Out of Heaven's Grasp

by V. J. Chambers

  She bit her lip. “I don’t think you’d like it if we didn’t, though, would you?”

  “Go back to bed.”

  She started to pace. “You’re a man, and all men want that. And when you wanted me to run away with you before, you wanted to marry me, and you wanted to do it to me, and you will want it, won’t you?”

  I cringed. I wished I didn’t. I wished I was operating on completely noble and pure intentions at the moment. “Abby…”

  “See, that’s why I don’t think this is going to work.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “I can’t do it, I don’t think.” She turned and looked at me. “And so, I mean, I feel like I need you to know that. And then, if you want to back out—”

  “Jesus Christ, Abby, I’m not here for sex.” I had this all wrong, I realized. I thought she was condemning me for my base lusts, but instead she was only afraid that she wasn’t going to please me. Of course she’d feel that way. Women in the community always believed that they had to obey men’s desires.

  “You’re not?” She looked unsure.

  I patted the couch next to me. “Come here.”

  She took a shaky breath, and then she sat down.

  I didn’t dare put my arm around her. Every time I tried something like that, she got spooked. I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I promise you, I will never do anything to you that you don’t want. If you want things like that from me, you have to start it. I’ll never pressure you.”

  “And if I don’t want it? Ever?”

  I sighed. “Listen, whatever happened to you, it didn’t happen the right way. He hurt you. He scared you. If I ever get my hands on him…” I thought about Bob Carroll’s fat, old body on my Abby, and I clenched my teeth. I wanted to hurt him.

  She cocked her head to one side. “I don’t think he did it the wrong way. He’s got three wives and fifteen children, so it seems like he would know what he was doing.”

  I grimaced. “He didn’t care about you, and that’s the important thing. If he cared about you, he never would have…” I looked her directly in the eye. “Abby, I swear to you, all I want from you is what you want. Okay?”

  “What I want?”

  I nodded.

  She was quiet. She looked down into her lap, examined her fingernails. When she spoke, her voice wasn’t steady. “I never… it’s always been about what God wants or what my father wants or what my husband wants. I think… I think I’m afraid to want things.”

  Of course she was. She was trying to rethink the entire world. “That’s okay,” I whispered. “You don’t have to have it all figured out.”

  She raised her gaze to meet mine. “I want you, Jesse. I always have. That’s what started all of this. I wanted something I wasn’t allowed to have. And I’ve been punished for that for so long. I’ve been trying to accept my punishment. But now, you’re saying that I… It just… it can’t be true. I can’t really get to have what I want.”

  I grabbed her hand. “It can be true. It’s the way the rest of the world works.”

  Her face twisted, and she looked like she might cry.

  I wanted to hold her close and comfort her, but I didn’t want to do anything she didn’t like.

  She tore her hand out of mine and scrambled off the couch. She ran away from me.

  “Abby?” I got up to follow her.

  She fled into the bedroom, and she stood at the foot of the bed, hugging herself.

  I stopped in the doorway. “Hey,” I murmured.

  She looked up at me, and then her eyes widened.

  “What?” I said.

  She pointed. “Your-your—”

  I looked down. Shit, seriously? How was it possible that I was still hard and making my sweatpants stick out like that? I felt my face flush, and I backed out of the room. Man, what the hell was wrong with me?

  I flattened myself against the wall outside the bedroom and pleaded with my erection to just go away.

  It was quiet. I stayed there, my eyes closed, listening to the blood rush against my temples.

  “Jesse?”

  I opened my eyes. She was in the doorway to the bedroom.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean…”

  She looked at the floor. “It’s okay. You said you weren’t going to do anything I didn’t want. And I trust you.”

  I rubbed my hands over my face. “I think I’m just going to go back to the couch. We should go to sleep. Both of us.” I lurched away from the wall, happy to put my back to her, so that she couldn’t see my hard-on anymore.

  But her hand was on my shoulder. “You don’t have to.”

  I turned my head back to look at her.

  “Could we both sleep in the bed?” she said. “Just sleep, I mean.”

  “Uh… it would probably be easier if we slept separately.”

  “It’s only that I think… I think I might want… You said I could want things.”

  I turned the whole way around. “You can. You can want things.”

  Her gaze flitted to meet mine and then away. “Maybe I want you to hold me.” Her hand was still on my shoulder, and she slid it down over the top of my bicep.

  I shut my eyes at the sensation.

  And then she stepped closer, her soft body pressing into mine.

  Carefully, slowly, I put my arms around her.

  “I do too, you know,” she whispered. “I love you.”

  * * *

  Abby

  Jesse never did anything more than hold onto me the whole night. He didn’t even try to kiss me, even though I sort of wanted him to. Being in his arms was thrilling. I liked the way he smelled, and I liked the way his body melded itself to mine. He was firm. His shoulders were broad. I had wicked desires—wanting to run my fingers over his flat, hard stomach. Being close to him and thinking about touching him like that made strange things happen to my body. Heat pooled between my legs in the place where I knew that he’d put his penis if I ever let him have relations with me.

