Only You

by Peg Sutherland

  She peeked at him through half-closed eyes. He leaned against the closed door, his clothes streaked with Weddington Farms dirt. “You ran out on me.”

  “It was Nigel’s idea.”

  Harper told herself that didn’t necessarily mean that Nigel or anyone else had caught on to them. “Did you think I wouldn’t find you?”

  “They said you were sick.”

  Good. He didn’t sound sure of her, either. “Did you miss me?”

  He walked over to the bed, sat beside her and started pulling off his boots, then his socks. “Your old man will raise hell if he finds out you’re here.”

  “Who’s going to tell him?”

  “Some kiss-up down the street who works the line.”

  “Nobody likes Sam enough to tell him. They’d rather see him look like a fool.”

  “So how’d he know about Red Jannik?”

  The name struck her like a slap. She could only hope she hadn’t flinched when he said it. “Forget about him.”

  He studied her; she avoided his gaze.

  He stood and stripped off his shirt, dropped it to the floor. Harper’s throat contracted at the sight of his bare chest, smooth but knotted with muscles. She wondered how his bare skin would feel, and an ache started in the tips of her fingers.

  “I’ll shower.”

  He took a fresh pair of jeans from the suitcase and a well-worn towel from the back of a chair and disappeared down the hall. She listened to the hum of water in the pipes and wondered what would happen if she took off her skirt and her knit top and the little scraps of underwear to greet him when he returned.

  Her nipples grew tight and hard thinking about it, the way they had when he kissed her.

  But a part of her remained frightened by the thought and shrank away from carrying the vision any farther.

  TRENT KNEW THE RISK he was running by allowing her to come every day. But. he was beyond saying no to her. Being with her every day, talking to her, sometimes kissing her and sometimes knowing that kissing her would mean going all the way, these were things he needed more than he needed food or drink or sleep.

  Sometimes, when they sat in his room and talked about their childhood and their parents and the ways they felt alike, he asked himself how he had lost control of his plan so quickly. The plan was now nothing more than to be with her as often as possible. But often during the workday, when he stared up at the big house and fancied how cool it must be in one of those high-ceilinged rooms, or on payday, when he saw how little his sweat was worth, Trent still felt the hunger that had nothing to do with the way he felt about Harper. It was simply buried deeper now.

  But feeding that hunger would mean betraying Harper, taking advantage of her, treating her no better than her old man had treated her all her life. Today, Trent no longer felt so sure Harper deserved that treatment.

  So he stopped at the diner and bought take-out burgers and fries for them on his way home. Sometimes they talked late into the evening. Once, they drove to the next county for a ’50s sci-fi movie at the drive-in and laughed so loud the management threw them out. She taught him to waltz and didn’t mind that he had two left feet. He beat her at poker over and over and over again until she grew bold enough to bluff, and then he didn’t stand a chance against her.

  But mostly they talked. Trent had never talked to anyone the way he could talk to Harper. He marveled at how much he trusted her. Her of all people, the hell-raising daughter of the man who owned Collins, South Carolina.

  “What’s your greatest fear?” she asked one night as they crumpled up the wrappers from their burgers. She was always talking about things like that, things nobody he’d ever known talked about.

  He wasn’t sure how to answer, but that was okay. Harper, he’d learned, would sit quietly in the dim light and let him think about his reply.

  “I…I guess my greatest fear is that I’ll end up like my mother. Being some rich person’s fool.”

  Harper nodded. “But if she loved him, really loved him, maybe she wasn’t the fool. Maybe he was.”

  Trent didn’t believe it, but he had begun to like the way Harper always made him see things in a way he never had before. “Ask anybody in my hometown and they’ll tell you who the fool was.”

  “Nope,” she said, tossing one of the balled-up wrappers toward the floor lamp. She sank it, banking it off the rim of the shade before it rolled in and fell through, the perfect basket. “I learned a long time ago that what people think doesn’t mean squat.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he countered, wondering if she would be so ready to spit in the eye of public opinion without her old man’s fortune to back her up.

