This Given Sky

This Given Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: This Given Sky Read Online Free PDF
Author: James Grady
three steps of the concrete front porch, knocked on the dark wood slab door. Knocked again. Raised his fist . . .
    She opened the door, gravity tumbling him into her blue eyes.
    Thel struggled to find only one smile. Long hair floated on her sweatshirt. Faded jeans sheathed her legs down to bare feet.
    “You’re home,” said Thel.
    “If you say so.”
    Her face of tears pressed against his shirt. His palms and fingers flowed up the silk of her back under the sweatshirt, her hair like water to his touch as he cupped her skull and she raised her hungry mouth to his. He never forgot her burning lips, swollen nipples and salty wetness, their triumph over years of waiting on that living room floor.
    Jake woke in his childhood bed before dawn. Showered and shaved. Told his breakfasting parents that he was going for a drive but not where, west of town around a curve of low hills that hid from all of Shelby where he parked in a cluster of deserted Quonset huts to share kisses and coffee Thel brought in her old car on her way to work.
    Because of his family necessity for dinner precisely at six, by seven-thirty he’d checked into a lonesome roadside motel seventeen miles east of town near grain elevators and across the two-lane highway from the roadhouse that sold beer to Shelby’s teenagers for three generations. He parked behind the motel. Hid outside along its west wall, eyes on the highway, his back toward the railroad tracks and the windswept prairie rolling to Canada. Spotted Thel driving toward him, waved her around back where she parked beside his car to stay as the stars shone down on Montana, then slip away before dawn.
    “We can’t use that house,” she told him as they lay naked on the motel’s lumpy bed. Moonlight poured through the smudged window.
    “I know. I don’t want to . . .”
    “To hurt him. Neither of us does.”
    “Ever.”
    She pressed her forehead against the ribs over his heart.
    Whispered: “We’re more than this.”
    “Yes,” he said.
    They talked about what they’d never said in all the before days, found a way to tell stories about Steve without flinching, laughed and teased each other, made love every way that came to them and were careful never to drive Shelby’s streets together. They avoided streets where the city crew was working. Went to none of Shelby’s bars or cafés. Saturday, they parked her car thirty-two miles south of Shelby in the even more disappearing town of Conrad, then drove his car the rest of the fifty-five miles to big city Great Falls. They went to dinner in a restaurant, to a movie in a mall where a future Republican governor of California starred as a cyborg sent from a different future to save mankind, browsed through a just-opened giant franchised book and music store, wondered whether they’d need to buy one of the new machines that played things called compact discs. Do you know we’re talking about more than technology? wondered Thel. She didn’t ask. They spent an entire night together, got back to Shelby after moonrise Sunday.
    Wednesday, Thel “took a late lunch.” Jake’s parents were at work. The garage beside his house waited empty for her car. She came in through his back door. In less than a hundred heartbeats, they were in “his” bedroom laughing and pulling off each other’s clothes, her looming above him while he lay on his back in his boyhood bed of dreams.
    Afterward, she’d dressed while Jake restored his bedroom to its squared-away condition so as not to leave visual evidence disturbing the continuum of his parents’ construction. Thel picked up her red sweater from his parents’ living room floor. Saw a stack of mail on a lamp table. Spotted an unfolded letter boasting the logo of an airline that flew to Rome and Hong Kong and, best of all, Paris. The red sweater crinkled as Thel pulled it over her long brown hair. That’s not a form letter . Her shoes were in his bedroom. Oh, my God, we did it in his bed in his parents’
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