He was almost sorry he decided to go.
Susan sat smack on the fifty-yard line, in the middle of a bunch of squealing, silly high school juniors on row three in the old stone bleachers out back of the school. Tag watched her from the tenth row near the end zone, which was as high as the bleachers went, and as far away from her as he could sit without going to the visitors’ side of the field, which would have set everybody in Sweetbranch to talking. She wore a bright red coat with a black, furry collar, because it was a cool night. Her hair was all done up in little curls on top of her head, with a big red satin bow in back. She looked so sweet and pretty, Tag thought he might start tearing the bleachers apart with his bare hands if he had to look at her much longer.
Then, at halftime, she went out onto the field with the three other girls who were nominated for homecoming queen. She left her coat in the stands and went down on the arm of weasely Edwin Plankton with his glasses and those stringy Beatles bangs. Her dress was creamy white and fit snugly across her small, high breasts, and Tag ached with the memory of those breasts against his chest. She wore a corsage with red ribbons to match the bow in her hair, and when she was crowned homecoming queen, Tag knew everybody could see that Susan Marie Foster was the most beautiful girl at Sweetbranch High—and too good for the likes of Eugene Hutchins Junior.
She spotted him that night when she was going back to her seat after halftime ceremonies, and froze right in the middle of effusive congratulations from Rose Finley, her auburn-haired best friend who had been her only real competition for the homecoming queen crown. Susan’s eyes locked with Tag’s, and he saw that she was still as miserable as he was.
Knowing it gave him no peace.
In fact, he thought as he pulled his old Ford into his driveway later that night, it might have been easier to put her out of his mind if he’d been able to tell himself that Susan was okay, that she’d forgotten him, that she was now in love with that creepy Edwin Plankton. But he’d seen the misery and longing in her eyes, and he couldn’t stand knowing it perfectly matched the misery and longing he’d been living with for two interminable months.
As he killed the engine, Tag toyed with the idea that he might have to leave Sweetbranch.
Clutching the steering wheel in a death grip, Tag was consumed with wondering how far he would have to go to leave Susan behind. So consumed was he that he didn’t realize he was no longer alone until he heard the passenger-side door shut. He jumped, startled. Was even more startled when he looked over to see Susan sitting beside him, the black, furry collar of her coat snugged against her chin.
“Susan...”
“I can’t do it anymore, Tag.”
Her presence stunned him. “But Susan...”
“Just kiss me before I absolutely die from missing you, Tag Hutchins.”
And because flying would have been easier than saying no, he did kiss her, with the taste of sweet fruit punch on her soft lips and the tickle of her collar on his chin.
In an instant, he grew painfully hard, and dangerous thoughts possessed him. Knowing he risked going too far, he tried to keep the kiss gentle. But Susan teased against his lips with the tip of her tongue and all the good sense in the world couldn’t have kept him from opening his lips and meeting her tongue with his.
“I love you, Tag,” she whispered. “Nobody’s going to keep us apart.”
The words were oil on the fire inside him. He pulled her tightly against him, aching to feel her soft curves and grateful when she let her coat fall open. The pin from her corsage jabbed him in the chest, but he barely noticed, he was so enthralled in the pleasure of feeling her against him once again.
“I love you, Susie. I’ve been crazy from missing you.”
He didn’t know exactly how it happened, but as they kissed and murmured, he gradually realized that his hand was grazing the top of her thigh, above her stocking, exploring the forbidden territory of garters and silken flesh. Susan sighed and he felt heat against his fingers. Susan whimpered and thrust the heat against his palm. Tag followed instinct and found the damp softness of her. He explored, the pressure building within him. She cried out then, softly in the darkness, and Tag felt himself gripped in shuddering release.
Instantly humiliated and frightened beyond words, Tag drew his hand away from her dangerous heat. She murmured an incoherent protest, reached for his hand. But Tag took her by the shoulders and pulled her firmly away from his chest.
