She pulled her book and the letter from her pockets. She’d been such a baby when he’d come to visit. Now, she was ten. She wrote to him about everything she did, and he wrote back to encourage her. The letter was on his school’s paper, with an important-looking gold crest at the top.
She read avidly. His handwriting was dark and beautiful.
Keep making good grades in school, and don’t believe the teacher who said you’re too smart for your own good. You’re just too smart for her, that’s all. Tell that boy who called you a “giant red goober” that he has a small mind. Someday, he’ll be sorry. And keep remembering, I wouldn’t trust just any little girl to take care of Blue Willow for me. You’re the only one
.
Lily sighed with delight and pressed the letter to her chest. She had a mission in life, a mission that made everything right.
A gunshot echoed through the woods outside. Lily raced to the broken window. Crouching, she peered out.
Down the hill, where the forest opened onto the old lawn, she spied Joe Estes among the weedy grass and little pine trees. He was dressed in his hunting clothes, and he carried a rifle. A little ol’ squirrel rifle. Lily sniffed in disdain.
He was a grown boy, and his folks owned Estes Hardware and Feed, in town. They were nice, solid people, Mama said.
But Joe raced stock cars like a fool, and he’d been in trouble with the law for things Mama and Daddy would only whisper about, and he liked to hunt. He could hunt from now till the cows came home, but he’d better get off Blue Willow. Furious, Lily stuffed her book and letters back into her pockets, then slipped out the window. She tiptoed down the hill, hiding behind the tree trunks, her heart racing.
When she reached the bushes along the edge of the forest, she hunkered down and began growling. She’d scare him off, make him think a bear was after him. There were still some around these woods. He couldn’t kill a bear with a squirrel rifle.
She rattled the bushes, made the most terrible, low-pitched noises in her throat, growling louder and louder, and peeped at him, wanting to see him run. He turned, staring in her direction.
Then he put the rifle to his shoulder and fired.
An invisible hand slapped her backward. She lay on the ground, blinking in amazement. A pain like fire ran down her right arm. She could hear Joe tromping toward her. Dazed, she looked at her arm and saw blood everywhere. Her shirtsleeve was torn near the top. It revealed a long, deep gouge on her shoulder.
“Oh, my God,” Joe said, when he parted the bushes and looked down at her. “It was your fault, you stupid little shit. I oughta leave you here, but it’d just cause a stink.”
Lily glared up woozily, pointed at him with her good arm, and intoned, “This is
my
land. If I was a bear, I’d bite your head off.” Then she fainted.
• • •
Aunt Maude and the sisters’ faces appeared over her like angels. Mama and Daddy were looking down at her too. Lily gazed up at them from a dreamy mist, smiled, and shut her eyes again. She was in the guest bedroom at Aunt Maude’s, she remembered. Her bandaged arm was cushioned on a pillow.
“She’ll sleep all afternoon, doped up on those pain pills the doctor gave her,” Lily heard Aunt Maude whisper. “Leave her here till you get through talking to the sheriff.”
“I’d like to kill that damned Joe for hunting on the estate,” Daddy answered, his voice sounding tired and worried. “But I can see how him shooting Lily was just an accident. Good Lord, who expects to find a ten-year-old girl hiding in the middle of nowhere and growling at him?”
“What are we goin’ to do with her?” That was Mama, Lily knew. She sounded upset. “She thinks that old estate belongs to her. She thinks she has to take care of it for Artemas Colebrook.”
Little Sis. Her voice was high and squeaky. “Can’t fault that kind of loyalty, Zea.”
“But I worry about her. She’s not like other little girls. She keeps to herself, reads all the time, hangs out at the old mansion. I can’t keep her away from it.”
Big Sis. Her voice was gravelly. “She’s as tough as a mustang and twice as stubborn. She’ll never get by on dainty temperament or dainty looks—not with her size and that cap of orange hair. But that doesn’t matter. She’s smart. You might as well get used to the fact that she’s odd. It’s a remarkable kind of odd.”
Odd
? Tears pooled behind Lily’s eyelids. What could be good about being odd? When an old man who lived down the street from Aunt Maude had started going outside with no pants on, people said it was because he’d gotten
odd
. His wife sent him off to a home for crazy people.
