What if he’d touched her that night? That first night when he’d taken her to his trailer, and they’d sat on the sofa, and she’d had trouble breathing because he was so close and so much a man and so unlike any other boy she’d ever known. He smelled of cotton and cigarettes, maybe the sweet kind he rolled himself. He lived by himself as young as he was, lived in trailer in a part of town she’d never been before, worked hanging sheet metal until it fell on his arm and sliced through to the bone. She could see the bandage on his arm, tight against the skin under the sleeve of his cotton shirt. He showed her boy things--rocks he’d picked up, bottles he’d found, coins he’d saved--in his man’s world of second hand furniture in beat-up trailer.
She’d been dating high school boys with smooth cheeks and slim builds but this was a man she sat beside with a man’s strong legs and stubbled cheeks, a year out of high school and a lifetime beyond any boy she’d ever known. This was a man who smoked and drank and worked and played cards for money so that he could eat after his job sliced open his arm and took his strength away. This was a man who could have touched her once and taken her forever without a murmur of protest, could have taken her before she knew where she was going and she’d have been glad of it.
But he didn’t. He didn’t take her for a long, long while.
He was there in evening church, but she saw him get up and leave. Then she heard his engine outside on the street as he drove up and down, shifting the gears, waiting. She ran out when service was over and waited on the sidewalk, just expected that he’d come for her even though they’d barely spoken. But she knew he was coming. She knew that engine, that little blue car. When he drove up and opened the door, she hopped in without even asking where they’d go.
Before he came with his calloused hands, she’d dated boys whose sticky, soft hands had roamed her body without invitation. Boys who joked and talked of girls who didn’t stop them because they didn’t know they should. Boys who took possession, who learned the map of her body and searched for that hidden spot not even marked. She knew what they wanted; she knew they’d take as much as she allowed or as little as they could stand before their adolescent control gave way. And she enjoyed the power it gave her. She laughed at their insistence, their greedy pawing, their growing need. She laughed when they shook with unmet expectations. She laughed and petted them like dogs. Then Monday in class when they should have listened and studied, she’d smile so sweet and look so fine in the laced-up shirt that hugged her small curves, tempting with the possibility that one slight tug on that lace would expose her flesh, that they’d pant with need and lean close and touch and beg. And she’d look shocked that they’d want her so badly they’d forget it was daylight in mechanical engineering, they’d forget the teacher at the front of the room who watched distractedly wondering if he should intervene.
Then that summer when she was seventeen, he had shown up at church. He just appeared, shaggy blond hair and red mustache. Sat there in the meeting hall flirting with girls around him and never looked her way. But she knew, she knew as soon as she saw him that he was hers. She knew because he took her breath away. He sat back in his chair, legs apart, arms crossed. His thick calves were thrust into heavy tan boots that rooted him to the floor. White western shirt with sleeves rolled to his elbows. Beach blue eyes above that red moustache. Those tight, pale jeans stretched around him like his own skin. He was beautiful.
She gazed at his arms, saw the muscles flex beneath the skin and ached to feel them tight around her. She watched his hands, broad strong hands that stretched across his thighs, hands that held the hammer and pounded the nails. He was beautiful. The planes of his cheeks were firm with lines around his mouth that deepened when he smiled.
Summer passed. She worked in a swimming pool company store selling chlorine and acid and testing water. She was good at sales. All she had to do was remember what the other clerk said, say it like she knew what she was talking about and she’d ring up $200, $300 easy. Her memory and her dimpled glances sold a lot of chemicals that summer. Days off she’d show up at church looking for friends, looking for him. Orange yarn bows tying up her pigtails and another bright white t-shirt. They’d all hide in a cool room on the third floor and listen to music and talk, just clean fun. They painted some sets for a play and forgot to open the windows and got high on the fumes and had to walk for blocks to get it out of their systems. God, that was fun.
The play was for fun, too. Something to do, a summer theater for the church youth group. He built the sets; they painted them. They practiced lines and made costumes. She was the lady in red. He was a cowboy. The night of the performance she was trying to put on false eyelashes, but her hands trembled, so he stood over her, and with his large, rough hands he placed the eyelashes one by one into place. She nearly fainted from forgetting to breathe. She forgot her words. She forgot the steps. She forgot everything but his beach blue eyes and the warmth of his breath that smelled faintly of the cigarette he'd smoked outside the church.
Then that August Sunday came. The Sunday he’d left church early, and she listened to the engine of his little car pacing up and down the street outside the church, and she knew he’d come back for her. She jumped into his car without even knowing where he was taking her just like she’d have given herself to him without thinking. And that night in that torn up trailer, the power switched hands. That power she’d had over boys who couldn’t keep their hands away was gone for this was a man who’d learned to control his need and to respect a woman. Now the power was his because he left her screaming inside for just a touch, just a touch, a feather kiss.