She cleared her throat and began the verse.
Terry-Joe leaned closer to harmonize on the chorus. She could feel his breath, warm and alive, on her cheek.
He looked up, and their eyes met. She stopped playing. He continued, his shoulder muscles moving beneath his shirt. He gazed at her with unabashed desire. “You’re the most beautiful girl I personally know,” he said finally.
“You should get out more,” she said, but her voice was a little raspy. She remembered that first day when she’d found him working on her wheelchair and later pressed against him as he held the door. The urge to press against him anew swelled in her.
Now he stopped playing. He looked down as he said, “Tell you the truth about something, Bronwyn. My brother may brag about his money and his wheels, but you’re the only thing of Dwayne’s I ever wanted.”
“I’m not like his truck. He didn’t hold the pink slip on me.”
Still avoiding her gaze, he shrugged and said, “To him, you were.”
“I’m not anymore.”
Now he looked at her, and the heat in his eyes matched her own. “He’d kill me if he knew I was even thinking about this.”
“Thinking about what?”
He leaned closer and their lips met.
She wasn’t clear as to how exactly they got from that point to lying on the bed, their instruments safely on the floor. But there she was, on her back, Terry-Joe still kissing her as his hands roamed over her. His lips moved to her neck, then her cleavage, and she put up no resistance when his hands slid beneath her shirt and closed over her breasts. He was tentative, but as gentle with her as he’d been that first day with Magda and she felt everything that she’d denied herself since the attack flare back to life.
She whipped off the tank top and arched her back. His lips found her nipples, and she made a sound she couldn’t hear over the blood roaring in her ears. Then he took off his own shirt, and she reciprocated, tonguing and biting his hard chest and tiny pink nipples.
She could not remember when another’s skin against her own had felt so good. He was hot to the touch, and his muscles were well defined and not bulky like Dwayne’s. He caressed her thighs and rear through her shorts while nuzzling her breasts, then her heaving belly. He kissed her navel, and when his lips moved beneath it and she felt his tongue along the top of her shorts, she was sure she screamed. He unsnapped her shorts and slid them down her thighs, leaving her clad only in her panties. He kissed along the lace edge of them, and she was infinitely glad she’d shaved and trimmed that morning. But then he was lifting the elastic and probing with his tongue, and suddenly nothing else mattered.
Until the voice in her head said, He’s seventeen, and he’s never been out of the valley.
She rose suddenly on her elbows and gasped, “Wait!”
He looked up. She had her good leg draped across his back, and quickly lowered it. “What?” he asked breathlessly. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Good God, no,” she said, and scrambled away to sit on the edge of the bed. She quickly found her tank top and pulled up her shorts. “Believe me, you’ve got my motor racing like no one has in longer than I can remember, and that includes your no-account brother.”
He looked confused. A red flush of arousal covered his shoulders and neck. “Then what’s wrong?”
She trembled with the intensity of her feelings. It felt as if the last set of switches had been thrown, bringing some huge, powerful engine roaring to life. It had nothing really to do with sex, although she was certainly turned on. It was more an awareness of the world, as if she now saw in vivid color what had previously been pastel. Last night she had asserted her independence from Tufa expectations; now she broke free from the things that once ruled her in the past.
She reached over and touched his cheek, unable to repress a smile. “Nothing’s wrong, baby. Whoever taught you did a fine job, because you sure know how to treat a girl. But…” And here she had to choke back a laugh at the absurdity, because she didn’t want Terry-Joe to misinterpret it. “We’re coming at this from two completely different directions, and they won’t ever really meet up.”
He took her hand and kissed her fingertips. “I think they will. Somewhere below the waist, maybe?”
Now she did laugh. She kissed him quick and soft. “Terry-Joe, I know you want to make love to me because you like me, or maybe even think you’re in love with me, and not to get back at your brother, which is the thing that would motivate most boys your age.” She saw his face fall at the use of the word “boy.”
She continued, “But if I did it, it’d just be because… well, it’s been a while since I wanted to, and now I do. Not for any other real reason. I like you, Terry-Joe, but if we went all the way, it’d mess that up.”
He frowned. “So if we did it, you wouldn’t like me anymore?”
“I wouldn’t feel any different. You might, though, and that could lead to all sorts of mischief. Best we leave it where it is.”
“But I was doing it the right way, wasn’t I?”
She laughed again, and kissed him a final time. “You were sure enough doing it right. I’m so fired up, you could light a joint off me.”
He smiled and reached for his own shirt. “Well, I reckon I can’t be too upset, then.”
She watched him pull the shirt down over his torso, recalling its touch beneath her fingertips. The morning sun through the window glinted off its sweaty contours. She had a brief twinge that perhaps she was making a mistake, that letting him have her might be good for them both. But she knew which parts of her body were talking, and it wasn’t her head or heart. “You’re really not mad?” she asked.
Now he kissed her, on the cheek. “If I leave you better than I found you, how can I be mad?”
She giggled. “You sure enough did that.”
Bronwyn walked Terry-Joe to the front door and watched him amble down the hill to his bike. The buzz as it started echoed off the hills, and when he spun out and headed down the drive toward the road, its whine reminded Bronwyn of a sad, long wail. Yet he waved and grinned as he disappeared.
She leaned on the door until Chloe said behind her, “You’re letting the flies in.”
She closed the screen door and turned around. Chloe wore overalls and carried the big gloves she used for gardening. Her hair was tucked beneath one of Deacon’s baseball caps, this one sporting a bass in midleap. “I heard you two playing, then you stopped. What happened?”
Brownyn nodded toward the boys’ bedrooms. “Anyone else home?”
Chloe shook her head. “Kell and Aiden went fishing, your dad’s out in the fields.”
Bronwyn sat heavily at the kitchen table. “Terry-Joe and I almost… made out. All the way.” She looked at her thumb as it moved back and forth across the wood.
Chloe said nothing for a long moment, then leaned against the counter and crossed her arms. “Why didn’t you?”
Bronwyn shrugged. “I don’t know, it just felt wrong.”
Chloe sat opposite her, deliberately keeping the table between them. “’Cause of Dwayne?”
“No, because of me. And Terry-Joe. I could’ve… well… had a good time with him, and let it go as that. But he’d have fallen in love. It was three-quarters there in his eyes already.”