“Susan, we can’t do this. Don’t you see? This isn’t right.”
In the darkness, he saw her lower lip tremble. “You’re afraid of what my mother will do, aren’t you?”
“No. Listen to me, Susan. I’m afraid of what we’ll do.”
“I’m not.” Her chin went up defiantly, one of the many Susan-gestures that he loved.
“You’re barely sixteen. I don’t want us to spoil it by...making a mistake. I want it to be perfect.”
She crossed her hands across her chest and glared out the front windshield. “And when will I be old enough for it to be perfect, Eugene?”
“When you’re old enough to marry me, that’s when.”
Her shoulders lost their stiffness and her chin came down a notch. Slowly she turned to look at him again. “You mean that?”
“I mean it.”
Susan’s mother fought them all the way, of course, but Tag also wouldn’t agree to sneaking around, either. By the end of Susan’s junior year, Betsy Foster had just about given up her ranting and raving, probably because everybody in Sweetbranch had gotten so tired of it nobody listened any longer.
Tag worked construction every day, enjoying the hard labor, barely noticing as his eighteen-year-old chest broadened and hardened. He learned that a lot of the men he worked with were like his father, too ready to drink when their fears threatened to confront them. And he made up his mind not to be like that, ever. He worked hard and saved his money and stayed out of his father’s way. What money he didn’t save he gave to his mother. And what time he wasn’t working, he spent with Susan.
He taught her to drive his noisy old Ford with its crotchety stick shift, laughing with her the first four times she rolled all the way back down the hill at the stop sign on Cottonwood Way.
They visited Crash at his first apartment in Birmingham, after he flunked out of junior college and started working for the electronics nut who kept saying computers were the future.
They celebrated her seventeenth birthday, and his nineteenth. They visited the hospital when Tag became an uncle, both feeling funny over such grown-up stuff. Feeling funnier yet when they both looked at the tiny, red-faced baby in the crib and glanced at each other, each realizing the other had been entertaining possibilities.
They fished in Willow Creek on Saturdays with old Bump Finley, who had turned up, as Tag’s mama put it, like a bad penny, to move in with his brother’s family around the corner on Dixie Belle Lane. He’d left town decades ago in a fit of temper, folks said, and now he was back, having lost his job and his retirement benefits in another fit of temper. But Tag and Susan learned to love the cantankerous old man, who sometimes gave a reluctant chuckle as the young couple splashed and cavorted in the creek Bump vowed was sacred ground, set aside for fishermen only.
Susan taught Tag to dance—real one-two-three slow dancing—in her family dining room the weekend her parents went to New Orleans for a Shriners’ convention. He stepped all over her feet, and she laughed as delightedly as if he was Fred Astaire.
The weekend they brought Elliott’s remains home from Vietnam she also held his hand, squeezing it tight every time he thought he was going to lose his cool in public.
And he watched her make steady progress on the Double Wedding Ring quilt while they daydreamed about the future. They talked with delight about how poor they would be. About how hard they would work. About how wonderful it would be in that little married students’ apartment off campus with nothing but hand-me-down furniture and their quilt to keep them warm.
<
br /> And they waited and hungered and sometimes got carried away by the desire that grew stronger every day. But never too carried away.
Now, as Tag lay on the ground and watched darkness settle over Sweetbranch, he wondered how much longer he would have to wait. How many more years it would be before their dreams would start coming true.
He heard the crackling of a footstep in the woods and looked up in time to watch her slip between the trees. She was smiling expectantly, her hands behind her back.
“I thought you’d never get here,” he said.
“I stopped by the house. I have a surprise.”
She swept her arms around in front of her and the quilt came tumbling open, falling in a rose-and-green-and-white sweep to the moss-covered ground. She smiled at him over the edge she still held in her arms. “I finished. It’s ready now and it won’t be long until—”
Her happy smile, her hopeful words, brought every fear in Tag’s heart bubbling to the surface. He turned away, dropped his head into the hands that rested on his knees.
