On into the bathroom, which had the fifties green and white tile. The terrazzo on the floor was a real surprise.
A small rear room that must have once been a porch was lined with windows. Things were stored there now.
She came to the door into the kitchen and took the room in at a glance, seeing the enameled cabinets, the green checked curtains at the windows, the welcoming yet lonely feel of it. The house was lonely, she thought quite suddenly.
Mason’s back was to her. His T-shirt was stretched tight over his shoulders. Feeling her gaze, he turned. She went toward him. He watched her come, and then he reached for her and drew her against him, breathing a great sigh when she pressed against the length of him.
“Charlene,” he whispered in a warm and welcoming tone.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him deeply, until she began to feel weak in the knees. Weak all over, so that she clung to him and said, “Please hold me. Just please hold me.”
He held her tight and kissed her eyes and her cheeks and her neck down toward her breasts that she bared for him, while running her fingers through his silky, thick hair. And then he laid her head against his chest, and he massaged her back while she listened to the steady, hard beating of his heart. They stayed like that, listening to each other’s heartbeats, absorbing certain knowledge of each other’s bodies, for uncountable minutes.
Finally, having absorbed enough of his strength to stand on her own, Charlene pulled away.
“I made coffee,” he said and indicated the steaming cups on the table.
“Thank you.”
She sat at the table. Seeing her shiver, he moved to shut the back door, but she said quickly that she would rather it be open. “I like to see the sunset light fade. It’s so beautiful.”
So he went out of the room and came back with a thick, soft corduroy shirt that he placed around her shoulders. His scent surrounded her.
They sat at the table, not talking at first, until finally Charlene managed, “I’m trying to figure out what I need to say,” and he told her, “Take your time.”
Grinning at that, she asked him if he had always been this patient, and he said that he had not and that he really wasn’t right then, but he was trying to be.
She shook her head, feeling teary, and said, “Oh, Mason…thank you for the roses. They are beautiful. They smell so good. So many roses have no fragrance. Very often the ones from the florist don’t. They’re bred for beauty, not for scent. I love the ones with scent.”
“Something told me that,” he said.
She gazed into his eyes, which were clear and warm. They smiled at each other. A warm sensation like water washed over her.
“I apologize for my attitude toward you the other day,” she said.
He told her he understood, that it was okay.
She shook her head and told him, “I want to explain, as best I can.” Then she took a deep breath and continued. “I have been running from you, Mason. I failed in my relationship with Joey. I tried as hard as I knew how to try, and I failed. I think if I had not tried so hard, that failing wouldn’t hurt so badly, but to know I gave it all I had and I still came up deficient is very hard to take.”
“Why do you not think Joey had a big part in the failure?” he asked.
“That is something I have to work through. I can see that logic now, that it wasn’t all me, but I have not gotten to the place where I can deal with it. You see, I am terrified that I will repeat all the mistakes I made with Joey. That’s why I need time to find out who I am, not who I am with someone, but who I am by myself as a woman. I lost that knowledge somewhere along the way.
“And you don’t know me, Mason,” she continued. “Not really. You are in love with someone you’ve made me out to be in your mind. I don’t want you to wake up one day and find I don’t in reality match up to that fantasy woman. I want you to love the real me.”
“Tell me about you, then,” he said, in an earnest fashion that caused a great thumping in her chest.
“I like to see sunsets and sunrises,” she began. She told him a dozen things she liked, and then asked him what he liked, and he told her so many that she laughed and asked if there was anything he did not like.
“Yes,” he said. “Cold winters and toll roads.”
They fell quiet, so quiet she thought she could hear his heart beating. He laid his hand on the table, palm up, and she slowly put her hand into his. A shiver of pure desire went up her arm and down her back to land deep in the recesses of her belly.
“I am so attracted to you, Mason, that it scares my socks off,” she admitted, facing him fully, watching the warm light grow in his eyes and the crinkles at their corners as he smiled.
“Scares me, too, I guess,” he drawled.
“But I don’t want to let my body dictate my life. My soul. I don’t want to make love with you, because I’m afraid I will lose myself. I don’t want to go in that deep, until I can commit my total self. Can you understand?”
He nodded. Yet his hand stayed tight around hers, and hers tight around his.
“I’ll wait until you’re ready,” he said. “But can you be my girl?”
“Oh, Mason.” And then she got up and went to him, and he pulled her into his lap.