“She thinks Artemas Colebrook is coming back someday to marry her.” That was Mama again. Lily’s heart jerked at the tone of disbelief in Mama’s voice.
“Well, you don’t know,” Daddy said slowly. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Oh,
Drew
, don’t you dare encourage her notions. She’ll outgrow ’em. When she’s older, she’ll figure out that the world doesn’t work like something out of ‘Cinderella.’ ”
“Let her daydream,” Little Sis whispered. “Maybe it’ll keep her away from the bull-necked dimwits around here. You want her to go to college, don’t you? And you
sure
don’t want her pregnant or married before she’s old enough to know her head from a hole in the ground.”
Lily listened in stark despair as they tiptoed from the room. She opened her eyes and let the tears roll out the corners. She wasn’t going to marry anyone, not Artemas, or dimwits, or anybody else.
She wrote to Artemas about getting shot. By return mail he sent a large package. Inside neatly folded tissue paper was his beautiful gray academy jacket, with gold piping at the stiff, stand-up collar, ornate brass buttons down the center, four gold stars pinned in a perfect horizontal line across one breast, and under them, a shiny little nameplate with
ARTEMAS COLEBROOK, SENIOR CADET COMMANDER
in etched black letters.
On a piece of academy stationery he had written, I
wore this to graduation. Now, I want you to have it. What you did was very brave but you have to promise not to get shot again
.
She wrote back,
I promise. It wasn’t much fun
.
Lily modeled the jacket for Mama and Daddy. Artemas’s jacket swallowed her. “He must be as big as Daddy,” she said in awe. So big and sweet that
he
wouldn’t mind that she was wild as a mustang, with fuzzy red hair, big hands, big feet, knobby knees, and a long bullet scar on her shoulder.
Artemas would come back someday. He already knew she was
odd
, and it didn’t seem to bother him.
Six
These were Artemas’s last few weeks of freedom before he entered West Point, and the summer sun splaying down through the trees was warm as life on his naked body, and Susan de Gude was his first girl.
“Yes, like that,” she whispered against his ear, bare and golden beside him on the soft forest floor. Even though the air rolling in from the sound was tepid, he burned, sinking into a blinding need to learn what a girl felt like inside. But this was her first time, too, and he didn’t want to hurt her, or God help him, do anything that would make her want to stop.
They’d spent what seemed like hours reaching this point, touching each other with awe and, for a while, embarrassment, until the fire of excitement erased everything but sensation. Now, she was writhing under his hand, and he was exploring the moist recesses between her legs with a restraint that made him light-headed. “You’re so smooth inside,” he murmured, taking her mouth as she tilted her head up to his again. She moaned into his lips, then broke away, her green eyes smoldering, her hair, dark red and tangled, catching on bits of grass as she twisted her head from side to side.
He felt as if the ache between his legs would consume
him. There was no longer any way of knowing where it ended and the limits of his skin began. She and he had managed to get a condom in place only seconds ago, snickering over it, nearly shooting it across his belly a time or two before the laughter faded into desperate intensity, and her fingers, trembling but incredible, had stroked it down firmly.
“Now, okay?” she begged, her narrow hips grinding upward into his palm. Her face and breasts turned a brighter shade of pink, her small nipples becoming as dark as roses. Her lashes quivered and lowered shyly. “I’m going to do it, you know,
come
, any second.”
Those were the most erotic words in the world. Shaking, Artemas tried to say something coherent but only managed “Me too” before he carefully moved over her, frantically aware that she was much smaller and softer than his brutally muscled body. There was a painfully awkward moment in which their legs became entwined and he jabbed her upper thigh with his jutting arousal, but then he instinctively slid his hands under her and lifted her legs around him, and they were dignified again.
Then, suddenly, he was pressing into the edge of her sex, feeling it stretch, holding back so hard that every muscle in his back and buttocks quivered. They inched closer, her eyes wide on his. “Does it hurt?” he asked desperately. “Is it all right?”
A smile broke across her damp lips. “Yes. Its perfect.”