  “Easy for anybody to say,” she said. “The hard part is learning to mean it. To feel it in your gut.”

  “And do you?”

  She rolled to the floor and put her head in his lap. Sometimes she seemed so innocent it was all he could do not to pack up his car and drive straight out of Collins. He couldn’t bear the thought of being the one who destroyed that innocence.

  “Sometimes I do. And sometimes I don’t.”

  “And when you don’t?”

  “Then I need you to kiss me.”

  He didn’t even ask if now was one of those times. He simply cupped her head in his hands, lifted her to him and kissed her. He drank in her sweetness and her courage and the tough exterior that didn’t run nearly as deep as she wanted everyone to believe. He coaxed her lips open and taught her to welcome his tongue with hers. He let his palm drift down her side, over her hip, back up to her breast. He heard the soft moan deep in her throat and told himself his plan was never going to work at this rate.

  But the plan didn’t seem so important at the moment He sent her home and spent another restless night.

  HARPER PASSED her mother’s bedroom door on her way to her own room. The door was ajar, and she caught a glimpse of Leandra sitting at her dressing table in a circle of rosy light. Her footsteps slowed. The image of her mother giving her long hair its nightly one hundred strokes threw her back to her childhood.

  Once she had loved to sit at her mother’s feet and watch this ritual. Sometimes she had asked if she could do the brushing, but Leandra had complained when Harper tugged too hard. In time, Harper had been encouraged to retire a half hour earlier.

  Harper studied Leandra now, her back still straight and slender in her silk robe. She still wore her hair long, but it had been years since Harper had seen it down around her shoulders. She felt an ache to go in and take the brush from her mother’s hand and say, “See, I can do it now. I’m bigger now. I won’t do it wrong again.”

  Watching her mother, she thought about how Trent had been so close to his mother that he wanted revenge for the anguish she had suffered. Harper wondered if she should want revenge for the sterile life Leandra lived, and felt sorrow at realizing she didn’t care.

  Still, a part of her hungered for that closeness to her mother everybody but her seemed to enjoy. She wondered what made her so unworthy of love.

  “You look beautiful,” she. said, startling herself and Leandra.

  “Good gracious, Amanda, you frightened the wits out of me. Must you skulk around so?”

  “Sorry. I just…I saw you and stopped to watch. Remember when I used to help?”

  “Did you? Heavens, that must have been years ago.”

  Harper told herself the coolness meant nothing; it was just Leandra’s way.

  THEY WALKED IN THE RAIN. Harper insisted, Trent gave in.

  They wandered to the woods bordering the south end of Collins, and Harper held her face up to the warm spring drizzle. It clung to her eyelashes and made her hair spring wildly around her forehead. It washed away the heavy feelings that had been with her since the night before, when she had spoken to her mother.

  “You’re nuts,” Trent said, hunching his shoulders against the damp.

  “Maybe. Does that bother you?”

  “No.”

  “It just feels good
to me, that’s all. Free.” She stopped and faced him in the misty dusk. “Sometimes I think I’d give anything in the world to be free. Do you know what I mean?”

  He smiled his crooked half smile and took her hand. “Yeah. I think so.”

  She sometimes thought he was the only one who accepted her just the way she was. Leandra wanted her to be a simpering fool, and Sam wanted her to be silent and invisible. Her teachers wanted her to live up to her potential, and all the guys she knew just wanted her to put out. Even Floretha wanted her to behave, to cause a few less ripples.

  But Trent liked her fine the way she was. And that, too, felt like freedom.

  “But we’re going to get soaking wet,” he said.

  “Wet clothes,” she said. “So what?”

  And with that, she stepped out of her shoes and ran along the damp ground in her bare feet.

  He picked up her shoes and followed. “You are nuts.”