“Tag, what’s wrong?”
And she was beside him, her arm around his shoulders. Just her nearness eased some of his fear.
“I’ve been drafted.”
“Drafted? But—” She sank onto her knees. He looked into her confused eyes, watched as realization slowly crept into their smoky gray depths. “Drafted?”
He nodded. “I’ve got two weeks.”
They were silent, communicating their misery and fear with their eyes.
“Will you...will they...you won’t have to go to...?”
“There’s only one reason they draft anybody, Susan. Everybody’s going to Vietnam.”
“Oh, Tag!”
She threw her arms around him, and they held each other for a long time, until darkness was all around them. Moonlight sparkling off the creek was their only light.
Tag drew strength from holding her. Enough strength, at last, to draw the little fuzzy box out of his jeans and place it in her hands. She hesitated, then opened it. The tiny chip of a diamond barely twinkled in the moonlight.
“Oh, Tag! It’s beautiful!”
“I wanted...hoped you would want to...make it official before I go.”
Her bright smile returned. “Oh, yes! How soon can we do it, Tag? While you’re in boot camp, I’ll get us a little apartment and before you go, we can be together every single minute and—”
He chuckled at her typically Susan, full-steam-ahead solution to every problem. “Whoa, now. I just meant we’ll be engaged. That way it’ll be official that we’re going to get married as soon as I get home.”
She closed the ring box with a snap. “Engaged? Tag Hutchins, I don’t want to be engaged. I want to be married. If you’re going off God knows where, I want to be your wife!”
The strength of that devotion, Tag knew, was all he would need to see him through whatever lay ahead. He smiled.
“Susan, you’re seventeen. You have another month of high school. Your mother would—”
“My mother can eat gravel in her grits for all I care! I’m not letting you go off without marrying you first. And that’s that!”
He took her in his arms, but she held herself rigid. “It’s not the right thing to do. Don’t you see that, Susan?”
“How could it possibly be the wrong thing for us to get married?” she wailed.
“Because you’re too young. Because I won’t leave you here trying to act like a grown-up married woman all by yourself. Because I want it to be right when we do it.”
“It would be right, Tag. It couldn’t be anything but right. Why can’t you see that?”
And she kissed him then, fiercely, as if she could make him see just how wrong he was. Her lips were hard and insistent and urgent against his, and he met them with all the emotions he’d bottled inside himself since opening the letter the afternoon before.
She threw herself into his arms as they kissed, her fingers winding through his hair, her legs tangling with his. All Tag knew, as they fell back onto the quilt, was that he never wanted to let her go, that he couldn’t bear the thought of letting her go.
“I love you, Tag,” she whispered against his jaw while one of her hands slipped up under his T-shirt and clutched at his chest.
“Oh, God, Susan, I love you, too.”
She looked into his eyes then, and pulled away from his embrace. Before he could ask what was wrong, she was unbuttoning the little brown shirt that was part of her Dairee Dreme uniform.
“Susie...”
“Just hush, Tag Hutchins,” she whispered with the stubborn set to her chin that he knew so well. But he had trouble watching her chin, for her shirt was off and she wore nothing beneath it. All he could see were her small, perfect breasts with their dusting of freckles, puckered into small, tight points.
Knowing better, he reached out and felt one of those small, tight points with the tips of his fingers. Susan closed her eyes and gasped.
Tag pulled his hand away. “We can’t do this, Susie. We’ve waited all this time. We have to—”
“If you’re going to make me wait to be your wife, we’re at least going to know there’s something real between us, Tag. You’re taking something with you. And I’m keeping something here with me.”
She slipped her skirt down around her ankles, then stepped out of a scrap of yellow bikini panties. Tag groaned at the nest of pale curls between her legs.
“Susie, are you sure you know—”
“I’m sure.”
