Page 45 of The Cadence

“Thank you,” I said, and it was nice to hear. “Thank you, but I’m really nothing like my mother, and I’m nothing like my grandmother. You saw her and you know. Her hair was black and so were her eyes, and she barely cleared five feet tall. Her son took after her, and then…there’s me.”

“Genetics are very weird,” he said. “I tower over my mother and my dad came up to my collarbone. There are rumors that one Bodine born during the Reconstruction was about my size, but that was generations ago.”

“There’s more, which I found out by mistake from the church ladies.

My mother had also been dating someone from the university basketball team, nine or ten months before I was born.

He was the center and he was thin and very tall.

I looked him up and saw his red hair and hazel eyes, too, and it’s pretty clear that she lied about my paternity.

Maybe she just put down her best guess on the birth certificate,” I said.

“But it was still a low thing to do. She even let the man she pretended was my father choose my name, and he picked ‘Calla’ after his own mom.”

But Will was shaking his head. “Did you and your grandma ever take DNA tests?”

“The minute she saw me, she must have realized. She got a crick in her neck when she looked me in the face! But she didn’t care.

” I stopped and tried to clear my throat.

“She never said a word about it, because lying was ok with her if the intention was good, and if it would help someone. She never let on that she had any inkling that we weren’t really related.

The first time her son saw me, when we visited him in prison, she wouldn’t let him say a word about it, either.

She held up her finger when we walked toward him and shook her head.

To his credit, he kept his own doubts quiet.

It was probably the nicest thing he ever did. ”

“You couldn’t know the truth, not for sure.”

“The truth is that it didn’t matter, not to me or to my grandma. I loved her and she loved me, even if there wasn’t any genetic tie between us. Her house was my home because she thought I belonged there, so I did. It was her love that made me belong.”

“That’s all the truth you need,” he said, and I nodded. I had come to terms with it a long time ago, but it still felt good when he reached and took my hand.

When we got home, Will made me drink some syrup for my throat and we both went to bed soon after he’d eaten.

We went alone, as usual. I didn’t have work the next day but I always got up around the same time, and I expected him to sleep in.

I was surprised to hear his quiet knock just as it was getting light, and he entered with a mug of coffee when I called out to him.

“Hi,” I said, and patted the bed. It was one of my favorite things to talk for a moment in the morning, before both of us got busy. “You’re up early.”

“I have some plans.” His eyebrows lowered. “If you’re feeling all right.”

“I feel fine. I was only too enthusiastic about how great you play football,” I said.

“I also thought that you might be upset by what we talked about in the car.”

I shook my head. “It was hard at first, but it was seven years ago. It’s been hard to talk about her at all but now I’m remembering more good stuff, like when she first hugged me on her porch. I’m really ok.”

He nodded, but he still looked concerned. Or maybe…tense? I wasn’t sure.

“What do you want to do today?” I glanced at the window, where the sky outside seemed very grey. “It may be too cold for me to try the beach again.”

“I have another idea,” he said. “You’ll still have to wear something warm, though.”

This was exciting. I got up fast and shooed him out so that I could get dressed and he left, laughing, and moving very well like he was mostly injury-free.

I had been watching. I did get dressed in something warm, which was the new sweater that Miss Mozella had knitted for me.

She was working on one for Will, too, but she was lamenting how much yarn it took. He was just too large.

Soon enough, we were done with the breakfast he’d made and were in the car, the old one. “I bought this for myself,” he noted as we backed out of the garage. “I paid off my parents’ debts first, and then I got a car.”

“Did you buy the other car when you asked me to come live here?” He hesitated but then nodded. “You spend money on everyone else,” I said. “You wanted my grandma to have some, too.”

“What would have been a better use for it than taking care of you?” he asked, and he held my hand again.

I had learned my way around a lot better, but I didn’t know where we were headed.

We didn’t go too far before Will turned into the parking lot of a high school, empty now since it was Sunday and most people were probably still recuperating from the tense Woodsmen game of the day before.

“What are we doing here?” I asked him. “Are you going to practice on their football field or meet some players?” He had stopped directly behind the bleachers.

“No.” He coughed and shook his head.

“Is your throat bothering you, too? You should have taken some of the syrup.”

“No.” Now I watched him swallow. “Let’s get out.”

Ok, sure, I thought, and we exited the car. It was cold and also a little dismal. High schools were usually filled with people and energy, but not today. “What are we doing?”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the last day at our high school. My last day,” he corrected himself. “I’ve been remembering what you said after my graduation ceremony. I thought we could come back here and it would remind you, too.”

I looked around this chilly, empty parking lot and recalled the May sun and the crowds of people smiling, carrying flowers, and taking pictures.

I also remembered crying out, “I love you!” and the expression on his face when he’d heard those words, the mask of surprise and uneasiness he had worn.

“I didn’t need the reminder,” I said now. “That’s a very vivid memory.”

“It was brave of you to tell me that.”

“It was embarrassing,” I corrected him. “There was me, the skinny, stupid child, and there was you, the smart, gorgeous, strong, athletic—”

“There was me, the kid who was afraid every day that people would find out that I wasn’t as awesome as they all believed,” Will said.

“There was me, the guy who didn’t really have friends I could count on and whose girlfriend was only interested in what she thought my bank account would hold in the future.

I wasn’t all that much. You were too young for me back then, and I was too afraid that I would hurt you.

I thought that I would turn out just like my father. ”

“You haven’t!” I said. “You’re not him, not at all!”

“In a way, I’ve been acting like him. He never could admit the truth about anything—no, he was a straight-up liar.

I spent so long trying to read his cadence and dig out what was real, but I want to be honest all the time.

I feel like…” He stopped and his fists clenched.

“I’ve been working on that. I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel and what my emotions actually are.

