The Perfect Letter (8 page)

She went silent. She'd gone too far now, and she knew it, but she was angry. She wanted to find a way to take back her words, but she couldn't, she wouldn't—he had no reason to think Jake was wrong for her, none but one, that Jake was the hired help. He wasn't good enough for Gene Merrill's granddaughter because he wasn't from a wealthy family, because he wasn't going to college or making any other grand plans. That was what galled her. That her grandfather, secretly, was something of a snob.

She'd been about to say something else to this effect, but her grandfather had cut her off with a sharp jab of his hand. “I want you to put an end to it. That's it. I'm finished with this discussion,” he'd said. “Put an end to it, or Jake and his father are off this farm tomorrow. Don't test me on this, Leigh. I've said my piece, now I expect you to obey.”

Before she could have said anything else, he was out the door,
leaving Leigh behind to scream at the walls in frustration. Why wouldn't he listen? Why did he have to be so
unreasonable
? She'd started to have an understanding of what Abby had gone through with Gene all those years ago. The old man had said his piece, and that was the end of the discussion.

After that she and Jake were never allowed to be alone together. Gene must have said something to Jake's father, insisted Ben put a stop to their romance or else, because Ben made sure to load Jake up with chores every day after school, mucking stalls, working the racehorses, even letting him break a few of the yearlings. Keeping him too busy for romance.

Always, always she and Jake still managed to find each other again, after supper, late at night, a few minutes in the hayloft, where they could talk in secret, where they could kiss and cling to each other, promising their love, making plans for the day they'd get out of there, the day they'd break free. Instead of keeping them apart, Gene's orders only cemented their connection to each other.

It was only a few days after Gene issued his decree, in fact, that Leigh and Jake slept together for the first time. She'd come home after school one day and found Jake gone. His father had sent him into town for some feed and other supplies, and Leigh, disappointed yet again, had gone into the house to do her homework and sulk. Her grandfather must have seen her bedroom door closed and knocked twice, softly. “Just checking in,” he said, opening the door a crack.

She could see his face, tanned from the sun, out of the corner of her eye. He looked sad, but she would not give him her forgiveness, not yet, not after what he'd said and done. “Just checking that I'm alone, you mean,” she said. She was lying on her stomach with her math book open in front of her. She wouldn't look him in the eye.

“Watch your tone, Leela,” he said. “I put up with a lot of sass from you, but you know I'm right about this.”

“You are
not
right about this.”

“Enough,” he said. Then he stomped back up the hallway and down the stairs while Leigh, in frustration, flung her book at the closed door.

She stayed in her room right through dinner and would have stayed in there all night if there hadn't been a knock on her window just past eleven, when she was starting to get sleepy and hungry, when the big house seemed as silent and lonely as a tomb. Then the
tap, tap
of pebbles hitting her window. She looked out, and there was Jake standing in the bright moonlight, in a clean blue T-shirt and jeans, grinning at her like a crazy fool. She raised the sash a little and said, “Are you nuts?”

“Must be,” he said. “Come on out here.”

“I can't. He'll hear me.”

“Climb on out the window.”

“Oh sure, no one will hear that.”

“The longer we argue about it, the more likely he is to hear you.”

Leigh groaned. “All right. Hold on.”

She turned the light off in her bedroom to make her grandfather think she'd gone to bed, then raised the sash on the window and swung herself out onto the windowsill. Jake reached up and took her around the waist. She leaned back into him, and he eased her down, then spun her around to face him. “Look at that,” he said. “I was wrong about you, that first day. You aren't a horse; you're a monkey.”

“And you're still a talking ass.”

“Ah, but I'm
your
talking ass.”

“Lucky you,” she said. She kissed him.

A noise around back startled them, and they went completely silent: it was her grandfather opening the window in his bedroom.

“The barn,” Leigh whispered, and they went around across the lawn toward the stables, keeping to the shadows and away from the bright glow of the moon rising orange over the hills, staying low. In a minute they heard the scrape of the window closing again.

