The Vibrant Years(3)
The phrase vibrant years had amused Bindu when she’d read it on the brochure, but looking at these deeply confident faces, it felt like the joke was on her. The sunshine was blinding, much like the rush of feelings she’d just experienced at the sudden reappearance of the girl she’d been. Unwanted. Unaccepted. Always on the outside.
She knew exactly why she was suddenly reacting with such ferocity to everything. It was the stupid money.
“Don’t let them get to you,” a kind voice said behind her.
She turned slowly, hand shading her eyes from the sun, not trusting the way the soft, deep tones settled the churn inside her. Her gaze landed on a pink golf shirt. She tipped her head back to look up his absurdly tall body and found hazel eyes, much like her own, studying her. Lines radiated from their edges like cobwebs pressed into skin. Lines that would never be considered this beautiful on her face.
Bindu hadn’t thought of a man as beautiful in a very long time. But there was no other word for the gentleness with which he watched her. Not the sympathetic kind that grew more and more abundant in the way people treated you as you aged, but one that seemed rooted in humanity, in humor. As though he knew he could get her to see what he found so amusing about the situation that had just churned up the worst parts of her. A gentleness of equals.
“They’re easily threatened.” His voice was low, confident that people would focus to hear him no matter how softly he spoke.
“Threatened?” She let all the smoky huskiness of her own voice play out in the word, twist it with nonchalance.
It made his smile grow. He tilted his chin with the exact same impact as raising a finger and tracing her from head to toe.
It was the strangest compliment. But deadly, because it hit her where she never let men’s compliments hit her. She’d spent a lifetime fielding men’s gazes, their admiration, their lust. In recent years most younger men had stopped having that reaction to her, but men around her age still rarely gazed upon her as anything more than an object they’d like to possess.
The way he looked at her carried the weight of all those things. It saw how she must be looked at rather than mirrored it. Which made it different. But the part that caught her like the slow hook of a deep-sea fisherman was the clear displeasure in his gaze at how those women had made her feel.
“Are you new?” He seemed like a man who’d never once felt like an outsider.
In a flash she imagined his life in Hollywood-inspired vignettes: a high school athlete who got straight As. A father who called him “buddy” and shared life lessons as he tossed him a ball. A mother who baked pie and handed out supportive advice over it. A Mercedes-Benz and golf and a wife who kept a house that belonged in Architectural Digest and invited friends over for wine and dessert under a gazebo overlooking their lush garden.
Her gaze dropped to his hand, searching for a ring. But it was tucked into his pocket.
“I’m here with a friend,” she answered.
“That’s too bad. You should move here.” For the first time his voice slipped from its confident pedestal. Just the slightest bit.
She threw a glance over his shoulder at the women still fawning over Debbie. “How can I resist?”
Another smile warmed his eyes. She’d been wrong about the color. They weren’t hazel, like hers. They were green, like pond moss that made you slip off rocks.
“I think someone like you is exactly what they need.” His tone was the warm water that cushioned your fall when you slipped.
Bindu didn’t like it when people assumed they knew her. But since she’d just pictured his entire life without knowing him, she waited for him to explain.
“You’re trouble.”
The words body-slammed her, as if she’d run full tilt into a wall, one she’d built around long-ago memories. Glass beads crashed everywhere. It had been forty-seven years since she’d heard those words, since she’d almost let them ruin her life.
“Exactly the kind of trouble this world needs,” he went on. “They need someone who’ll pull them out of their bubble. Wake them up, you know?”
She felt off balance. “Setting the world straight is not my job.”
Words her mother had said to her too many times. The world is what it is. Fixing it is not your job.
The resurrected girl inside her flipped her hair and flounced off like the heroine from an old Bollywood film. Bindu was about to follow her when a group of men approached him. Every one of them wore well-cut golf shirts in sunny pastels and khakis so sharply ironed they had edges. Their eyes strayed to Bindu as they greeted him.
One of them offered her a glass of wine. The pale-gold liquid sparkled in the sunlight. “Lee, who’s your friend?”
Over the man’s shoulder Bindu felt rather than saw the women who’d closed ranks on her start to stir with awareness, their attention turning in her direction, one by one.
His green eyes smirked. A challenge?
You’re trouble. Yes, those words still held the power to move her to recklessness.
It had been a lifetime since she’d picked messages from a man’s eyes, since she’d felt like this person.
Taking the glass of wine, she shook the hand one of the men held out. “Bindu.” All on their own, her lids lowered and lifted slowly. Her shoulders straightened, making her immensely grateful for the drape and cinch of her dress, for the huskiness of her voice. Things about herself she’d let rust from lack of use. “This seems like a nice place to live.”