Flirting With Pete: A Novel (30 page)

She supposed that was why she went to her mother’s dresser and dug through the middle drawer for the small tissue package that was tucked in the pocket of what had been her mother’s favorite blouse. Inside were a pair of drop earrings, two large pearls apiece. She fastened them on and measured their length against the length of her hair. When her hair came out longer, she tucked one side behind her ear. That felt just right.

She pulled on jeans and a large sweater, and went looking for boots. The closest she could come to Pete’s leather ones were the tall rubber things that she wore during mud season. Like everything else in the house right now, they were spotless. She put them on.

She took out the anorak Miriam had given her several years back. She was going to miss Miriam. Maybe they would bump into each other out west. Seattle wasn’t all that far from Wyoming.

Pete was waiting by the side door with a hip to the wall and his ankles crossed. He straightened, looked her up and down, and grinned. “You look cool.”

She grinned back. “You, too.”

“Neat earrings.”

She touched the pearls. “They were my grandmother’s. She was the first woman in the county to go to medical school. She came back here afterward, even when people said she was crazy to do it, but she was dedicated. She wanted to help the sick. So she opened an office. Mostly she made house calls.”

“The townsfolk must have loved her.”

“No. They didn’t appreciate her. She was too different.”

“Was she your mother’s mother or your father’s mother?”

Jenny tried to decide which would be more believable. In the end, because she had taken the earrings from her mother’s drawer, she said, “She was actually my mother’s sister, but much older and different from my mother. I always thought of her as my grandmother. She loved me that way. I was ten when she died.”

“I’m sorry she wasn’t here to help you when things got bad.”

So was Jenny, or so the fantasy went. But it wasn’t all fantasy. There
had
been an older sister. Jenny had met her once, then built a story around her. Everyone needed a relative like that.

“But if she’d been here,” Pete went on, “she would have taken you away, so we would never have met, you and I.” He raised the hand that had been tucked by his side. It held two helmets. “You have a choice this time.”

Jenny was barely grasping the meaning of his having bought a second one, when he nudged them her way. “Which one?”

No contest. She took the one she had worn before, the one that smelled of him.

Within minutes they were riding down the road, past the houses of neighbors who had watched Jenny in scorn all those years.
They thought I wasn’t worth a dime. They thought I wouldn’t go far. They thought I didn’t have a prayer in hell of meeting a man who was more worldly and better looking than any of them.
Her head rose a bit with each charge until she wore Pete’s helmet proudly and thought with satisfaction,
They should see me now.

They couldn’t, of course. They might hear the motorcycle, but it was whipping by too fast for them to see who was on it even if she hadn’t been hidden in a helmet, and, besides, it was foggy and dark. One part of her knew it was chilly, too, but she didn’t feel any of that. Excitement kept her warm.

She hugged his middle on the ride through the center of town. At the far end of Main Street, he reversed direction and wove back along side streets, up one and down the next until no street in the three-block-by-three-block grid had been missed. If Jenny didn’t know better, she would have thought he wanted to wake anyone sleeping in the apartments over the shops or in the houses between, just as punishment for their unkindness toward her.

But Pete wasn’t spiteful, as that tiny part of her wanted to be. He was curious, that was all. She imagined he wanted to see everything about her past one last time before they left, and so did she.

They passed the elementary school, a rectangular structure with peeling paint on all sides and a worn playground in back. Jenny had loved kindergarten there. She had even liked first and second grade. By third grade, though, she had begun to feel odd. She couldn’t invite friends over, what with her parents’ arguing, and, besides, her father gave them the willies, the way he dropped her off and picked her up, glaring at anyone who came close. So she was left out of after-school and weekend things, and because those things were what everyone talked about
during
school, she was left out of that, too. Because she was left out, she was a perfect target for the boys, who played the kind of tricks on her that Darden would have whipped them for had he known, which would have only made things worse, which was why she never told him. Silent suffering was safer.

