by Anne Calhoun
• • •
The sun hung low in the sky when Ben’s truck pulled into the Silent Circle Farm parking lot. A plume of dust rose in its wake, turning the light a dusky orange. Rachel hurried up the path leading from the employee bunkhouse to the parking lot and stepped through the picket gate, grateful he was a little late. She’d needed the time to shower and change into a plain cotton blouse and skirt. Ben rolled down the passenger window. Mouthwatering aromas of fried chicken, biscuits, and mashed potatoes drifted to her nose. Mirrored shades hid his eyes completely, but his mouth was set in a firm line.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” she said.
The lock clicked. She opened the door and settled into the passenger seat, then carefully secured her seat belt. When the car didn’t move, she looked at Ben, and let her gaze linger on all the places she wasn’t supposed to look. He wore another western shirt unsnapped partway down his firmly muscled chest, this one in a faded blue pattern, jeans pulled tight across his hips and thighs, a brown leather belt, and boots. The ever-present shades hid his eyes again, and he hadn’t shaved since the morning. Dark stubble lay along his jaw, around his full lips. Heat cracked low in her belly as she looked her fill, flickered to flame when his mouth softened ever so slightly. Like he was thinking about kissing her, or better, thinking about her kissing him.
When the truck didn’t move, she spoke. “Is something wrong?”
“You have a curfew I need to know about?” he asked with a nod out her still-open window.
Rob stood in the open door to the hayloft, one arm braced against the frame, the other hand on his hip. George sat on the barn floor one story below him, ears perked and head cocked in a similarly vigilant posture. She lifted her hand and waved tentatively. Rob gave her a short nod in response. George didn’t move.
“No,” she said to Ben. “I don’t have a curfew. The chicken smells delicious.”
“It’s from a hole-in-the-wall diner near the station. You hungry?”
“Very. Rob sent one of the A&M boys into town to pick up the Truck Garden. Jess took his place in the fields, and I was alone at the stand. It feels good to sit down.”
Without taking his gaze from the highway stretching in front of them, he reached into a big white paper sack in the backseat and pulled out a cardboard tray of fried cheese balls. “Help yourself. We’re going to be driving for a little while.”
She popped a cheese ball in her mouth and bit down gingerly. The flavor of bread crumbs, jalapeños, and mozzarella cheese spread over her tongue. “Hot,” she said, fanning her open mouth, then took the bottle of water he extended, cracked the seal, and swallowed.
“Too spicy?”
“I wasn’t expecting that,” she said, and ate the second one more gingerly.
He gave her a crooked grin and plucked a couple of larger curds from the container, but didn’t say anything else. They drove farther north and west from Galveston, into Hill Country. Ben seemed to know exactly where they were going, braking to turn off the state highway onto two ruts through pastureland that gradually descended down to a creek bed. What appeared to be shrubs from the road were actually cottonwood trees. Ben parked the truck in a gap in the trees, nose pointing toward the nearly dry creek bed. Thick trunks rose around them, the branches arching in a canopy overhead, gilding the thick, humid air in greenish gold.
“Where are we?” Rachel asked.
“The back pasture of the Bar H ranch,” Ben said, and turned off the truck’s engine. “H as in Harris. This is my dad’s place.”
The leaves rustled in the breeze, the noise amplified when he powered down the windows. “Why are we here?”
He gave her that smile again. “I lost my virginity here,” he said. “The summer I was fifteen. A friend’s older sister had the keys to her daddy’s truck. She used to sneak out, pick me up at the end of the driveway. We’d park down here. Good memories. I thought maybe we’d make you a good memory here. But you’re hungry, so we should eat first.”
He snagged the bag of food and got out of the truck. She met him at the truck’s tailgate, where he handed her the food and unlatched the tailgate while her stomach growled. He took the food from her and set it in the bed, then turned to her and put his hands on her waist. “Up you go,” he said, and boosted her onto the tailgate.
Heat from the truck’s undercarriage swirled around her feet. She gripped the edge of the tailgate and waited while he hopped up next to her. She reached for the sack of food, but he held it out of reach.
“You’re not dying, are you?”
“What?” she gasped. “No, I’m not dying. Not that I know of, anyway. Why would you think such a thing?”
He shrugged, then set about laying out the food between them. Crispy fried chicken, mashed potatoes with a container of gravy, corn, baked beans. “I didn’t know if you liked tea, sweet tea, beer, or water, so I brought them all.”
“Tea, please,” she said. “Why would you think I was dying?”
“Because in the movies women who stay virginal until they’re twenty-five, then suddenly go wild, are usually dying of cancer or some other disease where they get attractively thin and pale.”
“I didn’t decide to have sex because I’m dying,” she said firmly.
“Good.”
He handed her a bottle of tea and a paper plate. She helped herself to a smallish breast piece and a little bit of everything else, attempting to eat the chicken with the tips of her fingers and her flimsy plastic fork until it became clear the only thing to do was tear it apart. She pulled the skin off and ate it, sneaking glances at Ben while she chewed. He ate without seeming to notice her interest, until he cut her a glance as he tipped back his second bottle of beer.
