Going Too Far

by Jennifer Echols

  “Nor is it ladylike to take such an interest in horseflesh in the first place!” the forgotten captain exploded. “Rebecca, are you mad? Hanging about in the barn will ruin your reputation! I shall speak with your grandmother!”

  “What an excellent idea!” Rebecca said. “Mr. Gordon, would you be so kind as to help the captain find my grandmother?”

  “And you must accompany us!” the captain exclaimed to Rebecca, offering his arm.

  Rebecca hung back. “No need. I am quite incapable of disciplining myself. You had better get to the root of the problem, and I shall stand here by myself in the corner and think remorseful thoughts about what I have done.”

  “Come, Captain!” Mr. Gordon feigned outrage. As he put a hand on the captain’s shoulder to turn him, he crossed his eyes at Rebecca.

  She winked at Mr. Gordon. She appreciated his help, and she felt a twinge of guilt at deceiving him. If he had known he was not only extracting her from an embarrassing courtship, but also clearing her for an illicit one, he would not have been so helpful.

  She watched the elegant backs of the two men weave among the partygoers and disappear into another room in search of the matriarch. With a last stealthy glance around the party, she backed to the arched doorway. She moved with excruciating slowness due to the damned fashion of the season, a bustled gown with an impossibly tight skirt, allowing steps of only a few inches at a time. The dress was flattering for marriageable women, she supposed, but extremely inconvenient when one had designs on a stable boy.

  Finally she passed under the arch and outdoors. The cold air made her shiver in her sleeveless gown, but she must hide her discomfort. The only way to pull off this affair without being cast into her bedchamber until her coming-of-age, and without causing David to be let go, or, much worse, to become a victim of country justice, was to have an excuse available at all times. Her excuse at the moment was that she had felt light-headed in the party and needed fresh air. Such a thing had never happened to her—the stable hands had told her she could hold her liquor admirably for a lady—but there was a first time for everything.

  Then, if she ever reached David beyond the patio, her excuse would be that she had left her fine riding gloves in her favorite filly’s stall at the races, and David, recognizing them and mistrusting the rough workmen to send them after her, had brought them to her at the colonel’s party.

  At least, that was the excuse Rebecca had invented, and those were the orders she had given David to follow. But David had been known to disobey orders, and to escape the consequences with a charming smile. He might have grown tired of waiting and left for home after all.

  Normally Rebecca would not have attributed such disrespect to a servant. But David was not normal. Devoted he was not. Patient he was not, either. In fact, arranging a romantic tryst with him had been a bit like herding cats, and at several points she had been ready to give up on him entirely and attempt an affair with the son of the greengrocer, and had told David as much. That he seemed hardly moved by the threat only made her want him more.

  The War Between the States had begun when they both were but four years old, and though it had not ravaged Louisville, it had been a preoccupation of the community, with threats of evacuation and concerns about beloved menfolk gone. Rebecca’s father had been commissioned as an officer of General Bull Nelson and had died of a bullet to the gut at the Battle of Richmond, and her mother had slowly expired of heartbreak.

  Rebecca missed her parents terribly, but she did not remember much of this period, save the sea of white tents at the Union Army training grounds on the outskirts of the city. Any parenting to which she’d been subjected had come from her aloof grandmother, grown bitter with grief at the passing of her daughter, perhaps, but Rebecca suspected her grandmother was naturally acrid, for a disposition of such intensity and consistency surely was born and not made. Rebecca had found solace in sun-filled romps through the pastures playing at army and other inappropriately tomboyish pursuits with David, the son of the stable master—a friendship that would have been harshly discouraged if anybody had been paying attention.

  But nobody had. And looking over her shoulder and past the troublesome white frills on her gown, she saw that nobody watched her even now as she stole away from the grand mansion with candlelight spilling from its arched windows, across the patio, into the cool night.

