Page 8 of Stubborn Mountain Man

“Did you just say you’re a virgin?” I asked.

Was that too personal? Maybe so, but she’d said it and I was just clarifying. My cock had just stirred again, and not in a way that was specific to her having never had sex before. It was mostly because sex had been brought into the conversation in the first place.

“Yep,” she said. “See this ring?”

She held up her right hand to display a silver band on her ring finger. It had a cross inside a heart.

“It’s a purity ring,” she said. “My high school friends all have one. If one of us loses our virginity, we have to enter it into the app.”

“There’s an app for virginity?” I asked.

Wow. Things had changed since I was young. I’d lost my virginity at fifteen, which was twenty years ago.

“It was through our church.” Gillian lowered her hand to her lap and stared out at the view. “We were in a youth group. Most of the kids dropped out of church altogether by the time they were old enough to become sexually active. There are only six of us from that initial group who are still on that app.”

“So instead of updating the app, you could just delete the app from your phone, couldn’t you?” I asked. “If you were going to lose your virginity, that is.”

“I guess that’s what most girls do,” she said. “But my friends and I have stuck with it. If we get married, we can update the app with that. Then we kept the promise.”

“The promise is to stay celibate until you’re married?” I asked. “Do blowjobs count?”

I couldn’t believe I just said those words to a virgin. Or to a lady in general. I normally wouldn’t talk like that this early into a relationship.

But this wasn’t a relationship. We were just hanging out on a rock that was precariously perched above a large drop-off. The rock was stable, of course. I knew it, and Gillian, no doubt, knew it, too, but we were still living on the edge. Literally.

“Nope,” she said. “But my friends and I don’t do that. It’s cheating.”

“So is kissing against the rules?”

“The rules just say no physical intimacy before marriage,” she said. “And not in those words. It’s more about the value of the gift one gives to a spouse by waiting until the wedding night.”

“Is this just girls or do boys do this too?”

“Both.” She sighed. “We made the promise in sixth grade.”

“Sixth grade?”

The words popped out before I could stop them, and they were full of disbelief. I didn’t want to put down what was obviously important to her, but sixth grade was a little early to be thinking about when someone would have sex.

“Most of the boys dropped away over time,” she said. “But my friends and I stuck to our pact even when we weren’t necessarily going to church all the time.” She laughed. “Okay, we weren’t going to church at all.”

She laughed and reached over for the water jug. I still held it in my left hand while I was eating with my right. I handed it over and watched as she unscrewed the cap and took a drink.

It was a good sign she’d drink after me. Did that mean she’d be open to kissing me?

“So I guess if you violated the rules, you’d be letting your friends down,” I said.

“Accountability.” She nodded. “It does keep me honest, but…”

She hesitated, and I held my breath, not sure what I was hoping she’d say next. Maybe that she was thinking about breaking those rules. Otherwise, I’d have to marry her to sleep with her.

The idea of getting married didn’t have me wanting to throw myself off this rock. That’s the first time I could have said that in years. In fact, when she’d mentioned wedding nights, I had this strange pang of longing. I wanted to be the one she gave that gift to. I wanted to be the first man she slept with.

“The friends who dared me to go on this adventure,” she said. “They’re the same ones I have a pact with. They keep saying I’m stuck in my routine. After college, two of them moved overseas to work. The rest of them never went to college at all. One’s been on a bunch of mission trips, another works as a flightattendant, traveling all over the world. Then there’s Meg, who conducts river raft tours in the Smokies, and Jessica, who travels the country with her sales job. Meanwhile, I sit in my apartment with my college roommate and work at a job where I sit in front of a computer all day. They just think I’ve gotten stale.”

I was listening to all of this with interest. It told me a lot about who she was and why she was here, but all I could think about was how this played into the “but” at the end of that sentence about waiting until marriage.

“I’ve been thinking that it’s time to show those high school buddies just how adventurous I can be.” She looked over at me. “Are you game?”

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