“So, Rachel Hill, why were you a twenty-five-year-old virgin?”
No polite small talk to ease her into anything, just a demand for the explanation she owed him. He’d walled off, as if the place was good for her, but not him. The scent of clean sweat rose from his skin to mingle with dirt and water and tree. She finished her mouthful of baked beans and said, “Because I was saving myself for marriage.”
He looked at her. “We’re not married, so keep going.”
“Because I believed premarital sex was as much of a mortal sin as murder,” she said.
A huff of laughter, but no more. “Religious?”
“Very.”
“But now you’re not.”
That was a very, very good question. She missed some of it. The singing that used to permeate her days and dreams. The certainty. Who was she outside the beliefs and community that defined her entire world? “I’m not sure,” she said honestly. “Not like I was. Are you?”
He gave a short, hard laugh. “With the exception of weddings and funerals I haven’t been in a church since I moved out of the house to go to college.”
She nodded, and selected another piece of chicken. In the sheltered world of Elysian Fields, everyone went to Sunday services. In the outside world, almost no one she knew went to church. Jess and the A&M boys went back to bed after morning chores. Rob disappeared in the middle of the day. Rachel didn’t know what to do with herself. Working felt wrong. So did church.
“Did you grow up around here?”
“Are you familiar with Elysian Fields?”
One eyebrow lifted. “The Fundamentalist community west of Rosharon? Yeah.”
“I lived there until six months ago.”
Both eyebrows lifted at that. He finished his mouthful of chicken and swiped at the grease left on his chin before saying, “Huh. Why did you leave?”
Most people didn’t ask that question because they assumed any sane person would bolt from a community like Elysian Fields. They wanted details about wearing only modest dresses and skirts, about a homeschool education, abou
t the blessing she knelt to receive from her father at the end of every day, about her daily routine in the kitchen or on the farm. They wanted to know why she’d never cut her hair above elbow length, and how she’d never been alone with a man other than her father and her pastor. She’d spent the first couple of months in the world feeling like a sideshow at the circus.
Ben asked the hard question, the one she didn’t have a good, simple answer for. They needed me to be someone I am not. They expected me to surrender all choice and control in my life to God, and if God’s direction wasn’t clear, my pastor or my father would explain it to me. But on the days when she felt some winged creature inside her, talons latched around her heart, beating its wings against her ribs, safety and salvation seemed distant, and untouchable. “I didn’t fit in anymore,” she said.
“That can’t have been easy,” he said noncommittally.
“It wasn’t.” She thought of her weekly letter now making its way to the community’s shared mailbox. “Science was the downfall. I’m willing to grant that the complexity of the natural world is a gift from God, but science is science. I wanted to know and understand, to dissect and analyze, but when I pushed I’d run into roles that functioned like walls. I didn’t need to take chemistry or physics or biology because my role was to be a wife and mother. Not that I don’t want to be a wife and a mother, but I want other things, too. I’d reached the point where leaving was easier than staying,” she finished, as if either option were easy. “I still don’t know what to do with myself when chores are finished on Sunday mornings. The whole day feels wrong.”
He said nothing, as if her story of leaving rubbed him the wrong way, or maybe he was just the strong, silent type. A few minutes later he’d made a big dent in the box of chicken, and she’d finished off her first helping.
“Outside of the auction, a girl like you wouldn’t have anything to do with me,” he said, giving her a sidelong glance as he cleaned his hands on the wet wipes from the bottom of the bag.
“And here I was thinking you wouldn’t have looked twice at me if I hadn’t bought your date.”
He did them both the courtesy of not denying her assertion while he sorted the leftovers from the trash. She came with too much baggage, and she knew it. That’s why she’d bought a man at an auction to lose her virginity. “Thank you for dinner,” she said, “but you don’t have to go through with this.”
Ben slid off the tailgate and turned to face her. The look in his eyes made her heart thump against her breastbone.
“So, Rachel Hill, former virgin of Elysian Fields, before you and I had our date, what had you done?”
Chapter Five
Fingers firmly gripping the tailgate edge again, she inhaled, slow and deep. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Purity of mind, body, and soul were paramount, so boys and girls were never alone together. When couples started courting, their relationships were supervised. In most cases they didn’t even hold hands before they married. I wasn’t courted.”
His eyebrows drew down, as if this was somehow a slight to her honor. “Why not?”
His genuine bemusement at this made her smile. “I asked too many questions.”
He stood in front of her, long legged and lean hipped, broad through the shoulders, his dark brown hair smoothed flat against his forehead. Sweat shone in the hollow of his throat. He wasn’t smiling when he said, “What do you want to do?”
Emotion crystallized into a word. Desire. “I want to kiss you.”
Something like amusement made his eyelids droop and the corners of his mouth lift in a grin far less dangerous than his flashing, slashing smile. The tailgate remedied the difference in their heights. Sitting down she was slightly taller than he was, standing on the uneven dirt ground sloping down to the trickling creek behind him. He braced his hands on the tailgate, not quite touching her but nonetheless amping up the vibrations resonating in her chest. “So kiss me.”