  David stood before her, broad shoulders and slim hips appearing all the more gentlemanly tonight in her farm’s special-occasion finery: long jacket, tight breeches, and tall riding boots. When he spied her, he ducked behind the hedgerow, where they could not be seen by anyone stepping out on the patio for air. She rounded the hedgerow and peered about the yard on the other side. Satisfied that they would not be discovered here, either, she gazed way up at him.

  He smiled down at her, his eyes tracing the plunging neckline of her gown. So enraptured was she with studying his face after days caught up in the whirlwind of balls and races, and so distractingly did her heart beat against her breastbone, that some moments passed before she remembered to greet him. “Hullo, David.”

  “Hullo, Miss O’Carey.” His words were the proper address to a daughter of the landed gentry from a stable hand. Indeed, his words always had been proper—in public at least. It was the attitude behind his voice that told her he did not consider himself her inferior. And that is what drew her to him, over and over.

  What he said next was not proper at all. “Would you care to walk behind the stables?”

  She should have laughed. Never would they get away with such a thing. A witness would happen upon them and report the tragedy to her grandmother before it could happen, saving Rebecca’s womanhood and ruining her evening.

  Rebecca did not laugh. David watched her expectantly, no humor in his steady blue gaze.

  “I would soil my slippers,” she murmured, “and the maid would notice in the morning.” She kicked the toe of one gold shoe beyond the hem of her gown to show him.

  “Then I suppose we can’t go far.” His strong hand encircled her wrist, and he pulled her.

  She looked up into his eyes in surprise, wondering what he meant.

  “Come with me into the bushes, Your Highness,” he said. “Come with me into the darkness. Isn’t that what you wanted when you asked me to bring you a glove you hadn’t forgotten?”

  Of course that was what she had wanted. But she was not prepared to admit this, much less to follow through.

  He pulled. And in that instant, heat burst from her heart and flooded her bosom, splashing a blush across her cheeks and rushing in a tingling trail to her fingertips and her toes. This stable boy—or whatever he had grown into when she wasn’t looking—was strong enough to take her into the bushes whether she wanted to go or not. There was nothing for it but to trip after him.

  Even as she did so, he whispered over his shoulder, “I’m beginning to think you don’t know as much about love as you claim. You seem astonished that I’ve called your bluff.” He stopped under a leafy bough laden with fragrant white blossoms that glowed in the moonlight.

  “I’ll wager I’ve learned as much in my boudoir as you in your stable,” she countered. “My maid was previously employed by the chorus line—though if you speak a word of that to my grandmother, you will find ground glass in your coffee.”

  He exhaled shortly through his nose. Rebecca was unsure whether this was a laugh or a sigh, because her presence tended to elicit both reactions from David.

  Then he placed his fingers on her bottom lip—pointer finger on one side, thumb on the other—and gently squeezed as if plumping her lip to ready it. “I’m going to kiss you now, Rebecca. Don’t scream.”

  Her nervous laughter was cut off as his lips met hers.

  Since those long-ago summer days of play, she had considered David her dear friend. He was important enough to her that she had hidden their friendship carefully from her grandmother. But now they were both eighteen. Over the recent months, the very secrecy o
f their relationship had turned dark in her mind, and needful. David was a man now, she a woman pursued by others, driven toward this kiss. She opened her mouth for everything she had dreamed of and expected.

  What she had not expected was David’s hands upon her bodice. They first grasped her waist, then smoothed up her back and wandered to her front. When one thumb traced her neckline, dangerously close to her bosom, she broke the kiss with a gasp.

  DID I GASP MYSELF? I was terrified that I’d made a noise while reading my own story, surrounded by my classmates. My copy of “Almost a Lady” stared up at me from the long table of dark polished wood, just as it stared up at the other six students seated around the table, only half the class. But none of them were reading it. Two of them whispered together, two read textbooks, two typed on their laptops. And none of them were staring at me. To disguise my gasp just in case, I took another long breath as if I simply couldn’t get enough of the good, fresh New York City air. Then inhaled again and held it while I concentrated on my heart, which seemed to be palpitating.

