OFF-TANGENT(A Lesbian Story)

Chapter Twenty

a/n: short update cause sobra kong naaliw sa GGV kagabi kahit bitin yung KaRa moments... lol...

skipper27 para din mas mapressure ka to update... lol... joke! Love you! Mwah!

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She skipped the press conference at the City Hall. She knew that her absence would only add fuel to the already-raging-fire of rumor, but she could not bear to face Vic again today. She needed time to think things through. She hoped Vic would realize that and not turn up on her doorstep, expecting a conquering hero's welcome.

Conquering hero indeed, she thought. If she had the nerve to show up at her apartment, expecting her to throw herself into her arms...

"I probably will do just that," she admitted wryly. After that blinding realization in her arms in her father's office, there was only one answer she could give Vic. She would do anything... promise anything Vic wanted.

She made herself a cup of coffee and curled up in the window seat in the tiny tower off her living room. From there, she could watch the street and be warned of anybody who will come.

But nobody came. She did not come at all... And that made her even more angry. Vic had told her outside her father's office that she wanted to come with her, to talk things out. Had she only been saying that to soothe her, knowing that she could not possibly leave the council just then, no matter what she said?

Perhaps she had not planned the little scene in the Mayor's office after all, she thought. She might have been only indulging herself in a harmless bit if fun by kissing her--- an interesting way to pass the time while she waited. Perhaps she had been just as embarrassed by it as she had, and now she had no intention of letting the game go any further. Was that what she had intended to talk to her about? Had all her talk about making love to a married woman been only a line? She had seemed awfully certain that Mika intended to marry Kiefer, despite everything...

Fury started to build deep inside her. Vic doesn't like reporters, she remembered. Anggie Torres had told her that. Mika had seen that dislike herself, well hidden though it was, the first time she had interviewed her. And yet, Vic had sought her out... had invited her to come to Pampanga. Why? She wondered. Had it been, as she had believed, an honest effort to convert an opponent to her way of thinking? Or had she intended from the beginning to destroy her, just for the fun of getting even with one member of the profession she disliked?

"Not Vic," she whispered, scarcely aware of the sound of her voice in the quiet room. "Vic is not vindictive. She would not take her revenge on me because of my job."

How far she had come, she realized with a twinge of panic, from the way she had felt about her just few weeks before. Then, she had been convinced she was a corporate con-artist, determined to bleed Dumaguete of all the advantages it held for her, and then, at her convenience, move to another town and another set of credulous officials who would do anything they could to bring an industry to town.

Now, she thought, she knew the essential person... the gentle, private one who did not talk about herself, but whose actions shouted in even the quietest room.

Vic was not an easy person to know. It had been a challenge to figure her out. It was like fitting together the pieces of a shattered china plate. At first she had enough to see the shape of her, but not enough to know what she really was. Mika discovered her slowly, picking up fragments from her employees, from her friends, from watching her as she worked and as she played. If she had known her for fifty years, she knew she'd still find new pieces now and then.