478DENNIS LEHANE

"Then what are we, Danny?" She stood on the sidewalk, her eyes on the pavement, so tense he could see goose bumps in her flesh and the cords in her neck.

Danny said, "Look at me. Please."

She kept her head down.

"Look at me," he said again.

Her eyes found his.

"When we look at each other like this, right now, I don't know what that is, but 'friendship' seems kind of watery, don't you think?"

"Oh, you," she said and shook her head, "you were always the talker now. They'd have called the Blarney Stone the Danny Stone if they could have--"

"Don't," he said. "Don't make it small. It's not small, Nora."

"What are you doing here?" she whispered. "Jesus, Danny. What?

I already have one husband, or haven't you heard? And you've always been a boy in a man's body. You run from thing to thing. You--" "You have a husband?" He chuckled.

"He laughs," she said to the street with a loud sigh.

"I do." He stood. He placed a hand to her chest just below her throat. He kept his fingers there, lightly, and tried to get the smile off his face as he saw her anger rise. "I just . . . Nora, I'm just . . . I mean, the two of us? Trying to be so respectable? Wasn't that our word?"

"After you broke with me"--her face remained a stone, but he could see the light finding her eyes--"I needed stability. I needed . . ."

That brought a roar from him, an explosion he couldn't stop that erupted out of the center of his body and, even as it punched its way along his ribs, felt better than anything he'd felt in a long time. "Stability?"

"Yes." She hit his chest with her fist. "I wanted to be a good American girl, an upstanding citizen."

"Well, that worked out tremendously well."

"Stop laughing."

"I can't."

THE GIVEN DAY"Why?" And the laugh finally reached her voice.

"Because, because . . ." He held her shoulders and the waves fi nally passed. He moved his palms down her arms and took her hands in his and this time she let him. "Because all this time you were with Connor, you wanted to be with me."

"Ah, you're a cocky man, you are, Danny Coughlin."

He tugged on her hands and stooped until their faces were at the same level. "And I wanted to be with you. And the two of us lost so much time, Nora, trying to be"--he looked up at the sky in frustration-- "whatever the fuck we were trying to be."

"I'm married."

"I don't give a shit. I don't give a shit about anything anymore, Nora, except this. Right here. Right now."

She shook her head. "Your family will disown you just like they disowned me."

"So?"

"So you love them."

"Yeah. Yeah, I do." Danny shrugged. "But I need you, Nora." He touched her forehead with his own. "I need you." He repeated it in a whisper, his head against hers.

"You'll throw away your whole world," she whispered and her voice was wet.

"I was done with it anyway."

Her laugh came out strangled and damp.

"We can never marry in the Church."

"I'm done with that, too," he said.

They stood there for a long time, and the streets smelled of the early-evening rain.

"You're crying," she said. "I can feel the tears."

He removed his forehead from hers and tried to speak, but he couldn't, so he smiled, and the tears rolled off his chin.

She leaned back and caught one on her finger.

"This is not pain?" she said and put it in her mouth.