  I was nervous. Me, nervous! My story, by the luck of the draw, would be one of the first three critiqued in class. I only hoped it wouldn’t be the very first. I was confident in my writing, but nobody wants to go first. And nothing mattered more to me than my stories.

  This one especially. I’d written it from life, sort of, about my very own, very real stable boy back home in Kentucky. We’d started out as friends, like David and Rebecca. Then something awful had happened and for years I couldn’t get past it. Now we never would.

  We could in my story, though. I could set up obstacles to love, just like in real life—and then, unlike in real life, I could knock them down. Making every piece slide into place for my characters, writing them an unrealistically happy ending, gave me a rush and made me high. This was why I wanted to be a novelist.

  The people in my high school creative-writing classes hadn’t felt this way. But now I was in an honors creative-writing class at a New York university famous for its programs in creative writing and publishing. Granted, every freshman in the honors program had to take this class, and most of them weren’t English majors and might not care about writing fiction, but surely some of them would see what I saw in my story and love it as much as I did.

  If that were true, they would not be able to tear themselves away from reading and rereading my delicious romance. Yet strangely, they seemed to be getting on with their lives. I could hardly hear their breathing over their taps on laptop keyboards and the noise of late-afternoon traffic outside the window, but I was pretty sure nobody gasped. The girl nearest me texted on her insidious-looking black phone as if reading my story had been just another homework assignment and had not changed her life.

  Screw all of them. I dove back into my story.

  * * *

  “Shall I stop?” David whispered, kissing the corner of Rebecca’s mouth. “If we’re caught, you may be confined to your room, but I will lose my position. My father may lose his position, too, and then he will shoot me.” David kissed her chin, left a trail of kisses down her neck, and mouthed her breastbone. Placing one kiss at the lowest point of her neckline, between her breasts, he paused and glanced up at her, his blond hair catching in the frills of lace upon her dress. “Better make it worth the trouble.”

  “By all means,” she breathed—none too easy a feat in her corset. If this kept up she might swoon of tightly bound excitement.

  With her leave, his tongue lapped at the tender skin between her breasts. He licked his way up the other side of her neckline, blazed another trail of kisses up that side of her neck, and nuzzled past the smooth ringlets of hair that her maid had arranged so artfully.

  “Some things will have to wait until we are truly alone,” he growled in her ear, sending chills down her neck and across her arms in the cool night. “I should like to put my lips here.” His hand wandered down her bosom again, and cupped her breast. His thumb moved back and forth across her nipple, hard beneath the lace.

  Now it was she who grasped him, her fingers finding his white shirt beneath his riding coat, her palms sliding over the warm, hard muscles of the chest that lay beneath. She kissed his lips.

  Then he took charge of the embrace, grasping her shoulders to hold her still while he explored her mouth with his tongue.

  Rebecca had no concept of how long this ecstasy went on before he pulled back, panting, and set his forehead against hers. “Well, that satisfies my curiosity, Miss O’Carey. Thanks for a lovely evening.”

  “Cad.” She shoved him lightly.

  Smiling like a scoundrel, he backed against the boughs. White petals rained down upon them both.

  He fumbled with something in his breeches. She had thought the past few minutes the most intense of her life, but they were nothing compared with the alarm and ashamed delight now rushing through her veins—until she realized he was only bringing out his pocket watch.

  Glancing at it, he said, “You’d better go back before you’re missed.”

  “All right.” She backed a pace away and observed him, calmly now that her heart had quieted. He carried the watch for timing the horses, of course, but it was easy to imagine him a gentleman, with a gentleman’s pocket watch, his clothes the fashion of a young dandy rather than the uniform of a stable hand. He could so easily have been the great catch of the neighborhood, and in that case they could have been married.

  But it was not to be. She shook her head to clear it. It was one thing to arrange an assignation with the stable boy, and another thing entirely to fall in love with him.