The stables were dark for the night and smelled of dust and creosote and leather polish and horseflesh. The horses nickered softly when they heard footsteps in the aisle, but Leigh gave them a reassuring
whoa there, hey there,
and they went quiet.

They went down to the tack room and found a stack of clean wool blankets. She took one, but under the bottom blanket she could just feel the cool metal of her grandfather's .357 Magnum. She picked up the corner of the wool and showed the gun to Jake.

“One of these days,” she said, “the old man is going to get brave enough to open my door and realize I'm not there. When that happens, you'd better learn to run fast.”

“He won't catch me.”

“It's not catching you I'm worried about, it's shooting you. He's a hell of a shot, you know. He keeps this gun here for coyotes and horse thieves and debauchers of his granddaughter.”

“He won't shoot me,” Jake said. “Don't you fret.”

They grabbed a blanket, then climbed up the ladder to the hayloft, the one place she was sure that no one would be that time of night, the one place she knew no one would look for them. She'd spent hours reading alone there when she was younger, trying to escape her list of after-school chores, dreaming of her future in New York. The hay was stacked in bricks, smelling sweetly of the fields in summertime, and the hayloft was hot even in the evening, holding on to the warmth of the day. Leigh spread the blanket over the carpet of hay littering the floor and flopped down on it. Jake lay down next to her, stretching out his full length and leaning over her.

A beam of moonlight was coming in through the open hatch of the
hayloft. Below them they could hear the sounds of the horses moving in their stalls, stamping their feet, chewing a bit of hay. A breeze blew through the building, causing a wind chime outside to tinkle. Somewhere the old peacock, Peabody, was standing on a roof and giving his mournful cry:
ah-Ah! ah-Ah!

In the dimness Jake was just a shadow, a deeper bit of darkness. His skin was hot where Leigh touched it—the back of his neck, his shoulders, the hard muscles on the back of each arm. His hands wound around her back, and he pulled her in for a kiss, long and slow, leaning into her until they were pressed together knees to chest.

She could feel his heartbeat under his ribs picking up speed like her own. Something was different. He seemed strangely intense, his touches longer, less tentative. There was a pressure in his fingers and breath that hadn't been there before, a question he was asking with his hands and his body. She realized suddenly that he was trembling.

“What's the matter?” she breathed.

“Nothing,” he said, his hands stroking her hip, moving up toward her breast, the shiver working up from his core and making his voice shake as well. “I don't think I've ever been happier.”

He found her nipple under her shirt, and her breath caught. “Me, too.”

“Are you scared at all?”

“No,” she said, and meant it. She trusted him completely. After all, it had been his idea to wait until the time was right, and it seemed the time was most certainly now. She knew he would never abuse her trust. He was worthy not only of her trust but of her passion. The time for caution was gone.

She slid her hand up his back, under his T-shirt, his skin velvety and a little damp, following the curve of his spine, the wings of his shoulder blades, the soft place at the base of his throat. She wanted to touch all of him, every bit of him. She sat up and pulled off his T-shirt,
leaning back to look at him in the moonlight. He looked like a Greek statue, or a
David,
his skin marbled and white in the silvery light. The muscles of his chest and belly were flat, taut from working out of doors with the horses. A faint touch of stubble darkened his cheeks and the spot in the middle of his chest, and she kissed him there once, and felt him shudder.

She pulled him to his feet and undid the buckle of his belt, then the buttons on his jeans, and with a thump they both slid to the floor. He stepped out of his jeans and stood still.

“What is it?” he said.

“I've always wanted to look at you.”

He looked down at himself and up again, abashed. She saw his hands clench and unclench, as if he were fighting the urge to cover himself, but she reached out and ran a finger up his leg from knee to hip and smiled when she heard him gasp. “Jesus,” he said, his voice ragged.

“Too much?”

“No,” he said, slightly breathless but grinning.

She ran another finger across his backside, enjoying the feeling of it clenching under her touch. She'd had no idea the power she could have over him, or how intoxicating that power could be—that she could tease him, seduce him, enjoy him all she wanted.

