Running from Monday

by Lea Sims

  He shrugged noncommittally, averting his gaze again. “All circumstances can change, but only if we want them to.”

  Then she exhaled a disappointed breath. “And you don’t think she wants them to.” It was a statement, not a question. “I think we were both hoping God was getting through to her this week.”

  Drew walked around her to his truck and sat down on his back bumper. “He was.”

  She turned to peer at him closely. “You think so?”

  “I know he was. I told her as much. And she did say she was leaving the door open to faith, so that’s something, at least. I hope she comes around—gives God a chance. But she doesn’t want any part of me, that I do know.”

  Claire snorted. “If you think that, you’re blind. That girl is so taken with you, she can’t see straight. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. But that’s not really the question, is it? The real question is…do you want any part of her?”

  Drew thought about all the revelations Delaney had thrown at him earlier. They weren’t easy to hear. They had done what she intended them to do—make him question everything about her. How had he allowed himself to be so caught up in this woman? He’d known absolutely nothing about her, and despite all the evidence staring him in the face that she was the farthest thing from what he’d been patiently waiting for, he’d fallen for her like a brick in a pond. He felt like a blindsided fool.

  Don’t fall for a pretty face or a sexy smile.

  Just six months ago, he’d preached a message to their youth group about discernment. Jason had asked him to talk to the kids about walking in wisdom when it comes to relationships with the opposite sex. He had talked about how important it was to wait for God’s timing, how to set the right boundaries around dating, and how to avoid the trap of being sucked into a relationship based on someone’s looks or physical attraction alone. Not that Delaney’s only appeal was her beauty, to be fair, but he couldn’t deny that he was powerfully attracted to her. That kiss. He was still feeling the effects of it.

  He took so long to answer her that Claire sat down on the bumper next to him, nudging him a bit to get him to scoot over and make more room. “You already knew she was divorced, and you’ve known all week that she struggles with believing in God. That knowledge made you cautious, but it didn’t sway your interest.” She didn’t look at him but instead kept her gaze across the parking lot. “So, honey, what did she say tonight that shocked you?”

  He smiled wryly up at the sky, shaking his head at her. Claire had the simple Southern charm of someone who had spent her entire life in the same town, married young, and had never gone to college. But she was smarter than any ten college graduates he knew. “Her story is not mine to tell, Claire. Besides, the details don’t matter. I just know now that she lives a very different life than I do and that I was very foolish to think she might be the one.”

  “You’re sure she’s not?”

  “Not unless God is playing some kind of cosmic joke on me.”

  “Why do you say that? Is it totally impossible that she could be the one? Don’t get me wrong, Drew. I’m not saying she is or she isn’t. Goodness knows, I’ve bounced back and forth in my own mind all week about whether it was a good idea that the two of you were getting close. But how can you be so sure?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking me.” He gave her a perplexed look and then sighed. “Look, I think she just came along at a time when I was starting to lose my resolve. I’m thirty-seven years old, and I don’t let on about it much, Claire, but it’s getting harder to sit back and watch all my friends getting married and starting families. I want all of that…more than people realize.” He swallowed hard and took a deep breath.

  “We realize it, honey,” Claire said softly, putting her arm around his shoulders.

  He reached up and grabbed the hand that was wrapped around his shoulder, grateful for her gesture. She was as kind as she was smart. “Despite having a very firm grasp on what I was looking for in a woman, I feel like I threw all that out the window when I looked into those big blue eyes of hers. I’m also a sucker for girls in need of a rescue, it would seem.” He crossed his arms and his ankles at the same time, clearly exasperated with himself.

  “Even though I’m pretty sure I know how you’ll answer, I’m curious about your first statement. What is it you were looking for in a woman?” She absolutely knew what his answer would be, but she wanted to hear him say it.

  “You sound like Delaney,” he answered, annoyed again at the question. “She asked for my list.”

  “And you gave it to her?” Claire smacked him on the shoulder in reprimand. “Are you crazy?”

  “She was bound and determined to get me to admit that I’ve been waiting thirty-seven years for a godly woman who is serious about her faith, committed to church, and called to a life in ministry. Just so she could convince me she isn’t that woman.”

  “Did you tell her that your perfect woman needed to spend a minimum of two hours every morning in prayer and devotion, serve three days a week at the church, and be willing to sign on for at least one mission trip every other year?” Claire’s lips curved upward in a smirk.

  “Very funny. You know my standards aren’t that stringent.” She said nothing and simply stared at him with wide eyes, forcing him to listen to his own words, which now hung in the air around them. “I—I didn’t mean standards…you know what I meant.”

  She took a deep breath. She had so much respect for the discipline he modeled when it came to dating, but he needed to be honest with himself. “You had it right the first time. You do have standards, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but they can put blinders on you. I know this may be hard for you to hear, but everyone knows you have an impossible picture in your mind about the woman you’ve been holding out for, Drew. It’s kind of common knowledge that you’re going to cut anyone off at the knees who tries to set you up with somebody.”