“Yes, I can be your girl,” she said with a teary whisper into his ear.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.
And while the golden setting sun sent deepening shadows into the warm kitchen, they kissed and explored each other with hands and lips and voices, and Mason displayed an amazing understanding of her needs right at that moment.
Six Months Later…
It was the second Saturday of the month, and Mason did as he had been doing each second Saturday, he drove into town to the florist to get Charlene a vase of yellow roses. This Saturday it was also his turn to help Winston Valentine raise his flags, so he drove in at the crack of dawn.
“You’re late,” Winston said. Despite the chilly, damp morning, he was waiting on the porch.
“I am not. I’m on time. Sunrise is in exactly one minute, according to the weatherman this morning.”
Winston always had to tell him he was late. It was part of the ritual. Mason came two mornings a week, Larry Joe one, and Northrupt the other four. It was hard on Winston’s pride, but he said he would put up with it in order to keep up the standard of the flags.
Mason, carrying the flags, helped Winston, who used a cane, down the stairs. He walked just behind the older man over to the flagpole. He attached the flags, and Winston managed to pull the ropes, sending the flags into the air, while “Dixie” played out from the house. Mason, slightly behind Winston, followed suit in saluting.
Then Winston said, “You are askin’ her to marry you again today, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Mason said. He asked Charlene the second Saturday of every month, the day he considered something of their anniversary.
“Good luck,” Winston said and waved him away.
Mason looked over to see Vella coming across the pasture. She would join Winston for morning coffee.
“Nobody hardly lets me pee alone,” Winston muttered as he walked in his halting gait off across the yard.
Mason went into town, had coffee and the regular argument with his brother Adam over their joint project on the senior living complex that was nevertheless progressing, and then went down to get the vase of yellow flowers that now always awaited him at Grace Florist.
“Good luck today,” Fred Grace told him.
Mason took the roses and drove back to his old house, which sat upon a foundation that was currently being dismantled. They had decided not to tear down the old house but to move it to five acres three miles down the road. This had been Charlene’s idea.
“Oh, Mason, you can’t tear it down. It is…well, so you.” She loved the house, she said. It had become their hideaway.
He set the roses on the kitchen table, and for the rest of the morning
hours and into the afternoon, cooked a stew, sorted and dusted books, which appeared to be a lifetime’s work, and prepared the table for their Saturday evening supper.
When Charlene arrived, she brought him his favorite tomato pudding. It was her part to put candles on the table and light them, even though they always ate just before sundown, when the long buttery rays of the sun slanted across the yard and in the windows.
He told her she looked beautiful in the candlelight, and she told him he looked good, too.
“The roses smell especially lovely tonight,” she added.
“Mr. Grace makes sure he orders these for us once a month.”
Then he gazed at her for a long minute. “Are you going to marry me?” he asked.
And she said, “Yes.”
She sat there, knowing he had not really heard her.
He picked up a bowl to serve, and then he looked at her.
She grinned broadly, every womanly cell in her body dancing.
He put down the bowl. “You said yes?”
She nodded. And, laughing, she threw herself into his lap and kissed him with an abandon that she had never before allowed herself to display.
After a minute of that, he jerked her away from him and said in an eager voice, “You said yes?”
She put her palm against his dear, tender cheek and said, “Mason, you are some kind of man. I will be your wife, here and now.”
Then she rose and took his hand and said boldy, “Mason, I cannot wait another minute to have you.”
And she led him off into his own bed, where the flame of their passion flared quickly, burning away their initial bit of shyness. The ticking clock seemed to beat in time with their hearts as, fully naked, they stared at each other, a man and a woman with trembling hearts and hungry bodies. Her breasts were creamy mounds of flesh more beautiful than he had imagined, and his hips more narrow and man part more eager than she had imagined.
Then, with a great smile and breathless sigh, she extended her arms, and he came fully to himself and took her as a man does the woman he has longed for, mating with her in hot desire and wanting and piercing happiness, where the cries of two hearts melding into one floated on the evening breeze.
Afterward they lay damp in each other’s arms, caressing, kissing lips and skin, and whispering words of praise and love such as only two souls can who have at last found their mates.
“Let’s do it again,” she whispered, and he laughed a great laugh and covered her body with his.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-6198-6
DRIVING LESSONS
Copyright © 2000 by Curtiss Ann Matlock.
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Driving Lessons Page 38
