Page 5 of The Story of Us

But I was feeling bold and maybe just a little bit bad, so I said, “I could show you right where your friend lives, but I don’t have my car.” I gestured vaguely in the direction of RaeLynn’s convertible.

I knew what he’d ask. Lord help me, I was hoping he’d ask it.

“Ma’am, I’d be obliged if you’d show me.”

“Ma’am” to a twenty-year-old. He was definitely a Texan. “Show you. You mean, ride with you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He probably expected me to say no. Even though I was more than ready to be bad, I still looked well-behaved on the outside. And he had to know how he looked—big and muscular, clad in all black, riding a Harley Softail. I smiled at him and said that would be fine, and then I went to tell my friends.

You would have thought I’d told them I was going to start selling my eggs or move to Detroit. They were mortified.

“You can’t just hop on the back of some guy’s motorcycle, Grace,” RaeLynn said. “It’s not safe.”

“What if he abducts you?” Trudy demanded.

Oh, please, I thought. Please let him abduct me.

“I’ll be fine,” I assured them. “He’s going to see Buddy straight-arrow Plawski, of all people.”

Not good enough for my girlfriends. They approached Steve Bennett and peppered him with questions, thus learning more from him than I’d managed to extract in my tongue-tied state. He was on a rare two-week leave from the Navy and had ridden all the way from Pensacola just because he felt like it, and because a friend had invited him. I felt foolish for not concluding he was in the Navy as soon as he said he was a friend of Buddy.

He told my girlfriends he’d ridden all day from Pensacola, Florida to see him. It was a shock to hear that he’d driven straight through, stopping only for a nap at a rest area outside Lafayette, Louisiana. He must be dead tired, I thought.

“Let’s go,” I said to 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.

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