  Her words stung, but he couldn’t argue with them. He simply nodded. “So, how much trust have you really put in God if you’re calling all the shots?” He pulled his face into a wincing grimace. “I’m sorry,” she hastened to add, “You know I love you. I just want to see you happy.”

  “I know, and I don’t disagree with your assessment. But surely you’re not telling me to open myself up to just anybody, right? That goes against everything I…we…believe, Claire.”

  She chuckled. “Well, God did tell Hosea to marry Gomer, so you never know who he’s going to tell you to open yourself up to.” She was joking, of course, but Drew didn’t know that.

  “And the Apostle Paul tells me not to yoke myself to a nonbeliever.”

  She sobered quickly. “And I would never tell you otherwise, honey. But let me ask you this. If Delaney did open her heart to God—if she gave her life back to Christ—would you still have the same reservations about her?”

  He considered her question. The things Delaney had told him still bothered him a great deal, so he had to answer honestly. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that.”

  “So, even if she were a believer, she still wouldn’t meet your list of specifications? That’s ironic.” She got up off the bumper and walked over to her car, keys in hand.

  “Why ironic?”

  She turned back to him. “Well, I was just thinking that it’s a good thing God doesn’t do that to us, Drew. All he asks is that we come to him. He doesn’t ask us to meet some kind of standard or be the perfect match to his list of qualifications. He accepts and loves us as we are, where we are. And by simply loving us, he invites us to trust him, to grow and to change.”

  Her words hit him like a slap in the face. He felt immediately contrite. “I’m not judging her…or at least, I’m trying not to. I honestly don’t know how I would feel if she came back to God—happy for her, of course—but we would still be very unequally yoked.”

  She put her
hands on her hips and cocked her head to the side, giving him her most stern mother-hen look. “Funny how that didn’t seem to bother you so much earlier today. And don’t be so sure of yourself, Drew. That girl was the most dedicated church girl you ever saw for most of her childhood. She’s had a lot of truth spoken into her life, and she’s got a whole lot of Bible in her. Might surprise you to know that she represented Shady Oaks four years in a row at the state Bible Bowl competition, and two of those years, she won it.”

  Bible Bowl? Drew grinned slightly in spite of how miserable he felt. “And…?”

  “And…if God gets ahold of that girl, she’s going to be a force to be reckoned with. If you were willing to give her half a chance, you wouldn’t be unequally yoked for long.” She threw up her hands. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  Drew stood up and walked around to hug her before she got into her car. “I hear you, Ms. Claire. But it’s really a moot point. She’s leaving and going back to her life in New York. My life is here. And neither of us really has a clue whether she’ll embrace a life of faith again. I just need to go home, regroup, and spend some time seeking some direction from God about what I was supposed to learn from all this.”

  Claire reached up and gave him a big squeeze, then she stepped back and laid a hand on his cheek. “There’s a reason this happened—a reason you met her and a reason God gave you a peek into her story. If she’s walking out her testimony right now, at least you know why. You know the pain she’s carrying around inside her. Please don’t forget that while you’re praying.”

  Drew felt an immediate pang of guilt and sorrow at Claire’s reminder. He’d been so thunderstruck by Delaney’s revelations about her life in New York, that he hadn’t allowed her parting words to really sink in. He pictured her standing in front of him, tears streaming, and the raw shame engraved on her face as she told him about her rape and her uncle’s cutting words. No matter how disturbed he’d been, and still was, about her taking a stranger home for sex, it should pale in comparison to his sorrow for her abuse.

  “I can’t forget it.” Her description still rang shrilly in his brain.

  The day he came into my room when my aunt wasn’t home, forced me face-down in my own bed, and raped me. He took my innocence…my goodness. He took what he had no right to take, what I can never get back again.

  “She confided something to me tonight. Her uncle did rape her.” Claire inhaled a sharp gasp and began shaking her head. “She didn’t say when or how old she was. I’m telling you so you can reach out to her. She’s in a lot of pain. And I can’t imagine there’s any healing waiting for her in New York.”

  She nodded and opened her car door, too disturbed by his statement to say any more.

  “Her uncle did something worse to her than rape her, if that’s possible. He made her hate herself. He told her she was damaged goods and always would be.” Tears welled up in the kind woman’s eyes. “And Claire?”

  She stared back at him and shook her head slightly.

  “She really, really believes it.”

  [Seventeen years old]

  The lead singer for the only cover band the prom committee could afford was belting out a slightly off-tune but still passable version of “Drops of Jupiter” while Delaney sat at a nearby table nibbling on cheese and crackers and waiting for Bobby to come back with their drinks. She looked across the room and saw him at the drink table laughing and joking with several of his friends on the Shady basketball team. She smiled slightly.

  They had only been dating about a month, but she’d secretly been crushing on him since the start of their senior year. They had two classes together, and he hadn’t really given her the time of day until two months ago when they’d ended up at the same lab table in Biology. She and Bobby had known each other since they were very young. Shady Oaks was a small town. They went to the same schools, attended the same church. Bobby’s parents owned the hardware store not far from her house. He’d been an odd-looking, gangly boy through most of their school years, but in the last two years, he’d put on the right amount of weight to match his height, most of it in muscle bulk, and he’d become somewhat of a celebrated hero when he’d led their basketball team to the state semifinals this winter. It wasn’t until they’d landed in Biology together that either one of them had been on the other’s radar.

