And I couldn’t take it back now. He was thinking what I was thinking. Head tilted and eyes down, he watched my hand stroking his skin. His eyes didn’t rise to mine. Maybe he suspected, as I did, that if our eyes met, we’d be acknowledging what was going on, and the spell would be broken.
The spell was too good. We both wanted to stay under it.
I continued to move my fingers across his skin exactly as I had before, but I needed to make a decision. I had reached for him, but I could back out of it by trailing my fingers down his arm and settling my hand in his, like I wanted us to be friends.
I didn’t want us to be friends.
Ever so slowly, I slid my hand up his sleeve, across his shoulder, and up his neck to cradle his jaw, prickly with stubble.
He bit his lip. “Let’s go back to my house,” he whispered, “and we can discuss our differences in private.”
We’d both forgotten about the storm blowing up. As soon as we climbed the stairs and slipped through the doors into the lobby, we could hear the rain beating on the windows.
Sam turned to me in question. I replied, “I still don’t have an umbrella.”
“Give me your keys and I’ll bring your car around.”
“I’ll get soaked on the walk to the driveway, no matter what.”
He continued to look questioningly at me. He’d been raised a southern gentleman. Whether the ladies were already soaked or not, gentlemen brought the car around in the rain. Their alcoholic fathers taught them this. The fathers might not be much good to the family, but they would bring the car around in the rain. This was another song in the making, one I struggled to push to the back of my mind. Now was not the time. I took Sam’s hand and said, “Come on.”
We agreed silently that it would do us no good to run. The rain came down so fast that no puddles formed, only swift rivers down the sidewalk. Under an awning near the driveway, several people huddled, laughing that they were wet, waiting for a shuttle to the huge hotel nearby, but those were the only folks we encountered all the way across the shining parking lot, empty except for my car. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since we first entered the theater. A stiff, cold breeze chased us the last few yards.
I shut my door and yelled, “Yuck!” I started the ignition.
“Yeah.” Sam turned up the heat. He adjusted the dials as I drove and the windshield fogged up. He placed his other hand on the inside of my thigh, not high enough to distract me from driving, but in exactly the right place to remind me where we were headed.
Back at his house, I parked as close to the side door as I could get. “Let me unlock it first,” he said. “Most families would have umbrellas waiting in the vestibule or whatever, but we don’t have a vestibule, much less an umbrella.” He trudged to the door, unlocked it, then nonsensically came back for me as if I couldn’t walk three steps through a downpour by myself, and ushered me inside.
We kicked off our shoes on the rug just inside the door, and he poured water into an automatic coffeepot. Then he came back to me, placing himself between me and the door like he thought I might escape. “Why don’t you take your clothes off,” he whispered, “and I’ll put them in the dryer.”
Suddenly I wasn’t freezing anymore, even in the air- conditioned kitchen. Heat raced across my skin. I knew what we were going to do. I had accepted this since the end of Julie’s show. But every new hint at it was like an electric shock to my system.
He stood in front of the door with his arms folded across his tight, soaked T-shirt, melting my insides with his dark eyes. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted to watch.
I might have tried very hard in the past year to give off the vibe that I undressed in front of boys every night of the week, but it just wasn’t true. Swallowing, I asked, “Could you turn off the light?”
He reached to the wall and flicked the switch. The kitchen vanished. All that was left was his silhouette in front of me, framed by the streetlight streaming through the window in the top of the door. He could probably still see me pretty well. Now that I couldn’t see his face, I felt more at ease.
The soaked cotton of my T-shirt felt like a cold compress on a wound. After I stripped it off, my skin burned hotter. All I had on underneath was my black bra.
I tossed the T-shirt to him.
The jeans were harder. Now that they were wet, they hugged me even more tightly. I struggled to force them down my legs, hoping my black lace panties made this striptease worthwhile to Sam. I had no idea what I was doing.
I half expected him to chuckle in the darkness. He didn’t make a sound. I finally tossed the jeans to him, and his silhouette caught them with one hand. He cleared his throat. “Be right back.” His voice broke. He turned and disappeared into a room just off the kitchen. I heard his own clothes slide off his body and the dryer shift to life. In nothing but boxers, the muted light smoothing his taut muscles, he crossed the shadowy kitchen and poured us each a cup of tea.
With shaking hands rattling the teacup on its saucer, I followed him through the old house, the small rooms and narrow passageways and squeaky wooden floors. Upstairs he led me down a short hall and opened a door for me. I expected his room to be wallpapered with signed posters of the Eli Young Band or the Zac Brown Band. Instead, I walked into a guest room with blank powder-blue walls and a crazy quilt on the bed. The weight bench in the corner was probably his, but everybody stored their exercise equipment in the guest room.
Wondering why Sam was taking me here instead of his own room, I looked back over my shoulder at him. Maybe there was something in his own room he didn’t want me to see—in which case I wanted to see it. When I’d first met him a few days ago, I’d tiptoed around him and let him keep his secrets. That time was over.
“My mom erased me,” he explained. “The plant shut down for a week in May. That doesn’t happen often when people are buying a lot of cars, so she always tries to get as much done around the house as she can. She’d already planned to make my room into a guest room when I went to college. She just did it a little early while she had the time.”
“If she erased you,” I said, “where did you go?”
He turned around and nodded to the boxes lined up against the wall. Here were the rolled-up posters of country bands, no doubt. In the shadows of one box glinted his gold football trophies. He paused, gazing down at them as if looking for himself.
I took his cup from him. As I moved, cool air brushed past my bare thighs, and I remembered I was walking around a boy’s room in my underwear. But that was what I’d come here for. I turned and placed one cup on either bedside table, then crawled onto the bed.