Steve did not move from the old bench between 6:45 when he got there and 8:45 when Cecilia unexpectedly appeared next to him. She had been unable to finish her allotted time on the organ in spite of the fact that the good people of Meadowville were paying for it. So, feeling uncommonly spritely, she had sneaked out the back door of the music hall and crept up behind the old bench fifteen minutes early to surprise Steve. But when she took stock of his unwary innocence she couldn’t bring herself to startle him too brutally, so she simply stepped out of nowhere beside him. That was startling enough! Poor Steve jerked around like a released slingshot and looked up into her teasing eyes in pure astonishment. She just stood there twinkling back at him, unencumbered by music books and luscious enough to eat. He bounced off the bench and, catching her capricious spirit, declared, “No fair! That’s guerrilla warfare!”
“All’s fair…,” she began, grinning back at him. Then she sucked in her cheeks a little and wavered back and forth with her hands behind her back, looking very elfin.
“As you say,” declared Steve with conviction, catching one of her hands in his and holding it lightly. Then he gently but firmly turned her around and started her walking down the lane. She responded happily to this good-natured display of pseudo-authoritarianism: it exactly suited her mood. They looked at each other and melted together under their little joke.
As they strolled down the path in the quiet of the cool night, an impregnable assurance of the rightness of it all bound them together. It was so much what should be, so divinely appointed, so very good. Although it was totally new to them both, totally unlike anything they had tumbled into until now, it felt to them as if they had been created for this from the beginning, as if they had never been strangers. It felt as if they had known each other for always and needed only the right occasion to solemnify what already was. Up and down the campus outskirts they strolled like partners in a dance, paying no attention to where they were going. Steve led, without realizing it, and she followed, trusting Steve to lead her well.
After some time they stopped on a seldom-used set of stairs leading down the hill toward a building that had burned down some years before. Around and beneath them spread the rolling countryside, just bright enough under the first quarter of the moon to resemble a vast snapshot negative and just dark enough to preserve the mystic envelopment of night. Their eyes wandered over the panorama. A light breeze fanned their cheeks. Their thoughts zeroed in on the same target, and they knew it without saying a word.
The minutes passed and strangely enough Cecilia began to sense in Steve a kind of withdrawal from the warm circumference of their little circle. She was just beginning to worry about this when Steve haltingly opened his mouth and said:
“I will never understand why you … you…,”—Steve hesitated—” I will never understand why you would take a second look at a frog like me.”
Her hand squeezed his. The silence of the next few moments cut off his breath entirely. Her hand held onto his so tightly that it almost hurt. Poor Cecilia had no idea what to say. How could Steve even think such a thing? Her heart was pounding, her breast rose and fell. There was only one answer that came to her at that most tender moment. Turning squarely towards him, the dim moonlight revealing the plea in her eyes, she raised her arms and entwined them behind his neck. He clasped her around the waist and drew her bosom into his chest. There was a moment of stillness, and then their lips met in a long and warm and moist kiss that effectively sealed their destiny. They would be together forever.
After the kiss she rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. He entwined his head and neck around hers and held her there while love washed over them both in its purest and rarest form.
From that moment on, it was evident to all that Stephan Pearson and Cecilia Endsrud were destined to become husband and wife.
*****
I will admit that at the time I wondered how all of this could have happened so quickly. Of course, I knew nothing then of Steve’s odyssey which had left him so helplessly ready to respond to Cecilia and to love her. But Cecilia? I think we can thank Tom in part for setting her up for her rapid and wholehearted response to the new Steve, the Steve who had already begun to emerge from his wilderness encounters of the previous summer a changed man even before he laid eyes on her.
I cannot claim full accuracy in my account of the reasons why they bonded so quickly, but I can confidently claim it in reporting the fact that they did.
And I know, because she told me, that Cecilia was quick to recognize and strongly affirm Steve’s latent genius. She also found in him an exceptional sensitivity and kindness without realizing that she herself was the source of it.