“See that open field?” she called to Pete a bit farther on. “That’s Town Field. We celebrate holidays there. Cookouts on the Fourth of July. Parades on Memorial Day. Races for the volunteer firemen in the fall and ice sculpture contests in winter.”

“Sounds quaint.”

Didn’t it just,
Jenny thought, but she didn’t want to sound bitter, didn’t want to
be
bitter, not with her time in Little Falls growing short. So she showed Pete where Miriam lived, where her kindergarten teacher lived, even where Chief O’Keefe and his wife lived, though it made her feel uncomfortable. She would have shown him the house where Deputy Dan lived— its garage housed the police office, and it was a real pretty place— but he had a different road map in his mind. Following it, they rode to the VFW hall, parked under the chestnut tree where Jenny had first set eyes on Pete, and sat while the bike idled, gathering strength. Then they roared along Nebanonic Trail once more, up the mountain and down, and out toward the interstate.

Pete took the curve of the up ramp at a heart-pounding angle and, reading Jenny’s excitement well, sped ever faster along the highway and through the night. She imagined it would be like this when they left for good. Astride Pete’s bike, she could go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.

Too soon he pulled off the highway, but the sense of power stayed. It grew even stronger when, knowing just which roads to take, Pete turned in at Giro’s. He parked the bike, fastened their helmets to the handlebars, took her by the hand, and led her inside.

It was Jenny’s dream come true. For once, she was one of the gals with one of the guys, sliding into a booth, ordering the same thick, oozy burger they did, munching the same greasy fries, drinking the beer on tap. When Pete fed the jukebox and dragged her to the small dance floor at the end of the bar, she was in seventh heaven. She danced like she had alone in front of her television, danced like others did. When he held her close and started moving in a way that was smooth and sexy, in a way she had never seen, read, or even dreamed about, she was in a heaven way beyond seventh.

“You’re so cool,” he kept saying, and the more he said it, the more cool she felt.
Easy to hold your head high and keep your shoulders back when someone was looking at you like he wanted to see you. Easy to meet his eyes when they held everything you wanted to see. Easy to smile when he gave you such a sweet glimpse of the rest of your life.

And it wasn’t over when they left the diner. They drove to the quarry, which was nearly deserted by then, and entered through Jenny’s special hidden spot. The motorcycle carried them up the gentle path to the far edge of the pitch-black pool. They set their helmets on the ground and changed places, so that she was in front, leaning back. His arms held her there, no questions asked, hands under her anorak, stroking her middle.

“Some people say there’s a quarry creature down there,” she told him. “They say it came out of the rock when the place was flooded, and lives in the very deepest part.”

“So you believe it?” Pete asked.

She thought for a minute, then nodded. “I like thinking it has a whole family down there, so it isn’t alone. It’s a peaceful creature. It hasn’t ever hurt anyone.”

“Has anyone ever actually seen it?”

“Some people say so.”

“Have you?”

“I’m not sure. I come up here a lot and just sit on the edge and look and look and look at the water. I’ve imagined the creature so many times. Maybe one of those times was real.”

Pete’s hands rose until his thumbs brushed the undersides of her breasts.

She closed her eyes. “Hard to believe sometimes, what’s real and what isn’t.” He was cupping her breasts so very lightly that it felt fine. No, it felt better than fine. It felt wonderful. But it wasn’t enough.

He helped her turn in the saddle to face him and looped her arms around his neck. This time his hands went under her sweater and found the lace of her bra.

“So
cool,
” he whispered. He caught her mouth in a kiss that was shortened only because they were both breathing hard. Then he unhooked the bra and caressed her bare breasts. “Feel good?”

Jenny nodded. It felt
so
good she couldn’t have found the words, and even if she had, couldn’t have pushed them past her throat. From there on down, everything inside her was swelling, more and more as his hands kneaded and tugged, more and more with the pleasure his eyes held.

“Want to go home?” he asked in a husky whisper.

She gave another quick nod.