They wrapped their arms around each other and huddled together. He began to move. It was amazing, wonderful, the sliding and tug of her flesh and the grip of her hard thighs on his hips. She gasped and burrowed her face into the crook of his neck, then shuddered and began struggling under him. “Susie?” he said with alarm. He could barely think, but he forced himself with the iron willpower he’d spent his whole life developing.
“Don’t stop
now
,” she ordered, whimpering.
He arched against her slowly, staring down at her face, his heart merging with love until he knew he’d die with happiness. The swelling throb in his body was suddenly
being stroked by waves of tiny contractions inside her. None of his friends’ descriptions of their own exploits had done this feeling justice. Artemas had never suspected that Susies body would hold on to him the same as her mouth had, earlier, but with a thousand small lips.
She made a soft, throaty sound that sank all the way through him. He pounded against her, forgetting restraint, feeling her fingers digging into his back, her voice saying urgent little encouragements and thank-you’s, then her body relaxing only a little. That signal broke him, and he surged inside her, dragging his lips back and forth across her cheeks as she clung to his rigid, arching spine.
“Oh, Artemas, Artemas,” she was moaning, as his head began to clear. “It was great. You were great. Everybody said it’d be awful the first time. But it wasn’t.”
He lifted his head to look at her ecstatically She raised a hand and stroked his jaw. “You’re clenching your teeth. Are you okay?”
Surprised, he realized she was right. “Sure. I just do that sometimes.” In the very second when he felt the most pleasure, he’d also felt a dark frisson of fear. He couldn’t let himself lose control completely. Who knew what might come out? All those terrible weaknesses Uncle Charles said he’d inherited from his parents—the ones they kept proving—might be lurking inside.
“I just … didn’t know what to say.” He looked at her apologetically. Dismayed and bewildered, he smiled at her quickly. She stroked a hand through his hair. “You’re a clam, but I don’t mind.” She drew a finger to his face and tickled the tiny brown mole at the edge of his right eye.
She began grinning at him, and he forgot the strange moment. He kissed her, and the grin became another sweet invitation to enjoy the rest of their time together.
Much later, when the woods were filling with shadows, they rose and dressed. He held her hard and listened to her cry. “I’ll write to you,” she whispered.
“I’ll write back.”
“I’ll die before Christmas gets here, I just know it.”
“No, we’ll have a great time.’
“But it’ll be so cold then. Where will we go?”
“Ill think of something. I’ll save my money and rent a motel room for us.”
“Yes! Of course!” She looked up at him with dawning enthusiasm. “I’ll put aside half my clothing allowance at school. We’ll get a suite, with a Jacuzzi, and we’ll keep it the whole holiday! We can meet there all through Christmas.”
“See?” He forced himself to smile down at her as if Christmas didn’t seem years away “All we have to do is use our imagination.”
“And a lot more of the other parts.” They clung together, absorbing each other in a kiss filled with sadness. “I’ll walk you home,” he said.
“No, it would only look suspicious, me coming out of the woods by the beach house at dark with you. Mummy has an eye for these things. And Daddy would think the worst.”
“What, that you’re in love with your terrible Colebrook neighbor?”
She chucked him under the chin and shook her head. “You’re the best Colebrook around.”
“Keep that in mind when all those guys from Yale are chasing you.”
Her eyes glistened with new tears. She took his face between her hands. “No one can stop me from seeing you. You are so gentle and romantic.”
She drew away, gave him a wistful smile, then turned and ran up the path toward her estate.
Artemas watched her with an ecstatic sense of pride. Today he’d proved—in the most intimate way—that he was not like Father.
Susan slowed to a walk halfway through the woods. Wiping her face, her head down, she didn’t hear the soft rustle of horse’s hooves behind her until the animal’s breath was almost on her back. Whirling, she looked up at Artemas’s father.
Big, powerful, but his spongy middle hanging over the tops of his riding britches, he swung down from the hunt saddle and walked up to her, drawing the reins over his horse’s head and flicking the plaited center between his fingers. He had a sly smile on his face.
“Hello, Mr. Colebrook,” she said nervously, starting to back up.
“I saw you and my son together. I’ve been watching. Quite an exciting show.”
Sick horror rose in her throat. “Oh, God.”
“You don’t want me to tell your parents, do you?”