No hesitation, no guidance. He expected her to know and take what she wanted, assumed she had the courage and strength to do just that. She bent forward, and paused. She smelled dry grass, the faint dampness coming from the creek, dust, oil and gasoline from the engine, but mostly she smelled Ben’s skin and sweat rising from the open collar of his shirt. The closer she leaned the more concentrated it got, and the heat of his body intensified it.
His mouth was closed, but she got the sense it wouldn’t take much pressure to open them. His restraint gave her the courage to close her eyes, lean in, and brush her lips over his.
Sparks fired under her skin.
He still didn’t move, so she did it again, grazing her mouth over his again and again, getting lost in the skittering sparking sensation in her lips, the way it spread down her throat, slackening her jaw as it did. He mimicked her, opening his mouth slightly, and now his breath mingled with hers.
So intimate, those soft exhales right into her mouth, faintly yeasty from the beer, a hint of residual heat from the jalapeño poppers. As if the memory of the spice made her want more, she hesitantly touched her tongue to the tip of his.
A short but definite halt to his breathing. She paused, unsure of herself, afraid to look at him.
“Keep going.” Low and rough. An intimate command. This time she slipped her tongue between his lips straightaway, and stroked his once, twice. When she pulled back, his tongue followed hers into her mouth, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. Her pulse pounded, blood heating.
This time he pulled back. Without thinking she lifted her hand to brush her thumb across his lower lip.
“You like?”
She nodded, then put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him again, more sure of herself now, frankly eager for the heat. The rush. The kiss deepened as he followed her lead, never insisting, always tempting. Her fingers curled into his shirt collar when his teeth closed gently on her lower lip. She drew back to look into his eyes. Unapologetic desire simmered there, so she did the same to him, nipping hesitantly at his lower lip, coming back immediately for a sharper bite. Then, driven by an impulse she couldn’t name, she licked the reddening spot.
A low groan rumbled in his throat before he swallowed it. “Jesus,” he said.
His hard shaft strained against his faded jeans. She opened her knees to him. With both hands he gripped her bottom and slid her forward, plastering them together from hips to lips.
She got a little lost in the kissing that followed, as if the gilded spring air seeped through her skin and into her blood, drugging her. His teeth clacked against hers as his tongue brushed the roof of her mouth, setting off a teasing sensation that emerged as a gasp when he dragged his mouth from hers and laid openmouthed kisses along her cheek to her ear. His hands left her hips for her jaw, cupping her ears so that her heart and breathing sounded like waves. She curled her fingers through his belt loops and pressed against him. With each quick inhale his abdomen brushed hers, while his chest pressed firmly against her breasts and his shaft notched between her thighs. Hard to her soft, everywhere.
Ben paused, hands on her jaw, breathing deeply, and for a moment her attention crystallized on the heat between her legs, the sense of longing. One hand left her jaw to skim down her back and press against her tailbone. The pressure sent sensation crackling through her, and she gasped.
“What is this?” she asked. She wanted to rub up against him. She wanted to see him, touch his bare skin. She wanted . . .
He gave a low laugh she felt rumble in his chest as much as heard in her ears. “Chemistry,” he said, and lifted his head to look at her. “This is some kind of wicked chemistry.”
His mouth was swollen, wet from hers, and the thought that she’d used her mouth to make it that way sent heat wicking through her.
“Still with me?” he asked.
Yes. Oh yes. “I want more.”
A smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “Come on,” he said, and helped her down from the back of the truck. Sliding the passenger seat as far forward as it could go, he climbed in the back bench seat and sprawled out with his broad shoulders wedged against the window.
She took the hand he held out and clambered awkwardly into the space to kneel beside him. “Is this okay? No one will see us, right?”
He shook his head and pointed out the windshield at the dirt tracks curving up the hill. “Private property, in pastureland that’s fallow, plus I can see any vehicle that comes over the hill. C’mere.”
Looking into those spectacular blue eyes as she parted her legs and straddled him felt as intimate as the hot, licking kisses. She looked at his pulse, thumping at the base of his strong throat. “Can I touch you?”
“Sure,” he said.
She bent and put her hands on his shoulders and her mouth to the side of his neck, just below his ear. Lips open, she touched him with the tip of her tongue. She’d never used her tongue to taste and touch at once. The skin just below his rough jaw was surprisingly soft and damp with salty sweat. A groan reverberated soft in her ears, and against her mouth, then his hands settled on her hips. Another long, vibrating moment while she scraped her teeth ever so gently against the tendon, then his big hands tightened. She filed his response away, and moved on.
Desire expanded inside her, and when she moved to his mouth she felt a matching response in the hot, slow kiss. She slid her palms over his shoulders to his pectorals. Heat and strength radiated through the cotton, into her skin as she toyed with the pearl snaps running down the length of his chest and abdomen to disappear behind his belt buckle.
“Go on.”
The click of the snap releasing sounded loud in the truck’s cab. Heat flared in her cheeks, but she didn’t stop. He leaned forward when she spread the fabric so she went all the way, tugging his shirt down his arms and off.