Story of Us Read Free Page A

him boldly.
    With my friends’ protests growing fainter in my ears, I put on a blue denim shirt and my grubby Adidas sneakers. I always used to wear Adidas because, unofficially, the name is an acronym for All Day I Dream About Sex. Which, as the oldest living virgin in my sorority house, I pretty much did.
    Steve Bennett probably realized I’d never been on the back of a motorcycle before. He was kind enough not to ask, but my inexperience was pretty obvious. I mean, I fumbled with the spare helmet, unsure as to how to put it on. I couldn’t figure out the footrests until he showed me, and I wasn’t even sure which part of the seat to straddle.
    Riding with someone, anyone, on a motorcycle is a strange situation of forced intimacy. Our pelvises fit together like spoons, and my bare legs were snuggled next to his muscular thighs. At first, I put my hands demurely on either side of his waist.
    “You’re going to need to hold on a lot tighter than that,” he said and pulled my hands all the way around his thick, hard torso.
    Finally, he turned on the motor. I felt the jolt of power course through me, and I clasped him even tighter.
    “Ready?” he yelled over the sound of the motor.
    “Ready.”
    The bike rolled off its kickstand as my sorority sisters stood in the roadway, calling warnings I couldn’t hear and wouldn’t have heeded even if I could.

Chapter Six
    When I rode into Edenville on the back of Steve Bennett’s Harley, I felt like a different person. The ride from Eagle Lake into town was short, but it took me on what was to be the first step of the longest journey of my life.
    With my arms around his tree-trunk middle, I dared to press myself against his back, and then he wasn’t the only one who was lost. I was, too. I grew dizzy with his smell and with the feel of the wind in my face and the roar of the motor in my ears.
    At that point, I didn’t know anything but his name, and that he rode a Harley, was in the Navy and had ocean-blue eyes. It’s funny that I could see a blue ocean in my mind’s eye, because the only saltwater I’d ever actually seen was the gray-brown Gulf of Mexico from the seawall of Galveston during wild-girl weekends from college.
    Yet though I knew little about him, I understood something deep inside—this chance meeting was changing the course of my life.
    I pointed the way to Alamo Drive and wondered if he was amused by the quirky names of things—the Halfway Baptist Church, Adam’s Ribs B-B-Q and the Celestial Café, the filling station with its hand-lettered sign, “We sell gas to anyone in a glass container.” Until I went away to college, this had been my whole world. It was imminently, almost oppressively safe, as small and tightly knit as a Catholic school uniform.
    Back then, the sight of a Harley roaring across the courthouse square brought on glares of righteous disapproval. People in those parts still talked about hippies and beatniks as though the countercultures were still a threat. Maybelle King came out to stand under the awning of Eve’s Garden Shoppe, planting her hands on her hips in consternation. I laughed aloud. No one knew it was me on the back of the bike, but I wouldn’t have cared if they did.
    Buddy Plawski’s house came up far too quickly, in the neighborhood where I grew up. When I got off the Harley, I still felt the buzz of the motor deep in my bones. Alamo Drive hadn’t changed in decades, and for all I know, it’s still the same: a quiet lane shaded by live oaks and lined with genteel Victorian-style houses and white picket fences.
    After Steve parked the bike and took off his helmet, he looked around with a puzzled expression.
    “Not what you expected?” I asked, handing over my helmet.
    “It’s fine. I can’t imagine growing up here.”
    “Where did you grow up?”
    He had such a fine, gentle smile. “Honey, you don’t want to know.”
    “What, is it a secret?”
    “Nope. Just depressing.”
    “I’m a very cheerful