  He brought back two cups of punch and a plate piled with chocolate chip cookies, and they sat as close as they could while their prom chaperones were trying to keep one eye on the couples and one eye on the punch bowl. When the opening sultry lines of Alicia Keys’ “Fallin” came wafting from the stage, couples rushed out to crowd the small gym floor. Bobby pulled her to her feet and they were swaying side to side on the floor within seconds, pressed full length to each other like they’d been wrapped in Saran Wrap. By the end of the song, she could feel how turned on he was—pressing into her hip through the layers of her silvery blue sateen skirt, and she looked up to see his eyes fixated on her breasts, pushed up perfectly for his downward view by the tightly laced corset of her bodice. The look he was giving her made her flush from the scalp of her beautifully styled up-do down to her manicured toenails.

  They’d had sex three times so far in the month they’d been dating—the first time in the back of his car after a lengthy make-out session in a poorly lit empty parking lot behind the laundromat. The other two times had been in his bedroom after school while his parents were at work. A bunch of kids from school had gotten hotel rooms in Savannah for the night, including Bobby, and she anticipated them hooking up there after prom. When his gaze finally traveled upward from her breasts to her face, she gave him back the same heated gaze he’d been giving her. It was going to be a good night.

  As she’d anticipated, they all left prom early and headed into Savannah. As it turned out, the boys had only been able to scrape enough money together for two adjacent rooms, and there were eight couples and some tag alongs piled into the two rooms, watching MTV, playing quarters and poker around the desk, and intermittently making out. A few had to take their dates home, but some of them stayed, slipping off in pairs into the adjacent hotel room, one of the bathrooms, or out into the stairwell for privacy.

  About midnight, Bobby pulled her into the other room and locked the door. They were both more than a little drunk, and he kissed her sloppily for a few minutes, dropped his pants, unzipped her from her dress, and then pushed her down onto the bed, pulling her legs up around him. It was over in less than a minute. He grunted, “That was good, babe,” then rolled off her and promptly fell asleep. She lay there blinking dazedly at the ceiling, but she was too hampered by the sensation of the room spinning to be let down by this post-prom session of so-called intimacy.

  She awoke the next morning to early sunlight pouring into the room. Her head felt like it had been cracked open and she looked down to see that she had fallen asleep in nothing but her strapless bra and her thigh-high stockings. She rolled over to see the space in the bed next to her was empty. She got up, wincing and holding her head with every step, and made her way to the bathroom, where she splashed water on her face and rinsed her mouth out with the little bottle of mouthwash next to the soap.

  When she stepped out of the bathroom, she could hear male voices coming from the other room. She peered through the partially cracked opening in the door, and saw that Bobby, Taylor, and Pete were sitting around the desk, dealing a new hand of poker. She frowned as she realized that at some point in the night, Bobby had gotten out of bed with her to return to their card game. Her eyes then scanned the two queen beds in that room. They were empty. Her stomach clenched when she realized that Taylor and Pete had taken Courtney and Brandie home at some point. All the girls who had been with her that night, laughing and joking, were all now at home tucked in their beds. Home safe with their parents.

  And she was the only girl who’d stayed the whole night.

  She was about
to push the door open and tell Bobby she wanted to go home, when the mention of her name froze her steps on the carpet and her hand over the doorknob.

  “So, are you and Laney like…a thing?” Pete asked.

  Bobby laughed. “She’s hot as h—, and she’s a good lay. But we ain’t a thing.”

  “She’s always been weird,” Taylor said, shrugging and throwing two red chips on the pile. “You ‘member when we was at youth retreat in seventh grade, and us boys snuck into the girls bunk room to tie the girls to their headboards and put shaving cream on their noses? Laney woke up in the middle of being tied down and come out swinging like a crazy person. Eddie Billings had a broken nose and a black eye for the rest of the summer.”

  “Crap, I’d forgotten all about that,” Pete said, howling with laughter. “She is a weird one. She used to be okay when we were little kids, but then she got dark and moody all the time.”

  “So, why are you messing around with her anyway?” Taylor asked.

  “Uh…you saw her in that dress tonight right? You’re not blind, are ya?” And Bobby and Pete broke out in a fresh round of grunts and laughter.

  Taylor feigned a far away, dreamy look as he considered the question. “Yeah, she’s had a fine pair of honeydews since we were in sixth grade.” Then he cocked his head toward the bedroom next door. “And obviously, she’s not a little prude like Courtney is. That girl slaps my hand every time I try to cup what little bit she’s got.”

  “Courtney’s a good girl, Taylor,” Bobby reprimanded him. “She’s the kind of girl you’ll come home from college to marry...after you’ve had some fun with those sorority girls at Valdosta State.” He winked at Pete and they all laughed again.

  Then he added, “No, dudes…Laney’s a ton of fun, but she’s the screwing kind, not the marrying kind. I wasn’t the first one in that door. She’s a hot piece, but I can’t see getting down on one knee for that. No way.”