You told me that a feeling isn’t an action.

It’s something like happy or sad, or yearning,” he continued. “Or love.”

I waited, mostly because I was afraid to speak and break his rhythm. I waited to hear the words I hoped would come next, promises of love and commitment, just like I’d fantasized about in another parking lot seven years before. I waited, and then he spoke.

“I made a list of my goals.”

I stared.“What?”

“I actually revised the list of what I want,” he explained. “Here it is, the honest truth about my emotions.” He stepped close to me, looping one arm around my waist, and showed me his phone. Under the heading “Future,” there was only one word.

“It just says my name. It just says ‘Calla,’” I said.

“That’s it. You’re it,” Will told me. “You’re all that I want. I’ll keep working on myself so that I’m good enough for you, and I’ll try every day to be the man who deserves—”

“Just stop that,” I ordered. “Will Bodine! Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”

“I love you, Calla.”

“Holy Moses,” I breathed. “Well, I still love you. I love you even more now than I ever did then.”

His face, which I could now see so well, lit up as he smiled down at me. “Thank God for that.”

And then something happened which I’d been dreaming about for so many years.

I’d pictured it and planned it, I’d imagined all the feelings and sensations, and I’d built it up to be the most monumental event of my life.

It was the moment that Will Bodine kissed me.

He leaned down and gently caressed his lips across mine, like he was testing things.

Then he pulled me flush to his body and I wrapped my arms around his neck and he kissed me for real.

It was better than anything I could have ever dreamed of. His mouth, his tongue, his roving hands—

“Let’s go home,” he said. “You drive, because you’re faster.”

I got us there in record time as he called out the directions, and we didn’t bother to make sure that the cars were lined up in the garage. We went inside and when we were in his bedroom, he slowed.

“Is this all new to you?” he asked me.

“Sex? Yes,” I answered, and pulled at his coat. “Take this off and your t-shirt, too.” I started to work on the button of his jeans, and was reminded of Kirsten. She had gone about things the right way, just diving in. I followed her example.

“Calla,” he moaned.

“Holy…that is a lot!” I said, my hand now inside his boxer briefs. No, I didn’t have personal experience, but this evoked a mental image of a small tree. “Will, really?”

“I’m a big guy,” he stated. “All of me. You take your clothes off, too.” He helped me with that, tugging away my sweater and jeans, and then the shirt I wore. “Is this the one I gave you?”

“Yes. I love it,” I said. I was trying not to feel self-conscious about wearing only my bra and underwear.

“It’s not the t-shirt, it’s because it was from you.

” Then he kissed me more, both on my mouth and also on my neck, which he accomplished by lifting me off the ground so he could reach lower.

He accomplished the lift by holding my butt, which felt so good that I wrapped my legs around him to pull myself in tighter.

Will lay me back onto his bed and we kept kissing.

I’d really had no idea that it was so nice—in most of the books I’d read, the kissing was only a breezed-through intro that led to the main event: sex.

But we kissed for a while, and we talked, too.

He made me laugh when he said that he really had heard me screaming during his game, and he spent a long time brushing his lips over my neck, collarbone, and ears, until finally he put his mouth on my breasts.

He kissed my nipple, which was so hard and seemed larger, oddly, and then he slipped the fabric of my bra to the side to suckle my skin.

I shifted to try to offer more of myself, and he quickly undid the clasp behind my back to toss the bra away.

He slid his knee over my thighs, so that the rock-hard tree branch also pressed against me.

Rather than making me a little apprehensive, as it had before, I shifted again to rub against it because now I felt very hot and bothered.

I was anxious, in other words, but in a different way—I was anxious to feel more of him and for him to feel more of me.

“We’ll go slow,” he murmured, and his lips closed over my nipple again.

“You could go faster,” I gasped, and he obliged. His palm, which had rested on my stomach, moved beneath my underwear to touch me there. He cupped between my legs and his one finger moved to my clitoris. Just the lightest brush and I moaned and jerked, and his hips did, too.

“Damn, Calla,” Will muttered, and tossed away our underwear.

Then he kept kissing my breasts and he kept touching me.

I closed my eyes and I told him things about loving him, and about it feeling so good.

Pleasure, complete and overwhelming, mounted until I was shaking with it.

When it broke, I clenched and released around his fingers and he moaned, too.

“This way,” he told me, and rolled onto his back.

“You can set the pace.” He was putting on a condom, which I watched blearily, and then he helped me fit his length just inside myself.

I did go pretty slow, easing down over him and getting used to the stretch.

Finally, he was all the way there, and both of us were breathless.

I moved slightly, testing it out, and I found that if I leaned forward, then we rubbed against each other in a way that felt even better than his fingers had.

He had watched me intently as I got situated but as I moved, his eyes closed and I smiled at the pleasure that washed across his face.

Sex with him was so good that I figured we’d doing it all the time, everywhere we could, like all the rooms in the house, both cars, the loading dock.

..tension was building up inside me and felt even bigger than before.

“Will,” I said urgently, and his eyes opened.

“I love you. I love you, Calla,” he told me, just as intense. He stroked my clit and I froze, on the edge. And then I felt him surge and come, just as I did.

After, he held me so tightly that I could never have gotten away. Not that I wanted to, because he was my home and I was here to stay. “Are you all right? Are you sure?” he kept asking. “Did I hurt you? Are you sore? Don’t hide it to protect me.”

“I want to do it again,” I answered, and then he laughed.

“We’ll do it plenty,” Will promised, and I said I was going to hold him to that.

For now, I would hold onto him. The reality of Will Bodine, with all the quirks and all the flaws, was so much better than any dream I’d had when I was fourteen. The reality was simple, too.

“I love you,” I told him. That was where it began and where it ended, because it was everything.