  She laughed at him and, on a whim, yanked her knit top over her head and threw it at him. The mist immediately began to seep through the wispy fabric of her bra, but she didn’t care. She ran ahead, deeper into the woods. He called after her, but she didn’t stop.

  “Officer Monk told me you were trouble,” Trent called out. “That first day.”

  She stopped on the path, eased the zipper of her skirt down and let it slither to her feet. Still laughing, she darted ahead, turning in time to see him staring down at her skirt.

  He looked up and said, “He was right.”

  At the look in his eyes, Harper’s laughter died in her throat. A moment of apprehension clutched her as she realized she stood in the woods alone with him, wearing only skimpy bikini panties and a scrap of a bra that hid nothing.

  She whispered his name, to remind herself that this was Trent.

  He dropped her shoes and her top onto the ground beside her skirt and started walking toward her. Their eyes locked, and that was all the promise, all the safety she needed.

  With barely a touch, he stripped her of her remaining garments. She expected him to grab her then, to clutch her against him and give her the kind of hard, demanding kiss he hadn’t yet given her. Instead, he began to touch her with the tips of his fingers. They slid along her wet skin, tracing the heavy swell of her breasts, the aching tightness of her nipples, the inward curve of her ribs. Harper feared her legs wouldn’t hold her up any longer, but the truth was she couldn’t move, not even to slide to the ground.

  He flattened his palms against her belly, then raised one to cup a breast and lowered the other to entwine in the damp curls at the juncture of her thighs. Harper thought she gasped, but she realized no sound had escaped her throat. Then, when she believed it impossible to feel any more inflamed than she already did, he lowered his hand yet again and slipped it between her thighs.

  This time he touched her the way she now realized she had wanted him to touch her in the parking lot outside The Stallion. His thumb played over her almost imperceptibly, while his forefinger parted her, tested, slipped inside her.

  Now she truly could stand no longer and she leaned into him, sagging against him as he continued to caress and probe. He held her in the circle of his arm and lowered them to the ground, never ceasing to touch her the way that was driving her to an aching madness she’d never known before.

  Mindless of the wet leaves, the cool ground, Harper clung to him. She fumbled with his shirt buttons but found her fingers didn’t function. In fact, she seemed to have disappeared, except for that tiny area where Trent was touching her. Emotions welled up inside her, too powerful to suppress, and she cried out like a wounded animal. But in truth, Trent’s touch seemed to heal the wound that had been festering deep in her spirit.

  He robbed her of his touch only long enough to unzip his jeans, then she felt him hard and hot against her inner thigh. He kissed her, still tenderly, his lips brushing her cheek, her neck, her breasts. She looped a leg around him, urging him closer.

  He grew still and pulled back to look her in the eye. “This isn’t…you’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

  His words barely registered. All she could think was that it was important for him to know this was nothing like anything that had ever happened to her before. “No,” she murmured. “No.”

  “I’ll be gentle,” he said. “I won’t hurt you. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

  And he eased into her slowly, gently, filling her. And when he had filled her completely, he lay still against her body, looked into her eyes and said, “I love you, Harper. No matter what, you have to know I love you.”

  The naked emotion in his silver-blue eyes told her the truth of his words. A truth that echoed in her own heart, revealing what she hadn’t realized until that moment.

  “I love you, too, Trent. I never knew I could love like this.”

  Wrapped in the tenderness of their feelings, their bodies rocked gently together, oblivious to the rain, conscious only of the way their emotions soared, erupted, then drifted gently back to earth.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THAT SPRING was the happiest Harper could ever remember. She couldn’t imagine the euphoria ending.

  Passing algebra and finishing her senior English term paper paled in importance to afternoons spent in Trent’s arms. They made love in his tiny room, shades drawn, a tiny transistor radio providing bubblegum rock as mood music. They fed each other black cherry milk shakes and ketchup-doused french fries from the drug store. They walked in the woods and drove down the highway with the top down. They learned each other’s bodies in intimate detail.