Jake's breath was coming in little gasps, his breastbone rising and falling quickly under her hands. She leaned forward and kissed the spot over his heart, then licked one of his nipples gently. She stood on her toes to reach his neck, then his mouth, all while Jake held himself still, willing himself not to move for fear of breaking the spell.

With one hand she cupped his buttocks, and with the other, she reached down to feel him hard against her thigh. She took him in her hand and felt his whole body shudder. “I can't—” he panted. “I can't—Leigh, please, please, Leigh, it has to be now.”

She let go of him and stepped back, undoing her shirt, her jeans, letting them fall to the floor. Then she stood before him naked herself.

He crossed the space between them in two steps, picking her up and wrapping her legs around his waist, lowering her to the floor. She was surprised at how strong he was. His lips moved to her ears, her neck. Her body was dissolving into his, the margins between them evaporating. He put his mouth on her nipples, and she panted. “Jake,” she said. “Jake, please don't make me wait anymore.”

His mouth on her neck, her breasts. His mouth on the deepest place inside her, his tongue, his wetness melting into her own. Her hands on the back of his hair, on the silk of his shoulders, and she pulled him up to kiss him again before bending over to slide the condom on. Then she lay back and arched her hips to let him ease into her. A quick burst of pain and then it was done, more smoothly than she had imagined. He moved over her, hips pushing into her softness, into the ache, her body so lit with desire she no longer had any sense of where she stopped and he began.

She grabbed him and pulled him into her, deeper, nothing but his body and hers curled around the epicenter of pleasure. He lifted her hips to pull him to her, thrusting until the world went white, and her whole body shuddered. Jake cried out once, twice, and then collapsed on top of her, his weight pleasantly heavy, his neck slick with sweat.

He stroked her hair in the moonlight, rolled off her, and lay quiet while she put her head on his shoulder. It had been surprising only in that she'd enjoyed it more than she would have thought, given what Chloe and the other girls at school always said—that it was usually fast, and painful, and awkward. But maybe it was different when you really loved someone, she thought. Maybe Jake had been right to make them both wait until they were sure what they meant to each other. But as she lay there with her head on his chest, her body still tingling with pleasure, the only thing she was sorry about was that
in the morning they'd have to go back to pretending in front of their families that nothing had happened, nothing had changed, when all she wanted was to shout from the rooftops that she loved him, that she was his now and always.

When she thought she could speak, she looked over at him and said, “Think you could do that again?”

He laughed. “Give me a minute,” he said. “I'm sure I could manage.”

Afterward they were inseparable, insatiable, finding each other in the hayloft, at the lake, in the woods. They were careful, so careful not to get caught—Gene still swore to Leigh that he'd fire Ben at the first hint that Jake wasn't keeping his hands to himself—but there was hardly ever a day they didn't find at least five minutes to spend together, hardly ever a day when they didn't have a chance to sneak a kiss in the tack room, a quick
I love you
between chores.

They managed to keep their relationship a secret from Gene, but Jake's dad was another story. Ben Rhodes watched them all the time, always aware that his job was on the line if Jake slipped up even a little. He hated Leigh for it, too, staying close whenever she was in the barn, never letting her out of his sight, yet he never spoke to her, just followed her with his eyes wherever she went, a scowl of disgust on his face.

Jake, who was a year ahead of Leigh, graduated high school and started learning the business in earnest from his dad, who sent him on errands to the vet's, to town, even long trips to deliver horses to buyers, anything to keep him away from the farm as long as possible. Sometimes he would go to Oklahoma, Missouri, Florida, staying away for days or even weeks at a time. Ben had his training partner, the dirty-minded, foulmouthed Dale Tucker, keep Jake out in the training pens for long stretches, working the horses on the lead lines, taking them through their paces on the test track. There was so much work
to do on the farm that there always seemed to be some new excuse for Ben to keep them apart. That Christmas, Ben even sent Jake away to his mother's back in Kentucky for a couple of weeks, maybe hoping he might see his old girlfriend there, that he and Amy would be tempted to pick up where they'd left off.