Less than a minute later, she was helmeted behind him and they were on their way. This time, Jenny didn’t see what they passed. She closed her eyes inside the helmet and concentrated on savoring whatever it was that had taken over her body— because it had been taken over, for sure. It was humming and throbbing, doing things it had never done, making her
think
of doing things she had never done, like rubbing Pete’s stomach and slipping her hands lower.

She gasped at what she felt.

He returned her hands to a safer place and called back a choked, “Keep that up, and we’ll go off the road!”

“I’m sorry!”

“Don’t be!”

Well, she wasn’t. Not really. She was feeling as high as when they had been racing along the highway, or dancing at Giro’s, or petting at the quarry. She was feeling like maybe good things really were possible.

He sailed down her street, careened into the driveway, and braked at the very bottom of the side steps, but when he took her hand to lead her inside, she balked. “Bad memories,” she said with the shake of her head, and he seemed to understand, because he was the one who made for the pine tree out back and held aside the curtain of boughs for her to enter.

If it was cold, she didn’t notice. Her body was so hot that she couldn’t get her clothes off fast enough, and then the heat Pete generated took over. He kissed her and touched her until she was begging him to do something,
anything
to end the nagging she felt in her belly. But he wasn’t rushing, he said. He wanted her to feel finally what a woman should feel, he said. He wanted her to know she was beautiful and feminine and loved, he said, and if she decided she wasn’t ready to have him inside her, that was all right, too, he said.

But she was ready. Nothing about Pete was even remotely like the past. Her body was on fire.

He did it then, pushed inside her until she barely had room to breathe, and when he began to move, she thought she would die. She felt it all, the push and tug of it, vivid, hot, and challenging, until she arched her back and came apart.

“I’ve never climaxed before,” she confessed.

“I’m glad.”

“I’ve never really made
love
before.”

He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers.

They were in the attic, sitting beneath the gable on a makeshift bed of pillows and quilts. A single candle flickered nearby. Pete wore nothing but his jeans, which were zipped but not snapped. Jenny wore nothing but her pearl earrings and his butter-soft shirt. It was a scene out of a fantasy, like something she might read in
Cosmo
. She felt so normal, so
happy
to be normal, so physically pleased and emotionally full that she wanted to cry.

She touched his face, wide-set eyes and eyebrows, high cheekbones, straight nose, square jaw. She ran her fingers through his hair, which was inky, thick, and stylishly long. She traced the curve of his ear, touched the left lobe where an earring might sit, imagined a tiny diamond there. She marked his collarbone with her thumbs, palmed the firm muscles of his upper arms, let her knuckles graze the hair on his chest.

Then she sighed. “Whatever do you see in me?”

“I told you at the start. You’re different.”

“I’m not beautiful.”

“I think you are.”

“I don’t have long legs like a model.”

“That’s okay. Taking all that energy to grow long legs leaves them scrawny everywhere else. Long legs don’t turn me on.” He unbuttoned the shirt she wore and spread it wide. “This does.”

She felt the caress of his eyes, felt herself warm up and start aching all over again. She made a sound that was vaguely his name.

“What do I see in you?” he asked. “I see freshness. Newness. Innocence.”

“I’m not innocent. I’m not even decent. I’ve led an awful life.” It bothered her to think how awful. It bothered her that Pete didn’t know. But if she told him and he left because of it, she didn’t know
what
she would do.

“I’ve made my own mistakes,” he said.

“Not like mine,” she assured him.

He was suddenly brash. “Wanna bet? I stole my best friend’s sweetheart. How’s that for decency?”

Jenny figured there was more to the story. “When?”

“When I left. Everyone was begging me to stay, telling me how much they needed me, how much they
depended
on me, but I could taste freedom and, man, was it sweet. But they kept arguing and begging and reasoning. By that time the need was raging inside, and I couldn’t get it out, because the guilt was bad enough without the yelling. I figured I’d show them I wasn’t a saint, knock their starry-eyed view right out with a one-two punch. So I took her away with me.”

“Did you love her?”

“No,” he said without meeting Jenny’s eyes.