Theresa felt lifted, transported above herself, as if this must certainly be someone other than herself in Brian Scanlon’s arms, hearing his murmured words of admiration. Perhaps she was an understudy having stepped in at curtain time when the star performer fell ill. Perhaps these words were meant for that other woman, the one with the silhouette of a sylph, with mink-brown hair and golden, flawless skin. That other woman had performed this part so many times she knew instinctively how to react to this man’s voice and movements.
But Theresa was not that practiced artiste. She was a hesitant ingenue to whom the part did not come naturally. She wanted to lift her arms around Brian’s shoulders and return the string of kisses he’d just bestowed upon her, but relinquishing the guard she’d maintained for years was no easy thing. Experience had taught her only too clearly that to believe she could attract someone because of her hidden attributes was a pipe dream. Each time she had done so, the man upon whom she’d pinned her hopes had proved himself no more honorable than the boy who’d made one blossom-kissed May prom night eight years earlier not a memorable celebration of the end of a school year but an ugly memory of shame and disgust she’d made sure had never been repeated since.
Brian’s forearm rested across her right breast, depressing it in an almost lackadaisical fashion that felt natural and acceptable to Theresa, until he began moving his wrist back and forth as if something had tickled it and he was relieving the itch by rubbing the skin across her sweater. His fingers were still interlaced with Theresa’s, and he carried her own hand atop his, turning it now so that the back of only his hand came into contact with her breasts.
Don’t panic. Don’t resist. Let him. Let him touch you and see if it makes you react like the woman reacted in the movie.
Theresa swallowed, and Brian’s tongue did sensuous things to the inside of her mouth.
He pulled back, teased the rim of her mouth with a butterfly’s touch of his lips. “Theresa, don’t be scared.” She tried not to be, telling her muscles to relax as he released her tense fingers and rested his warm palm upon the ribbed waist of her sweater.
No. Don’t let him be like all the others. Don’t let him want me for only that. Not Brian, who’s been so careful not to even look at me there during all these wonderful days while he grew dearer.
Beside them the fire danced, sending warmth radiating against the sides of their faces and bodies. But she pinched her eyelids shut, unaware of the troubled expression on Brian’s face as he gazed down at her. She lay beneath him with the stillness of fallen snow, pale and motionless, and breathing with great difficulty. But her breath was not drawn through lips fallen open in passion, rather through nostrils distended in apprehension.
Her flesh was warm beneath the sweater, and her ribs surprisingly fine-boned, the skin over them taut and toned. Her frame, Brian now realized, was built for bearing much smaller breasts than those with which she’d been endowed.
Trust me, Theresa. It’s you, your heart, your uncomplicated simple soul that I’m learning to love. But loving the soul of you means loving the body of you as well. And we must start with that. Sometime, we must start.
He moved his hand up her ribs, his warm palm molding itself to the arch of her rib cage, finally placing four fingertips in the warm hollow just beneath one breast. Gently he brushed back and forth, giving her time to accept the idea of his imminent intrusion. Beneath the heel of his hand he felt an unnatural tremor, as if she were holding her breath to keep from crying. Against his belly her midsection was arched up off the cushions, not in enthusiastic acquiescence, but in fortification as if steeling herself to defend at a second’s notice.
He covered her lips with his in forewarning, then rolled aside just enough to allow freedom to access to the warm, soft globe of flesh that brushed his fingernails and moved toward it with as much gentleness as he could muster. Seeking not to violate or to trespass, he breached the remaining space, playing her the first time with as fluttering a touch as he might have used to chime the strings of a guitar instead of strumming them. Beneath his mouth, hers quivered.
Easy, love, easy,
he thought.
His first touch brushed scarcely more than the seam of the stiff cotton garment that covered her, as he ran his fingertips along its deep curve, from the center of her chest across her breast to the warm, secret place beneath her arm.
She shuddered and tensed further.
He lightened his hold on her lips until their kiss became more of a commingling of breath than of flesh, a foretoken of the gentleness he was preparing for her.
Trust me, Theresa.