  Which I wasn’t going to do.

  I liked Jesse, and I didn’t want to ruin everything with something so disgusting and awful.

  But the warmth down there didn’t feel awful. It felt… nice.

  I wondered…

  Jesse had said that Bob didn’t do it the right way.

  Was it possible that if Jesse did it to me, it would be different? The thought of letting him do it terrified me. But it also made me excited, and it seemed to make something between my legs twitch eagerly.

  Maybe… maybe at some point, if I felt really comfortable, and if things went really slow…

  But not yet. Now, all I really wanted was to be snuggled up in his arms.

  The morning came too quickly. I slipped out of Jesse’s bed without waking him and crept out to my jeep to drive back to Bob’s house.

  I couldn’t stop smiling the whole drive back. I felt free and alive and happy—better than I’d ever felt.

  But when I got back to my room, and Bob was lying there in the bed, asleep as well, I felt something else.

  Guilt. Fear. Confusion.

  I knew that what I’d done was one of the worst sins that a woman could commit. I hadn’t had relations with Jesse, but I’d still been unfaithful to my husband. A woman who did that… well, I didn’t even know anyone who’d ever done that.

  I rushed into the shower, and I stayed in there a long time. Sometimes, if I took a really long shower, when I got out, Bob would already have left my room and gone off about the business of starting his day.

  Not today.

  He was awake and sitting up in bed when I came out. I felt self-conscious. I wanted to do what I normally did, but I felt as if Bob would be able to take one look at me and know what I’d been up to. Swallowing, I went over to the dresser and started combing my wet hair.

  “Abigail,” said Bob, “this can’t go on.”

  I whirled around. “What can’t?” He couldn’t know what I’d done. There was no way.


  “Your rebellion against me. We are going to be married for the rest of our lives. We’ve got to work this out.”

  Generally, I fought him when he said things like this, but I couldn’t see the point. It was only a matter of time before I left with Jesse. I began braiding my hair calmly. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to love you, Bob.”

  “You aren’t even trying,” he said. “Besides, your love for me will come from submitting to me.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “I could take that jeep away from you, you know,” he said.

  My eyes widened.

  “I’ll just take your keys,” he said.

  “You most certainly will not.”

  His shoulders slumped. “No, I suppose not. Then I’d just have you fighting me off and causing a scene. But really, Abigail, how much does a man have to suffer? I realize that I was wrong before. Why can’t you forgive me?”

  I finished off the braid. “I forgive you, Bob. But I don’t want you to touch me ever again.”

  He glared at me. “You’ve got a very willful attitude, Abigail, and I can’t help but wonder if the devil isn’t in it.”

  I gulped.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Abby

  Jesse was kissing me and kissing me. We were in his bed, and his shirt was off, because I’d somehow taken it off of him. I’d started the kissing too. Just as Jesse said, he relied on me to initiate everything that happened between us. At first, I had been very shy, and there hadn’t been much more to the nights we spent together than cuddling, like the first night.

  It had been two weeks since he’d arrived, and I now spent practically every night with him. It was just as easy to sneak out on the nights when Bob was with his other wives as it was on the nights he was meant to spend with me, so I left every night after everyone was asleep and made sure to come back early in the morning before anyone was awake. All day, I thought of nothing but Jesse. I craved being close to him, and I wanted to be with him all the time.

  He kept asking me when we could leave, but I kept putting it off. I knew that there wasn’t anything left for me in the community. I wanted a life with Jesse. But still I couldn’t leave. It seemed like such a big thing to do. Whenever I thought about really doing it, I felt so terrified that I stopped thinking about it.

  But we weren’t talking now. We were gasping against each other, in between kisses. My hands were roaming all over the solid muscles of Jesse’s back, and he was lying on top of me, my thighs wrapped around him, our bodies pressed close.

  Everything felt so good, and I was swept up in our kissing, in our union. I was enjoying every second of it, not thinking about the fact that my pelvis was pressed right into his, and that I was writhing against him—against the hard part of him.

  His penis was always hard when we did stuff like this, but I’d sort of gotten used to it. Jesse never made me do anything with it. He didn’t force me to stroke him there. He kept his clothes on, so I never saw it. Occasionally, I felt it, or I noticed that I was feeling it, but it didn’t scare me, not anymore.

  But Jesse suddenly seized my hips and pinned me down so that I couldn’t move.

  “Abby, you’re killing me here,” he panted.

  Killing him? “I’m hurting you?”

  He laughed a little. “No.” He flung himself away from me. Lying on his back, he struggled to catch his breath.

  I propped myself up on one elbow to look down at him. “What did I do?”

  He shook his head, still breathless. “I’m sorry, you weren’t doing anything wrong. It’s me.”

  I furrowed my brow.

  He shut his eyes. “I’m just kind of… worked up is all. Give me a second.”

  I watched him, waiting.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  He grinned. He reached up to touch my cheek. “Better than okay, I swear. You are just so amazing, and when I’m with you, sometimes it’s difficult not to take things faster than we should.”

  Take things faster…? I lay back too. “You wish we were having sex.”

