“Don’t be angry, Billie-boy,” she whispered. “I like to hear you laugh.”
His other hand closed quickly over the white fingers.
“What is it you’ve done to me? I always thought caring about a woman meant wanting to be with her because she liked the things I do, because we understood each other. That’s the way I felt about—” he broke off. “But you—I want to be with you because you’re so different—because I don’t always understand you. I can’t get enough of it—of looking at you, of listening to you. Naomi, do you care—a little bit?”
She lifted her eyes, lifted her lips, forgetting the game she was playing, forgetting the stakes. Then before he saw the move, she drew back. Not yet! She answered him instead with a shadowy smile and the long silent pressure of the hand held fast between his.
[146]
]CHAPTER III
It was an afternoon of late March, grim and forbidding, as if winter had thrown a last shadow across oncoming spring. The steam heat, turned off in the chorus dressing-rooms during a week of balmy weather, suddenly sputtered on and sang through the whole matinée performance.
Naomi came out of the stage entrance, fur coat hugged about her, and shivering a bit, made for the curb to hail a taxi. As she glanced up and down the street at the ant-like army of cars, one of them slid toward her and a man stepped down.
“Why, hello, Marshy,”—she reached out a hand—“haven’t seen you in weeks.”
He took it.
“Jump in.”