Once more he nudged her lips with a blandishment so weightless it might have been the gossamer approach of nothing more than the shadow cast by his head bending over hers.
But caution cracked through Theresa’s nerves and kept her from mellowing and melting beneath him. She waited, instead, like a martyr at the stake, until at last he enfolded her breast, firmly, fully, running his thumb along the horizontal seam of her bra. She acquiesced for the moment, allowing him to discover the breadth, resilience and warmth of her breast.
As his hand caressed and explored, Theresa waited in agony, wanting so much more than what she was able to allow herself to feel in the way of response. She wanted to stretch and loll, to utter some thick sound in her throat as the woman had in the movie. She wanted to know the pleasure other women seemed to derive from having their breasts caressed and petted. But her breasts had never been objects of pleasure, only of pain, and she found herself recalling the hurt of countless callous insults, feeling diminished by those recollections, even while Brian bestowed a touch of utmost honor and respect. But as he pushed her sweater up to her breastbone, she was like a hummingbird poised for flight.
He sensed it, yet steeled himself and moved the next step further along the road toward mutuality, inching down until his hips rested on the sofa between her open legs, and his head dipped down, his open mouth replacing his hand, kissing her through the cotton fabric that separated her flesh from his.
Brian’s breath was warm, then hot, and it sent waves of sensation shimmying up her ribs and along the outer perimeter of her breasts, cresting in a tightening sensation that drew her nipples up into a pair of hard knots, shriveling them like rosebuds that refuse to open. Through her bra he gently bit, and the sweet ache it caused made her hands fly into the air behind him, palms pushing at nothing.
He lifted his head. She heard him whisper, “Shh ...” but she could not open her eyes and meet his gaze, for behind her lids was the vivid image of her nipples. She saw again the tiny, demure nipples of other girls in shower scenes from years ago, envying them their delicacy, their femininity, and her terror grew. If she could be assured he’d go no further, she might have relaxed and enjoyed the shivering sensation his kiss sent through her. But she knew, as surely as she knew the shape of her own bovine proportions, that the next step was one she could not suffer. She could not bare herself to the eyes of any man. Her breasts were freckled, unattractive and when released fell aside like two obscene mounds of dough.
Oh, please, Brian, I don’t want you to see me that way. You’ll never want to look at me again.
The fireplay illuminated their bodies, and she knew if she opened her eyes she would see too clearly how visible she was by its light. His mouth bestowed a breath-stealing warmth to her opposite breast, and, as with the first, it was a seductive nip through stiff cotton whose very scratch seemed to beguile her flesh to succumb.
But when Brian braced himself above her and slipped his hands behind her back to free the catch of her brassiere, no power on earth could allow Theresa to let him see her naked.
“Don’t!” she whispered fiercely.
“Theresa, I—”
“Don’t!” She pushed against the hollows of his elbows, her eyes wide with trepidation. “I ... please ...”
“All I’m going to do—”
“No! You’re not going to do anything!” She flattened her shoulder blades to prevent his captured hands from doing what they’d been reaching behind her to do. “Please, just get off.”
“You haven’t given me a ch—”
“I’m not that kind of woman, Brian!”
“What kind?” Relentlessly he held her where she was.
“Loose, and ... and easy.” She struggled, unable to free her writhing limbs from the weight of his.
“Do you really believe I could ever think of you that way?”
Tears of mortification stung her eyes. “Isn’t that what all men think?”
She saw the hurt flash across his green eyes, the line of his jaw harden momentarily. “I’m not
all men.
I thought maybe you’d come to realize that since I’ve been here. I didn’t start this to see how much I could get out of you.”
“Oh, no? Considering where your hands are right now, I’d say I have cause to doubt that.”
He closed his eyes, let his head droop forward and shook it in a slow gesture of exasperation while emitting an annoyed puff of breath. He withdrew his hands and dragged himself away, rolling to sit on the edge of the sofa. But their limbs were still half tangled, and she was caught in a vulnerable, splayed pose, with one knee hooked beneath his, the other updrawn behind his back.
