs to get away from it, she'd done the therapy thing, and she'd written endless journal entries in an often-vain attempt to shut down the squirrel cage of thoughts that darted around in her head when she turned out the light at night. Above all, she made it a policy to steer clear of conversations like this. Now she surprised herself by saying, "You said we were here for similar reasons. What did you mean by that? And how could you possibly know why I'm here?"

"Just a guess. People who come to places like this and drink alone usually do it for pretty universal reasons."

She lifted her glass and took a long, slow drink. "And those reasons would be?"

"Ah, here is where we get to it." He focused his gaze on the long line of bottles behind the bar. "Here is where I risk a drink in my face, or at the very least, where you grab your purse and walk out."

"Please go on. You strike me as a brave sort."

"Okay," he said. "I'm guessing you're lonely. You're far too attractive to be lonely for lack of, well, 'prospects'. So that means either you're lonely within the confines of a relationship that may not be working out or because you're just not interested in anything permanent. Am I anywhere close?"

"Are you describing me? Or yourself?"

"Fair question." His laugh was soft. "Like I said, I think you and I have some similarities."

"And like me, you choose not to answer the question."

"The details aren't really important, are they? I don't even know your name. But I don't need to know it. Not yet anyway. What's important right now is that I feel drawn to you, and I think maybe you feel drawn to me, too."

Her breath caught in her throat and her heart started beating wildly. She felt a slow flush start at her scalp and spill down shoulders bared by her sleeveless blouse. She felt caught off guard, and stunned by her own visceral response to this man. She stared down at the dregs of her drink and stabbed the half melted cubes with a straw, and when the bartender appeared before her with a question on his face, she nodded, suddenly anxious to raise her drink quota to three. She realized as she did so that she had made a choice.

This was not Lisa Reisert's first excursion into a quiet bar after a mind-numbing day's work and a grueling workout at the gym. In the early evenings she could sit here, or in places like this, and let the cloak of shadows and candlelit illusions shield her while she drank her gin and watched the people around her, while she pretended she was part of life without having to participate in it. She needed the dark and the soothing lounge music and at some level she understood that she even needed the drinks as well, just to make it through the empty hours of the evening until bedtime. And bedtime was, more often than not, a battleground where she suited up to face the dark demons – the sleep slayers, as she thought of them - that came out after the lamp went out. And after that battle had been fought – sometimes won; sometimes not – she knew the sun would come up again and life would once more look safe. Dull and tedious maybe, but safe.

Tonight felt different to her; the edginess, the restlessness that even her second gin and tonic had not completely quelled was new. As was her decision not to make a casual excuse and slip discreetly away when the idle bar chat grew personal. Instead, acting on an impulse she neither understood nor argued with, she summoned a smile almost worthy of her former self and tilted her head toward the man sitting beside her.

"My name is Lisa." It was like going off the high dive for the first time, she thought. Terrifying, but strangely exhilarating. "And you have described me far too accurately."

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It ended badly, of course, as such beginnings often do. He wasn't to blame. Not fundamentally, anyway. It happened while they were still tiptoeing through the minefield of deciding just how much personal information to share. He mentioned his job as a business manager at a marketing agency. She would never know what he said after that because things suddenly clicked for her, and through an icy sheet of memory, she saw another man of similar build, of similar features, a man who initially held a similar fascination for her. ("Are you a shrink?" she'd asked him. " No. Manager.")

The horror and the implications of what she had done swept over her with the tidal force of the Atlantic in the midst of a late summer hurricane and she did as he had earlier predicted, she grabbed her purse and walked out.

She drove home in a fog only partially attributable to the gin, unlocked her apartment door, and punched in the security code on the panel by the door. She bolted for the bathroom, shedding clothing as she went, and jumped into the shower and scrubbed herself raw under scalding hot water.

Afterwards, she sat huddled in a bathrobe on a vanity stool in front of a lovely vintage dressing table that had once belonged to her grandmother, and faced herself – and her demons – in the mirror.

Three years ago a man had stolen Lisa's innocence – not her virginity, but her innocent trust in the innate goodness of people in general. Lisa's attack was only one in a string of rapes committed by this predator. He was arrested, convicted on several counts of sexual assault, and was now serving hard time as a guest of the Florida Department of Corrections.

Lisa began serving her sentence, as all rape victims do, the day he raped her. The doctors told her that the scar he carved with a buck knife above her right breast would most likely never disappear, but that she could expect it to fade in time. The psychologists told her that the same held true for her emotional scars.

Lisa steered clear of romantic entanglements of any kind until six months ago, in the fall, when she found herself charmed beyond reason by a young executive in an airport in Texas. For the first time in years, the laws of attraction once again applied to Lisa, and she felt her body, as well as her mind, respond to him. And she remembered, briefly, how good things could be between men and women. This was, of course, before he turned into her worst nightmare and held her hostage aboard the red eye flight to Miami, forcing her to participate in an act of national terrorism.

But she'd won, hadn't she? She'd beat Jackson Rippner at his own game after a long and arduous struggle. She'd nearly killed him, and perhaps she had, she didn't really know for sure. She saw him wheeled away from her home in an ambulance with a gunshot wound to the chest. Charles Keefe, the man targeted by the terrorist act and the director of Homeland Security, told her personally that Jackson Rippner was no longer a threat to her. She'd understood when he explained that for security reasons, he couldn't tell her more than that. (The feds had, in fact, somehow put a squelch on the press and Rippner was never identified publicly.)

She'd believed that she had won; certainly she'd lived through the horror. And yet look what her life had become once the adrenaline subsided, the furor died down, and the world expected her to be exactly as she was before.

She waded through her daily life now armed only with a blind faith that at some point it had to get better, that at some point she could face her father again with a real smile, and not one she dredged up to ease his fears and insecurities about her mental health and physical safety. She looked forward to a day when she could sleep easily at night without waking countless times to reassure herself by touching the cold metal of the gun she kept hidden under her pillow.

She hoped that someday she could return to the Lux Atlantic, the site of the assassination attempt against Mr. Keefe and his family, without feeling overwhelmed with panic and terror; and that someday she could call her former co-worker, maybe ask her out to lunch, without feeling guilt for refusing the hand of friendship offered by this kind, caring, and spontaneously happy young woman. Lisa knew that she avoided Cynthia because she saw in the other woman far too much of her former self. Once upon a time she too, sparkled.

Lisa was, in fact, in deep mourning for her pre-crisis life. Tonight she found herself snapped abruptly out of the numbing fog of denial and for the first time she became aware that beneath the familiar dull mantle of depression lay a deep reservoir of anger.

Now she faced herself in the mirror, stripped of make-up and at the moment, of hope. But it was time, she felt – in fact, far past time – for her to look at herself with unflinching honesty.

She saw dark circles beneath tired eyes and hair that had lost its gloss. She untied the robe and pushed it away from her body and looked at bones where once there had been curves, at dry skin that used to glow with health. She looked, too, at pink scar tissue that had indeed, with time, faded from angry red.

She traced the scar languidly with her fingertips, and thought about the man, the terrorist, who had touched her there so gently only months before, and she knew that her fight was not over, that he could not be allowed to win.

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A/N: Sorry for the long time between updates. Life got in the way. Thank you Royalty09, emptyvoices, and Zzee for helping me find my way back!