Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [182]
Rickie looked amused. “And the moral of the story is what?”
She laughed. “I’m not sure. What do you think?”
“It’s OK to let one get away?”
“Yeah, something like that. I’m not such a perfect farmer that I can kill a coyote for the one kid it might take from me. There are ten other ways I could lose a goat through my own stupidity. And I’m not about to kill myself. So. Does that make sense?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “If you say it does, I reckon it does.” He went quiet, smiling to himself, admiring something off in the distance behind her back. Lusa hoped it was the butterflies in her weed patch down below the yard, though she knew enough of young men’s minds to know that wasn’t likely. She bent her knees, took hold of her clammy feet, and pulled off her shoes, realizing suddenly that wet sneakers were a wretched proposition. That would explain his sneakers on top of his truck.
“You’ve got pretty feet,” he observed.
She stretched her legs out straight again and looked at her water-wrinkled toes, then up at him. “Oh, boy. You should get out more.”
He laughed. “Yeah, well. I have a confession to make. I think you look pretty sitting on the rear end of a goat, too. I’ve had the biggest crush on you all summer.”
Lusa bit her lips to keep from smiling. “I kind of gathered that.”
“I know. You think it’s stupid.”
“What’s stupid?”
He reached over and brushed the damp hair out of her eyes, softly grazing the side of her face with his knuckles. “This. Me thinking about you this way. You don’t know how much I think about it, either.”
“I think I may,” she said. “It’s not stupid. It scares me, though.”
He kept his hand against the side of her neck and said quietly, “I wouldn’t hurt you for anything,” and Lusa was terrified, feeling suddenly every nerve ending in her breasts and her lips. It would be so easy to invite him into the house, upstairs, to the huge, soft bed in which his grandparents had probably conceived his mother. How comforting it would be to be taken away from her solitary self and held against his solid, lovely body. His hands would become Cole’s. Just for an hour the starvation that dogged her through every night and day could feast on real sensation instead of memory. Real taste, real touch, the pressure of skin on nipple and tongue. She shivered.
“I can’t even talk about this.”
“Why not?” he asked, dropping his hand to her knees. He ran his fingers down the inseam of her wet jeans from knee to hem, then clasped his whole hand gently around her bare ankle. She remembered, with acute pain, the sense of small, compact perfection she’d known inside her husband’s large-limbed embrace. She looked at his hand on her ankle, then back at his face, trying to forge pain into anger.
“Do I really have to tell you why not?”
He held her eye. “Tell me you don’t want me to make love to you.”
“God,” she gasped, turning her head to the side with her speechless mouth open wide, scarcely able to breathe. Where had he learned to talk like that, the movies? She shook her head slowly from side to side, unable to keep her open mouth from smiling because of his face, his earnest determination to have her. She remembered how that felt, obsessive desire. Oh, God, those days in her Euclid apartment. There was no engine on earth whose power compared with the want of one body for another.
“That’s not a fair question,” she said finally. “I would want you to, yes, if that were possible. I think I’d like it a lot. That’s the truth, may lightning strike me dead, but now you know. Does it make anything better?”
“To me it does. Damn!” He grinned a crooked smile she’d never seen except on the face of Cole Widener, in bed. “To me it’s sweet. It’s like getting an A on a test.”
She took his hand from her ankle, kissed his knuckles briskly like a mother repairing a child’s hurt, then let the hand drop into the grass. “OK, good. You made the grade. Can we move on to another subject now?”
“Like what? Like throwing a mattress in the back of my truck and heading