She looked down at her leg. It was still considerably thinner than its mate, but that pasty hospital color was gone. The pink scars remained, but they no longer itched. She wiggled her toes and felt no numbness or tingling.
“You,” she said to her leg, “are getting shaved today. Yes, you are.”
She looked at herself in the mirror over her dresser. Something had changed in her face as well; the hard set of her eyes, the way her jaw cut a sharp line when she clenched her teeth, seemed to be gone. She looked younger than when she’d joined the army, she thought suddenly. Her sleep-tousled hair only added to the effect.
She pulled on some shorts and went into the bathroom. Later, following her shower, she sat on her bed combing her wet hair when there was a soft knock at the door. “Y’all decent?” a male voice said.
It was not her father or either of her brothers, so she quickly pulled on cut-offs and a tank top. “No, but now I’m dressed. Come on in.”
Terry-Joe Gitterman opened the door. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and looked handsome as the sunrise. He smiled when he saw her. “You look like a million bucks.”
“That’s a lot of deer,” she said, and winked. She put her comb aside and sat back on the bed, deliberately crossing her newly shorn bad leg over her good. “What do you think? Not bad for two weeks, is it?”
“Not bad at all,” he said appreciatively, and propped his mandolin case against the wall. “Hope you don’t mind me stopping by unannounced like this. Your daddy said it was okay to come on back.”
“Heck, yeah. What brings you by this early?”
He tapped his mandolin case. “I figure you’re doing pretty well with your playing now, so I thought we might jam out a little. If you feel up to it. I just want to hear you cut loose.”
Bronwyn’s eyes playfully narrowed. “Did Bliss Overbay send you to check on me?”
“She might’ve suggested it. But I wasn’t hard to convince. What do you say?”
She grinned. “I say skin that song iron.”
In a few moments she’d retrieved Magda and held the instrument ready against her chest. Terry-Joe sat on her desk chair, his own instrument across his lap. His foot eagerly tapped the floor. “What do you feel like playing today?”
“Hm. You know ‘The White Cockade’?”
He nodded. They decided on a key, and he said, “You lead us off.”
Bronwyn tapped her finger on the mandolin’s body four times, then began to play.
After the first verse, Terry-Joe said, “Now sing.”
“Oh, I can’t really sing,” she said with a shy smile.
“Sure you can.”
She cleared her throat and began the verse.
My love was born in Aberdeen,
The prettiest lad that ever was seen,
But now he makes our hearts so sad,
He takes the Field with his White Cockade.
Terry-Joe leaned closer to harmonize on the chorus. She could feel his breath, warm and alive, on her cheek.
Oh, he’s a ranting, roving lad,
He is a brisk and a bonny lad,
Come what may, I will be wed,
And follow the boy with the White Cockade.
He looked up, and their eyes met. She stopped playing. He continued, his shoulder muscles moving beneath his shirt. He gazed at her with unabashed desire. “You’re the most beautiful girl I personally know,” he said finally.
“You should get out more,” she said, but her voice was a little raspy. She remembered that first day when she’d found him working on her wheelchair and later pressed against him as he held the door. The urge to press against him anew swelled in her.
Now he stopped playing. He looked down as he said, “Tell you the truth about something, Bronwyn. My brother may brag about his money and his wheels, but you’re the only thing of Dwayne’s I ever wanted.”
“I’m not like his truck. He didn’t hold the pink slip on me.”
Still avoiding her gaze, he shrugged and said, “To him, you were.”
“I’m not anymore.”
Now he looked at her, and the heat in his eyes matched her own. “He’d kill me if he knew I was even thinking about this.”
“Thinking about what?”
He leaned closer and their lips met.
She wasn’t clear as to how exactly they got from that point to lying on the bed, their instruments safely on the floor. But there she was, on her back, Terry-Joe still kissing her as his hands roamed over her. His lips moved to her neck, then her cleavage, and she put up no resistance when his hands slid beneath her shirt and closed over her breasts. He was tentative, but as gentle with her as he’d been that first day with Magda and she felt everything that she’d denied herself since the attack flare back to life.
She whipped off the tank top and arched her back. His lips found her nipples, and she made a sound she couldn’t hear over the blood roaring in her ears. Then he took off his own shirt, and she reciprocated, tonguing and biting his hard chest and tiny pink nipples.
She could not remember when another’s skin against her own had felt so good. He was hot to the touch, and his muscles were well defined and not bulky like Dwayne’s. He caressed her thighs and rear through her shorts while nuzzling her breasts, then her heaving belly. He kissed her navel, and when his lips moved beneath it and she felt his tongue along the top of her shorts, she was sure she screamed. He unsnapped her shorts and slid them down her thighs, leaving her clad only in her panties. He kissed along the lace edge of them, and she was infinitely glad she’d shaved and trimmed that morning. But then he was lifting the elastic and probing with his tongue, and suddenly nothing else mattered.
Until the voice in her head said, He’s seventeen, and he’s never been out of the valley.
She rose suddenly on her elbows and gasped, “Wait!”
He looked up. She had her good leg draped across his back, and quickly lowered it. “What?” he asked breathlessly. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Good God, no,” she said, and scrambled away to sit on the edge of the bed. She quickly found her tank top and pulled up her shorts. “Believe me, you’ve got my motor racing like no one has in longer than I can remember, and that includes your no-account brother.”
He looked confused. A red flush of arousal covered his shoulders and neck. “Then what’s wrong?”
She trembled with the intensity of her feelings. It felt as if the last set of switches had been thrown, bringing some huge, powerful engine roaring to life. It had nothing really to do with sex, although she was certainly turned on. It was more an awareness of the world, as if she now saw in vivid color what had previously been pastel. Last night she had asserted her independence from Tufa expectations; now she broke free from the things that once ruled her in the past.
She reached over and touched his cheek, unable to repress a smile. “Nothing’s wrong, baby. Whoever taught you did a fine job, because you sure know how to treat a girl. But…” And here she had to choke back a laugh at the absurdity, because she didn’t want Terry-Joe to misinterpret it. “We’re coming at this from two completely different directions, and they won’t ever really meet up.”
He took her hand and kissed her fingertips. “I think they will. Somewhere below the waist, maybe?”
Now she did laugh. She kissed him quick and soft. “Terry-Joe, I know you want to make love to me because you like me, or maybe even think you’re in love with me, and not to get back at your brother, which is the thing that would motivate most boys your age.” She saw his face fall at the use of the word “boy.”
She continued, “But if I did it, it’d just be because… well, it’s been a while since I wanted to, and now I do. Not for any other real reason. I like you, Terry-Joe, but if we went all the way, it’d mess that up.”
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