She dropped to her knees once again and pulled his head to her breast and Tag was lost. He took her nipple in his mouth, swirled his tongue around it, groaning again, but deeper this time as he felt her open the zipper on his jeans and take him in her long, elegant fingers.
He knew then it was going to happen because there was no way he had the strength to stop himself any longer. So he touched her, there between her legs, and felt the hot, damp place where he’d wanted to be for so long. He touched her, heard her breath become ragged and quick.
He pushed her back onto the quilt and threw his own clothes into the pile with hers. He kissed her then, all over, although she tried in her impatience to hurry him. By the time he finished kissing her, touching her, she was writhing and calling out to him.
“I’m going to go crazy, Tag, if you don’t love me soon.”
He knelt and let the tip of his erection touch the hot, wet place between her legs and struggled not to come right then. “It might hurt,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
She arched up until the tip of him was just inside her. Then she wrapped her long, slim legs around his waist and pulled him into her in one swift lunge. She cried out and so did he. He held her buttocks in his hands, holding her still against him until he could be sure he wouldn’t explode and spoil everything.
When they started moving together, slowly, tentatively, Tag watched her face until he was certain she wasn’t hurting. Watched until her nipples puckered once again and a slow flush covered her freckles and her eyes grew hazy. Then he could contain himself no longer.
Afterward, he stayed inside her, growing hard again before he had fully lost his first erection.
When the moon went down hours later and they folded the Double Wedding Ring quilt and walked to the edge of the woods, he kissed her one more time before she ran back to her house to sleep alone.
“I’ll be waiting, Tag. Wherever they send you, however long it takes, I’ll be waiting for you.”
Tag held on to those words for a long time, hearing them over and over in his heart like a prayer; they saw him through times when faith in Susan was the only thing sustaining him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MALORIE FOLLOWED her grandmother to the car, wishing Addy Mayfield hadn’t been available to stay with Susan. Wishing she knew where to find the gumption to stand up to Betsy Foster.
“I don’t want to go to church with you,” she would say. “I don’t want to get to know anyone in th
is town. I don’t want to get a life.”
In your dreams.
For, as she buckled Cody’s carrier into the front seat, Malorie knew the bitter truth. She was no more able to stand up to Betsy Foster than her mother was. She didn’t even have the courage, at this moment, to brush Cody’s soft cheek with the back of her hand, which she ached to do. And all because she didn’t have the nerve to risk one of her grandmother’s stern, disapproving glares.
Nagged by the certainty that she deserved her misery, Malorie climbed into the back seat as her grandmother started the pristine six-year-old Cadillac. Although Reid Foster had been dead and his dealership in new hands for five years, the new owners still treated Betsy Foster like a queen when she came in for service.
Cautiously, the way she approached everything in life, Betsy backed the car down the driveway toward the street. She had almost reached the end when the roar of a motorcycle destroyed the Sunday morning serenity of Mimosa Lane.
Betsy braked to a stop a bit too abruptly. Malorie looked over her shoulder to discover that Tag Hutchins’ big black bike sat squarely in the Foster drive. It idled noisily. Tag stared through the rear window, one arm resting on the helmet that sat on his thigh. With the other hand, he slowly revved the bike’s engine.
Despite herself, Malorie smiled. Her boss was not like anyone else she’d ever known. He, too, intimidated her. But somehow she didn’t mind that as much as she minded being intimidated by her grandmother.
Betsy shoved the Cadillac into Park. “Well, of all the nerve!”
Malorie half expected her grandmother to get out of the car and confront Tag Hutchins. But she didn’t. Instead, after a moment, Tag swung one long leg over his bike and slid off. Dangling his helmet from a thumb, he approached the driver’s side window, leaned over and peered into the car.
“Mornin’, Miss Malorie.”
Malorie smiled. His words were polite, courtly even, but his voice was, as always, as rough as a gravel road. Indeed, Tag looked rough all round this morning. Heavy stubble darkened his lean face, his too-long hair was rumpled and his eyes were bloodshot.
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