Brenda's Dreams
Chapter Twelve

What was that awful noise? Brenda opened her eyes and looked around. She lay in a nest of blankets on the living room floor in front of a dying fire. Gloomy daylight filtered through rain-washed windows. She remembered a delicious warmth that seemed to be missing and sat up abruptly.

Where was Jax?

Brenda stood warping a blanket around her nakedness. The kitchen? Certainly that's where the squawking noises came from. Blanket trailing behind her, she investigated.

Larry Silver, perched on the counter, greeted her with a flap of wings and a loud demand for food.

"Your pretty darned feisty for a bird who was drowning last night," she said to the gull as she gathered some meat for his meal. She coaxed him onto the floor and set it out for him along with the last heel of bread.

Jax's clothes were no longer drying on the hearth. He must be upstairs dressing.

He wasn't.

Shivering in the chill, Brenda washed and pulled on jeans, a T-shirt and a sweater, then hurried back downstairs, telling herself she should have realized he'd gone out because he had taken his jacket. He must have left a note and she'd somehow missed seeing it.

She found no note.

He'll be back, she assured herself, she slipped on a jacket to stop the cold creeping along her spine. She caught sight of her face in the wavy glass of the walnut eagle mirror in the front hall. Abruptly she turned away from the mirror with alarm in her eyes, but it was to late to prevent her from realizing she wasn't sure he *was* coming back.

"Give him time," she muttered, not liking the uncertain tone of her voice.

He was not like Sonny, she reminded herself. He was entirely different. She and Jax had shared something special. Jax *would* return.

Brenda cleaned the living room, folding the blankets and quilts and taking them upstairs. Eyeing her bed, she decided to strip off the sheets and put them in a laundry bag for Fred to have them washed. If she was going to catch her flight to the West coast tomorrow morning, she would have to leave for Kennedy by tonight, at the latest.

Jax would be back long before that she told herself for reassurance.

But when she had finished straightening up the house and washing the dishes, over an hour had passed. This was more then enough time to give him. Brenda clenched her fists, fingernails digging into her palms, as the truth jolted through her.

Jax had gone, without waking her and without leaving a note. He had told her he didn't want involvement. She should have listened to that instead of immersing herself in the other things he said...the honeyed words, the sweet talk.

Tears threatened to fall from her eyes and she blinked them back furiously. Larry waddled in from the kitchen and fixed her with a bright yellow gaze.

"He left you too, friend." Her voice broke, and she swallowed against the lump in her throat.

Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions she thought. Maybe Jax had gone back to his cottage for a change of clothes, but had fallen asleep instead. This spurt of hope thrust her from the house into her car. She drove through the diminishing rain along puddled streets until she reached his rented cottage.

There was no car in the driveway. She jumped from hers and peered through a window into a living room with a cold fireplace, a room showing no sign that Jax had ever used the house. He was gone from her and from the Cape as well. Brenda buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

Finally conscious of the rain soaking her hair and running down her face in rivulets down her checks with the tears, she regained control of herself and got back into the her car. The quicker she left the cape the better off she would be. A man who had behaved like Jax wasn't would wasted tears.

Back at Grandma Quartermaine’s house, she packed as fast as she could, stowed her luggage in the car and returned to smother what remained of the fire and retrieve the sea gull.

"Well, *I* won't abandon you to the cruel, cold world," she announced to Larry, pushing the protesting gull into the box where he had spent the night. "Fred will take good care of you."

On the drive to Fred's, with Larry's box sitting next to her, she tried not to think about how she was such a fool. Hadn't she learned anything from the fiasco with Sonny? It was easy for her to see, after her eyes had been painfully opened, that Sonny Corinthos was a selfish, arrogant man who would always put himself first, love himself best. A man who didn't care what anyone else wanted, especially if it interfered with his own plans.

When she had first become involved with Sonny, though, she had created her own image of him as being warm and loving, ignoring evidence...and there had been tons of it...that he wasn't.

Gradually the veneer she'd supplied had peeled away, revealing more and more of Sonny's true personality, but she had clung desperately to what she wanted to believe until the devastating day he and Julia had come to tell her of their plans to marry. Even then it had taken months of listening to Julia's complaints about her handsome new husband to understand how completely wrong the Brenda version of Sonny had been.

How on earth could she have been so stupid as to do exactly the same thing with Jax? She really didn't know him. She'd fashioned a Jax sculpture from her own needs exactly the way she'd made the found object sculpture as a child. A bit of kindness here, a feather of understanding there, a few stalks of empathy, a solid bolt of sensitivity, all glued together with love.

Love! Brenda snorted with derision.

Jax had said it all, the truth she'd again been too blind to see. Proximity and desire. He had clearly warned her he didn't mean to get involved. Why put the blame on him, when it was partly her fault for not paying attention?

He'd left without a word, though, and she could never forgive him for that, no matter how right she felt it was to sever their tenuous relationship with a sharp, quick cut, using the deadly knife of disappearance.

She didn't know where he lived or worked, or even his last name. Not that she'd ever try to find a man who so obviously wanted no more to do with her.

He'd dreamed with her. That much was true. How could he ignore the closeness that had come from the dream to be a part of their lovemaking? Or was that incredible intimacy just in her imagination? She might well have projected her own emotions onto Jax and convinced herself they shared a bond that only she had felt.

I won't cry over him again, she told herself firmly. I'll put him from my mind and in a month or two I won't even remember the color of his hair.

Larry squawked and thrust his head out from under the cloth covering the box beside her. Glancing at him, Brenda wondered if she imagined the derisive glint in his yellow eye.