  But as consumed as they were by physical pleasure, it was the emotional closeness that fed most of Harper’s hunger. And Trent never left her wanting. It was as if, with the declaration of love, he had opened to her and could no longer close the door.

  They lay on the floor in his room, feet on the bed, fingers interlaced, and talked about growing up in the fishbowl of a small Southern town.

  “It was like everybody had a right to tell me what to do,” he said. “I always thought it was because my old man left and they thought I’d go to hell for sure if they didn’t keep me straight.”

  She squeezed his hand. “And did you?”

  “Naw, I was the model kid.”

  Glancing at him, she saw his teasing grin.

  “Well, at least on the surface. I was good at that, hiding what was really going on.”

  “Not me,” Harper said. “What you see is what you get. And if you think that didn’t set a few tongues wagging, you don’t know much about people in Collins.”

  He kissed her then, one of his hungry, desperate kisses that always left her breathless and throbbing and led to more lovemaking.

  Afterward, she said, “What’ll they say about us?”

  “They’re not going to know.”

  “Eventually they will, won’t they? I mean, this summer after school is out, I can get a job and be on my own. Or we could leave together, find a new place where…What is it, Trent?”

  He had looked away, stared at the ceiling instead of at her. “Maybe that’s not the right thing, Harper.”

  “What do you mean? Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “You ought to go to college, the way Sam wants you to.”

  She drew out of the circle of his arm. “You don’t want to be with me.”

  “That’s not it. It’s just…I want what’s best for you.”

  “Being with you is what’s best for me.”

  “But first—”

  “I know what I want and I know what I need. And I don’t need some snooty girls’ school where all I’ll learn is more math and history junk I’ll never use. Oh, Trent, you don’t really mean that, do you?”

  And he pulled her into his arms again and whispered softly against her ear, “I only want you to be happy.”

  “Good. I’m happy.”

  She smiled against his bare chest, telling herself she only imagined that something troubling continued to darken
his voice.

  SAM WAS WAITING UP for her when she got home that night, sitting on a screened side porch puffing on a cigar. The sweet, heavy smoke landed with a thud in the pit of her belly, nauseating her.

  “Where you been, missy?”

  As if he cared.

  “Out.”

  “None of your lip,” he growled. “I want to know where you’ve been. That’s that.”

  Harper’s stomach did a nasty flop. She turned away, gulping lungfuls of fresh air from beyond the screen.

  “Studying,” she said as defiantly as she could manage, given her reaction to his stinky tobacco.

  “Studying, my fat rear end.”

  “I have a lot of finals coming up,” she said. “Haven’t you ever heard of cramming?”

  He let out a heavy sigh and stared at her from beneath heavy brows knitted together in a fierce frown. “I heard from my friend at Agnes Scott today.”

  She groaned. The girls’ college he was determined to shove down her throat. “Oh, Daddy…”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Everything’s set. All you have to do is pick up that diploma in four weeks. You hear?”

  In four weeks, Harper hoped to have talked Trent into leaving with her. “I hear.”

  “In the meantime, your mama and I would appreciate it if you could keep yourself out of fracases that’ll mess up any chance you have for a decent future.”

  She almost smiled, thinking of his rage if she told him what she had been doing—and with whom— every night this past month. But getting a rise out of him was no longer her goal. All she wanted was to be with Trent, where she felt the love she’d craved all her life. The love everybody else was too busy to give her.

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  “You do that.”

  She turned and went into the house. The parlor was dim except for the small Tiffany lamp on the library table. She saw Floretha, her forehead pressed against the mantel. Harper stopped, knowing the housekeeper had heard everything.

  She had never seen Floretha look so dejected or so alone. Floretha looked up at that moment, and the sorrow in her eyes stopped Harper. Without a word, Floretha shook her head, turned and left the room. Startled by the housekeeper’s strange actions, Harper followed Floretha down the entrance hall toward the kitchen.