  He groaned. “Did I say that?”

  “I knew you were going to want it.”

  “Hey, Abby, come on.” He rolled over and pulled me into his arms. His voice rumbled in his chest. “Whatever you want is okay. I promise.”

  “So, then what was killing you?”

  He sighed.

  “I mean it,” I said. “I want to know what I did that made you want to do it so much that you had to stop kissing me.”

  “It’s not like that. Looking at you makes me want to do it.”

  I stiffened, inching away from him.

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “I told you that I don’t want to do it at all,” I said. Of course, I’d been thinking lately that maybe I might want to try it with him… sometime. Maybe. But I wasn’t going to say that, because I was kind of annoyed with him. “And you said you were okay with that. But now you’re saying that we’re moving faster, like you think we’re going to… get somewhere, and we’re not, and you’re going to be disappointed.”

  He was quiet.

  I glared at him. “Wouldn’t it disappoint you if we didn’t ever do it?”

  “I…” He threw an arm over his face. When he moved his muscles rippled, and he was stunningly beautiful. “Why do we have to talk about this?”

  I couldn’t help it. I reached out to touch his bare chest, my palm flat against his warm, smooth skin.

  He groaned again. “You just want to torture me, huh?”

  I pulled my hand back. “No.”

  He moved his arm so that he could look at me. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. God knows, after everything you’ve been through, I’m being such an asshole.”

  I wavered. “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made it seem like we were going to do it.” Now that I thought about it, we’d sort of been in the position for it. I still had all my clothes on, and he had his pants on, but there had only been a few layers of fabric separating our bodies. The thing was, it had felt so, so different from anything that I’d ever done with Bob, and so I hadn’t quite realized how far I was pushing things.

  He sat up. “Don’t apologize. You’re allowed to do whatever you want. You’re the one in charge. We can go as far as you want and no farther. That’s the deal, and I’m sorry if I didn’t sound grateful, because I am. Every time you let me touch you, I’m grateful.” He bent down to kiss me.

  I tangled my hands in his hair and held him there for a lingering minute. Then I let him go, and we stared into each others eyes.

  “You know,” I said in a quiet voice, “I might… maybe… sometime kind of want to try it.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Not now,” I said. “But it doesn’t seem as bad with you.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “Not for me. Anyway, I’m sorry, but I think I want you to be a little more excited about it than just saying it’s ‘not as bad.’”

  I flushed. “Well, I mean, everything with you is… really nice.”

  He kissed me again, and then he settled down next to me, lying on his side.

  “I guess I just…” I fingered the sheets, trying to figure out how to talk about it. “It’s so gross.”

  He laughed. “Gross?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s all these body fluids and everything’s all sticky and… yuck.”

  He considered. “Maybe I do remember that there was kind of a yuck factor. But I think it would be different if it was your body fluids. Because you’re you, and I like you, so maybe it wouldn’t be gross at all.”

  I turned to look at him. “You did it with someone else.”

  His gaze flicked away from mine. “Yeah.”

  “Oh,” I said. That bothered me. I didn’t know why it bothered me. I’d been raised to believe that my husband would have other wives besides me, and there wasn’t any reason that Jesse couldn’t have bee
n with another woman while he was gone. But I didn’t like the thought of it at all. I sat straight up. “Was it a worldly girl?”

  He shifted, looking uncomfortable. “Yeah.”

  Then another thought occurred to me. A worse thought. “Did you do it with more than one girl?”

  “No, just her. It was only a couple of times.”

  Oh. More than once, then. “Did you… like her?”

  “Uh…” He sat up too. “Let’s not do this, Abby. I mean, you haven’t told me all the things that happened with you and Bob, and I don’t want to—”

  “That’s not the same,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice with Bob. No one forced you to have sex with that girl out there.”

  “Okay, true,” he said. “But still, I don’t think—”

  “Did you like her?”

  He heaved a huge sigh. “Maybe. Kind of. But it doesn’t matter, because she didn’t like me.”

  “Well, she had sex with you. She must have liked you.”

  “No, she didn’t. She just wanted the sex, not… me.”

  My jaw dropped open. “That’s a lie.”

  He drew back, offended. “It’s not.”

  “No woman does it just because she wants the sex. That can’t be true.”

  “Worldly women do, okay? It’s possible to like sex, Abby. You could like it.”

  “Right.” I got up. “That’s what you want from me. You want me to be more like that girl, then.”

  “No, I don’t. At all. I don’t want you to be anything like her. And this is why I really don’t think we should talk about this.”

  “Fine,” I said. “We won’t. Because I’m leaving.” I threw myself through the bedroom door, slamming it behind me.

  “Abby, wait!” he called after me.

  * * *

  Jesse

  God damn it. I got up and went after her, throwing my shirt on.

  Everything with Abby was confusing. She told me that she wanted to leave the community, but she wouldn’t actually leave. Every morning, usually before I woke up, she disappeared back to Bob’s house. Even though she claimed she hated him, she always went back to him. When I tried to get her to agree to a time line to getting out of there, she waffled back and forth and then changed the subject.