Love Story(3)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I was nervous. Me, nervous! My story, by the luck of the draw, would be one of the first three critiqued in class. I only hoped it wouldn’t be the very first. I was confident in my writing, but nobody wants to go first. And nothing mattered more to me than my stories.

This one especially. I’d written it from life, sort of, about my very own, very real stable boy back home in Kentucky. We’d started out as friends, like David and Rebecca. Then something awful had happened and for years I couldn’t get past it. Now we never would.

We could in my story, though. I could set up obstacles to love, just like in real life—and then, unlike in real life, I could knock them down. Making every piece slide into place for my characters, writing them an unrealistically happy ending, gave me a rush and made me high. This was why I wanted to be a novelist.

The people in my high school creative-writing classes hadn’t felt this way. But now I was in an honors creative-writing class at a New York university famous for its programs in creative writing and publishing. Granted, every freshman in the honors program had to take this class, and most of them weren’t English majors and might not care about writing fiction, but surely some of them would see what I saw in my story and love it as much as I did.

If that were true, they would not be able to tear themselves away from reading and rereading my delicious romance. Yet strangely, they seemed to be getting on with their lives. I could hardly hear their breathing over their taps on laptop keyboards and the noise of late-afternoon traffic outside the window, but I was pretty sure nobody gasped. The girl nearest me texted on her insidious-looking black phone as if reading my story had been just another homework assignment and had not changed her life.

Screw all of them. I dove back into my story.

*

“Shall I stop?” David whispered, kissing the corner of Rebecca’s mouth. “If we’re caught, you may be confined to your room, but I will lose my position. My father may lose his position, too, and then he will shoot me.” David kissed her chin, left a trail of kisses down her neck, and mouthed her breastbone. Placing one kiss at the lowest point of her neckline, between her br**sts, he paused and glanced up at her, his blond hair catching in the frills of lace upon her dress. “Better make it worth the trouble.”

“By all means,” she breathed—none too easy a feat in her corset. If this kept up she might swoon of tightly bound excitement.

With her leave, his tongue lapped at the tender skin between her br**sts. He licked his way up the other side of her neckline, blazed another trail of kisses up that side of her neck, and nuzzled past the smooth ringlets of hair that her maid had arranged so artfully.

“Some things will have to wait until we are truly alone,” he growled in her ear, sending chills down her neck and across her arms in the cool night. “I should like to put my lips here.” His hand wandered down her bosom again, and cupped her breast. His thumb moved back and forth across her nipple, hard beneath the lace.

Now it was she who grasped him, her fingers finding his white shirt beneath his riding coat, her palms sliding over the warm, hard muscles of the chest that lay beneath. She kissed his lips.

Then he took charge of the embrace, grasping her shoulders to hold her still while he explored her mouth with his tongue.

Rebecca had no concept of how long this ecstasy went on before he pulled back, panting, and set his forehead against hers. “Well, that satisfies my curiosity, Miss O’Carey. Thanks for a lovely evening.”

“Cad.” She shoved him lightly.

Smiling like a scoundrel, he backed against the boughs. White petals rained down upon them both.

He fumbled with something in his breeches. She had thought the past few minutes the most intense of her life, but they were nothing compared with the alarm and ashamed delight now rushing through her veins—until she realized he was only bringing out his pocket watch.

Glancing at it, he said, “You’d better go back before you’re missed.”

“All right.” She backed a pace away and observed him, calmly now that her heart had quieted. He carried the watch for timing the horses, of course, but it was easy to imagine him a gentleman, with a gentleman’s pocket watch, his clothes the fashion of a young dandy rather than the uniform of a stable hand. He could so easily have been the great catch of the neighborhood, and in that case they could have been married.

But it was not to be. She shook her head to clear it. It was one thing to arrange an assignation with the stable boy, and another thing entirely to fall in love with him.

“I had almost lost the wherewithal to ask,” she said, “but did you bring my glove after all?”

He stared at her blankly for a moment, and she thought he had not brought it, and that her grandmother would demand some fine explaining if Rebecca had the misfortune to meet her on re-entering the party.

But this was more of his usual stonewalling to frighten her. With a grin he pulled her glove, tightly rolled, from another trouser pocket.

“I suppose I can’t stroll into the party with my excuse flopping about,” she said. “That would look odd.” She fished her reticule from her own pocket and attempted to work the rolled glove through the small opening. It would not go.

“Here, let me.”

Instinctively she pulled back, not wanting him to soil her glove and her reticule with his dirty fingers.

She looked up at him in embarrassment. Of course he had washed before meeting her. His fingers were not dirty, as usual in the stable. She was horrified that she had instinctively thought such a thing, as if he were dirty permanently. From his somber expression she could tell he knew exactly what was going through her mind.

Gently he took the glove and the reticule from her. As she watched, he worked the glove through, careful not to open the reticule too far and tear it. “I saw a snake eat a rat once,” he commented, “out behind your grandmother’s north barn. Unhinged its jaws to do it.”

“That may be beyond the capacity of this snake,” she said—and just then the reticule gave, and the glove slipped inside. They both sighed their relief.

He fastened the jeweled top and handed the reticule back to her, his fingers brushing hers. “When will I see you again?”

At dawn, when you drive us in the coach back to the house, she could have said cattily. But he gazed seriously at her, and something told her the kiss they had finally shared had changed everything between them. She might not love him, but she could not disappoint him.

“My grandmother leaves for business in Frankfort tomorrow,” Rebecca said. “Let’s look for an opportunity.”

“Let’s do.” He touched the tip of her nose with one finger, then her bottom lip again. “Take care, and watch out for captains.”

She laughed and whispered, “Always.” Then she fled the bower.