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Feed The Baby Of Love Page 7


  Against her will, there were tears in her eyes. Feeling him slip away she wanted him all the more. "So you have it, and you won't share, is that it?"

  "No, you don't understand," he said. "I can't give it to you."

  "Because you're afraid of losing it yourself. Afraid of what all these small-minded people in this two-bit town will think."

  "No, Rainie Pinyon, I'm not afraid of what they'll think of me, I'm afraid of what I'll know about myself. Right now, standing here, I'm the kind of man who keeps his promises. An hour from now, leaving here, I'd never be that kind of man again. It's the man who keeps his promises who gets the kind of life I have. Even if nothing else changed, I'd know that I was not that man anymore, and so everything would be changed. It would all be dust and ashes in my heart."

  "You are a selfish bastard and I hate you," said Rainie. At the moment she said it, she meant it with all her heart. He was forbidding her. He was refusing her. She had offered him real love, her best love, her whole heart. She had allowed herself to need him and he was letting some idiotic notion of honor or something get in the way even though she knew that he wanted her too.

  "Yeah," he said. He turned and walked down the stairs. She closed the door and stood there with her hand on the knob as she heard him start the car and drive away. It was hot in her apartment, with the heater on, with her coat on. She pulled it off and threw it against the door. She pulled off her sweater, her shoes, all her clothes and threw them against the walls and crawled into bed and cried, the way she used to cry when her mother didn't let her do what she needed to do. Cried herself to sleep.

  She woke up with the sun shining into her window. She had overslept. She was late for work. She jumped out of bed and got dressed, hurrying. Minnie will be furious. I let her down.

  But by the time she had her clothes on, she knew the truth. She had overslept because in her heart she knew she was done with this place. She had no reason to get up early because working for Minnie Wilcox wasn't her job anymore. She had found all that she was looking for when she first dropped out and went searching. Her music was back. She had something to sing about again. She could go home.

  She didn't even pack. Just took her purse with all her credit cards and walked to the post office, which was where the buses stopped. She didn't care which one -- St. Louis, Chicago, Des Moines, Cairo, Indianapolis, any bus that got her to an airport city would do. It turned out to be St. Louis.

  By the time she saw the Gateway Arch she had written a song about feeding the baby of love. It turned out well enough that it got her some decent radio airplay for the first time in years, her first top- forty single since seventy-five.

  Tried to walk that lonely highway

  Men and women, two by two

  Promising, promising they will be true

  You went your way, I'll go my way

  Feeling old and talking new

  Whatever happened to you?

  I wonder what happened to you?

  Spoke to someone in the air

  Heard but didn't heed my prayer

  Couldn't feed it anyway

  Didn't have the price to pay

  You got to feed the baby

  Hungry, hungry, hungry baby

  Got to feed the baby of love

  She had her music back again, the only lover that had ever been faithful to her. Even when it tried to leave her, it always came home to her in the end.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 0369f0e1-6bfe-1014-9b2d-c888487b0caa

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 06.06.2008

  Created using: Text2FB2 software

  Document authors :

  traum

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