  “I had almost lost the wherewithal to ask,” she said, “but did you bring my glove after all?”

  He stared at her blankly for a moment, and she thought he had not brought it, and that her grandmother would demand some fine explaining if Rebecca had the misfortune to meet her on re-entering the party.

  But this was more of his usual stonewalling to frighten her. With a grin he pulled her glove, tightly rolled, from another trouser pocket.

  “I suppose I can’t stroll into the party with my excuse flopping about,” she said. “That would look odd.” She fished her reticule from her own pocket and attempted to work the rolled glove through the small opening. It would not go.

  “Here, let me.”

  Instinctively she pulled back, not wanting him to soil her glove and her reticule with his dirty fingers.

  She looked up at him in embarrassment. Of course he had washed before meeting her. His fingers were not dirty, as usual in the stable. She was horrified that she had instinctively thought such a thing, as if he were dirty permanently. From his somber expression she could tell he knew exactly what was going through her mind.

  Gently he took the glove and the reticule from her. As she watched, he worked the glove through, careful not to open the reticule too far and tear it. “I saw a snake eat a rat once,” he commented, “out behind your grandmother’s north barn. Unhinged its jaws to do it.”

  “That may be beyond the capacity of this snake,” she said—and just then the reticule gave, and the glove slipped inside. They both sighed their relief.

  He fastened the jeweled top and handed the reticule back to her, his fingers brushing hers. “When will I see you again?”

  At dawn, when you drive us in the coach back to the house, she could have said cattily. But he gazed seriously at her, and something told her the kiss they had finally shared had changed everything between them. She might not love him, but she could not disappoint him.

  “My grandmother leaves for business in Frankfort tomorrow,” Rebecca said. “Let’s look for an opportunity.”

  “Let’s do.” He touched the tip of her nose with one finger, then her bottom lip again. “Take care, and watch out for captains.”

  She laughed and whispered, “Always.” Then she fled the bower.

  She returned to the party, furtively examining the revelers as she entered. No eyes were upon her, not even those of her grandmother,
across the room, or Captain Vanderslice, conversing with elderly Mrs. Woodson, boring her ever closer to death. Everybody seemed involved in their own pursuits. The mint julep was Rebecca’s friend tonight, throwing a shroud over others’ powers of observation. Nobody saw her come in or commented on her reticule, obviously full to bursting.

  She would not even need to use her pin money to pay off her maid, as she had done several times in the past when David had met her in the barn. They had simply played then, not kissed. He had taught her to swing on a rope from the loft down to the hayrick below like a pirate conquering the poop deck. The issue had been that she was too old to be playing, and much too old to be playing with the stable boy.

  The latter had not changed, she thought as she gazed out the doorway she had just entered. Blinded anew by the candlelight, she could not make out shapes in the darkness as she had earlier, but she did detect a flash of blond head keeping its distance across the patio. Watching her, and waiting.

  I LET OUT A LONG, SATISFIED sigh. This story set up a grand adventure for Rebecca and David, with a fairy-tale ending—everything I’d longed for with my stable boy. It was perfect. The class would love it.

  I only wished they would reassure me by telling me so. But they kept their heads down, focused on their own work, as if we were waiting for the subway. Maybe later in the semester we’d be comfortable enough with one another to start a group convo as we waited for the whole class to trickle in. But it was only our second meeting. Even so, normally I would have started the group convo myself. I hated silence.

  Today was not normal. To get my mind off the impending judgment of my goal in life, I pulled my calculator out of my book bag. My boss had offered me a double shift at the coffee shop on Saturday. If I took it, I wouldn’t be able to go to the Broadway matinee I’d scoped out. If I didn’t take the shift and I bought the cut-rate Broadway ticket, I might have to dip into the reserves I’d saved

  over the summer to make my first payment on my dorm room. My scholarship covered tuition only, and I’d been able to talk the university into a payment plan for my rent since I’d unexpectedly become destitute the night of high school graduation.