Steel Me Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

unoccupied.  The slope tumbled gently into the Brandywine Creek, which glinted through the trees that guarded its banks.  All around them was tidy farmland and the neat rows of vineyards.  J. pulled a scratchy wool blanket from his kit and spread it on the close-cropped grass.  Emmy looked at him, wide-eyed in astonishment.
    "Where are we?"  She was twisting around, a strange expression on her face.
    "Dunno, exactly. I came by here on one of my solo rides.  Thought it might be the kind of place you liked."  He tugged the corner of the blanket and sat down, stretching out his long legs.  The sun was baking down from above and he wished he wasn't wearing jeans.  He absentmindedly rolled up his cuffs and unlaced his boots.   Yanking them off with his socks, he settled his bare feet into the grass.
    It wasn't until he had finished his little ritual that he realized Emmy was still standing, regarding him closely.  "Sit down, you're making me nervous," he said.
    "Why did you think I'd like it?" she breathed.
    J. furrowed his brows in confusion.  "Because you told me you grew up in the country.  This is the country-est place I knew."
    Emmy settled down next to him and rested her head on his shoulder.  They listened to the creek babble gently to itself for a moment.  "This is utterly unlike the country where I grew up," Emmy smiled. 
    "Guess I kinda thought country was country."
    "I didn't even know that this was here," she continued, like she hadn't heard him.  "Robert," she spat his name, "had this chauvinism about the city being the center of the world.  The shit he gave me for being from a rural place...." she sighed and pulled up her pant legs to expose her pale flesh to the sun.  "Sorry.  I don't mean to ruin things by talking about him.  This is nice, J."
    J. covered her hand with his.   He could tell by the tense set of her shoulders that something was bothering her. "Say what you gotta say, babe."
    She gave a short, rueful little laugh.  "It's such a small thing when you compare it to all the other shit he put me through.  But the city was the sum total of his world and if I so much as mentioned leaving, he would lose his shit."
    "Where'd you want to go?"
    "Anywhere, really."  A pair of sparrows flitted past, chittering angrily as they landed in a low bush.  "But mostly I just wanted him to stop making me feel bad about where I'm from."
    "You miss your house?"
    She pressed her lips together.  "It's not my house, never was.  And no, not exactly.  Oh god, smack me if I ever say something otherwise.  But it's where I'm from, you know?  What made me who I am.  For better or worse."
    "Then I love the country," J. said, sliding his hand up the back of her shirt to caress the soft skin.
    She smiled and did a little shimmy.  In spite of how much it hurt him to pull back, he did.  She wanted to talk, he realized.  And to his ever-growing surprise, he found that he loved to listen to her.  Conversation had never much interested him before.  Most of the talking he did during the day was shout questions about orders and trade insults with Case.  He learned about his brothers through little dribs and drabs of information.  But with Emmy he was hungry to know everything all at once. 
She hunched forward when he pulled away, resting her head on her knees and hugging herself tightly.  Her pale eyes squinting, she stared into the lowering sun.  The golden light lit her white-blond hair, livening the platinum and honey highlights. 
    She was fucking breathtaking.  He stared at her so hard that he almost missed the next words out of her mouth. 
    "It's not like here," she mused.  "Here it's more open.  The hills are different.  Gentler.  My house is almost in the mountains.  Things are more closed in.  We wouldn't see the sun set like this because it would disappear behind a mountain at three in the afternoon.  All we got was the color.  Like the aftermath." 
    "I didn't see the sun set much