Thief of Dreams by John Yount Page A

after all, where he’d stayed for a week before he’d found cheaper lodgings a block down the street over D’Fonzio’s bar; and he knew she couldn’t afford such prices. Hell, he couldn’t afford them either.
    She giggled and leaned toward him, her eyes collecting candlelight. “I was a waitress here a couple of years ago, and I even lived with the chef for about six weeks. We had such a hot romance, I thought we were going to tie the knot,” she told him and shook her head with wonder or regret, he couldn’t be sure. “But it turned out he was an evil, jealous bastard who was already married, for Christ’s sake, and even had kids.”
    He had no idea what to say. He didn’t even know what he felt. Perhaps a touch of the chef’s jealousy around his heart, perhaps a more general regret and sadness.
    â€œHe sent me to the hospital with a black eye and a cracked cheekbone, the prick,” she told him, “and that’s when I packed up and moved out, but you’ve got to admit he can cook.”
    â€œHe still cooks here?” Edward asked in disbelief.
    â€œSure,” she said, “he owns half interest in the place.”
    â€œAnd you still eat here?”
    â€œNot very often,” she told him matter-of-factly. “It costs a fortune.”
    Asking Paris a question was like trying to walk up a steep, icy hill and sliding back two steps for every step he took. You always lost more ground than you gained. From the first it was that way. His third night in Pittsburgh, pretending to himself that he was justifiably angry and totally, by God, independent, but, in fact, feeling forlorn as hell, he’d asked if he could buy her a drink when she got off her shift. He’d thought he recognized something in her eyes somehow equally lonely and cast out. “Where?” she’d asked him with a wry smile, “in your room?” “No,” he’d told her, and nodded across the small lobby of the Hampton House toward the bar, “right here.” She’d studied him for a moment, her yellow eyes suddenly quite sad he’d thought. “You’re married, aren’t you?” she’d said. He’d nodded that he was. “Well,” she’d said with a little humorless snort of laughter, “that’s all right because I am too.” But her shift wasn’t over until midnight, and that happened to be when the bar closed. “Another time,” she’d told him. Yet at a quarter till twelve she’d called his room. “This is Paris Pergola at the desk,” she’d said in a cheerful voice. “You got your pants on?” He was just enough awake to say that he did. “Good,” she’d said, “you keep them on. What do you drink?” Any sour mash bourbon was fine, he’d told her. Room service would be up in fifteen minutes, she gave him to understand, which allowed him to get out of bed, wash his face, comb his hair, and get dressed, grateful, for the first time, that Womb Broom was bunking with Ironfield Cox at D’Fonzio’s and he was the odd man out.
    Promptly at five minutes after twelve she knocked on his door carrying a tray with two drinks for him and two for herself. And except for the conversation, it was all very proper. Maybe it was her special manner, or what he thought he saw in her eyes, the late hour, the bourbon, the fact that he had been sound asleep when she called, but talking to her was as effortless as talking to a man. No, it was easier than that, and he found himself saying things he never expected to say.
    When he’d told his story, she said she thought it was just very strange how someone could be attracted by what you were, and then when they had you, set about trying to make you over into someone else. Anyway that’s the way it had been with her husband. He had been a history professor who taught at Pitt, she told Edward, only he