She arched up and tugged her sweater down to her waist while he heaved a frustrated sigh and ran a hand through his hair, then slouched forward, elbows to knees, letting his hands dangle limply while he stared absently into the fire, a deep frown upon his face.
“Let me up,” she whispered.
He moved as if only now realizing he had her pinned in a less than modest sprawl. She disentangled herself and curled into the corner of the sofa, not quite cowering, but withdrawn behind her familiar shield of crossed arms.
“You really are an uptight woman, you know?” he said angrily. “Just what the hell did you think I was going to do?”
“Exactly what you tried!”
“So what does that make me?” He flung up both palms. “A pervert? Theresa, for God’s sake, we’re adults. It’s hardly considered perverted to do a little petting.”
She found the word distasteful. Her expression soured. “I don’t want to be gawked at like some freak in a sideshow.”
“Oh, come on, aren’t you being a little dramatic?”
“To you it’s dramatic, to me it’s ... it’s traumatic.”
“Are you saying you’ve never let a guy take off your bra before?”
She only puckered her mouth and refused to look at him.
He pondered her silently for several seconds before asking, “Had you considered that’s not exactly normal—or healthy—for a twenty-five-year-old woman?”
Now her eyes met his, but they shot sparks. “Oh, and I suppose you’re volunteering to break me in for my own good, is that it?”
“You’ll have to admit, it might be good for you.” She snorted quietly and cast her eyes aside while he grew increasingly upset with her. “You know, I’m getting awfully damn tired of you crossing your arms like I’m Jack the Ripper ...
and
of having my motives questioned when the way I look at it, I’m the one with the normal impulses here.”
“Well, I’ve had plenty of lessons on the
normal impulses
of the American male!” she shot back.
They sat stonily for several long, strained minutes, staring straight ahead, disappointed that this night that had started so magically was ending this way.
Finally Brian sighed and turned to study her. “Theresa, I’m sorry, all right? But I feel something for you, and I thought you felt the same about me. Everything between us was right tonight, and I thought it led to this quite naturally.”
“Not every woman in the world agrees with you!” she shot back.
“Would you look at me ... please?” His voice was low, caring, hurt. She pulled her gaze away from the fire, feeling as if its hue had been drawn to the skin of her face, which was flooded with a heat of a very different kind. Theresa confronted his eyes to find a wounded expression there that disconcerted her. He rested an elbow along the back of the davenport, his fingertips very near her shoulder. “I don’t have much time, Theresa. Two more days and I’ll be gone. If I had weeks, or months to woo you, things would be different, but I don’t have. So I used the accepted approach, because I didn’t want to go back to Minot and wonder for the next six months about your feelings.” His fingertips brushed the shoulder of her sweater very lightly, sending a shudder down her spine.
“I like you Theresa, do you believe that?” She bit the soft inside of her lip and stared at him, becoming undone by his words, his sincerity.
“You.
You, the person. The sister of my friend, the musician who shares a love of music with me, the girl who kept her brother straight, and who laughs while she fiddles a hayseed hoedown on her classic 1906 Faretti and understands what I feel when I play Newbury’s songs. I like the you that never knew how to put on makeup before tonight and had to learn how from her fourteen-year-old sister, and the you that walked into the kitchen with the refreshing shyness of a fawn. I like the fact that you wouldn’t know the first thing about dancing the way Felice does. As a matter of fact, there’s not much about you I don’t like. I thought you understood all that. I thought you understood the reason why I tried to express my feelings the way I just did.”
Her heart felt swollen, her throat thick, and her eyes and nose stung. Words like these, she’d always thought, were always spoken only in love stories, to the other girls, the pretty ones with miniature figures and silken hair.
“I do.” She wanted very much to reach out and touch his cheek, but her inhibitions were long nurtured and would take time to crumble. So she attempted to tell Brian with the wistful, downturned corners of her lips, with the aching expression in her tear-bright eyes how remorseful she was at that moment. “Oh, Brian, I’m sorry I said that. And it wasn’t true. I said it because I was scared, and I ... I just got panicky at the last minute. I said the first thing I could think of to stop you, but I didn’t mean it. Not about you.”