| |
The next weekend, Brad took Jemima out on another date to a county fair, and did all the things that a guy was supposed to do when he took his girl out to the fair: bought her cotton candy, won a stuffed animal to give her, and took her through the Tunnel of Love as often as she as willing to go.
Jemima screamed with laughter on the whirling teacups, had clung to him like a frightened kitten in the Fun House, and had gasped and whispered sweet things in his ear in the Tunnel of Love.
He’d given her the little vial of perfume, and she’d made all kinds of fuss over it, and then over him, and they had to move to a hidden spot, and had stayed there for a few delightful minutes.
A curling tendril of hair had escaped from under her cap, and he brushed it back, and asked her: “Having a good time, Duchess?”
She beamed at him. “Oh, Brad, the best time of my life!”
“We could do this sort of thing all the time, you know,” he said casually – and waited. He didn’t want to push his lady-love too much, or too soon. But to his dismay, she seemed not to take the hint.
Or what was more likely – she was being polite.
He smothered a sigh, and then smiled at her. “Ready for the House of Doom?”
“Oh, Brad,” she whispered, and looked up at him with such serious dread that all his frustration vanished. He laughed, and kissed her, and promised: “Don’t worry, I won’t let anything get you.”
And so he had saved her from the evil scarecrow and the clown with the maniacal laugh, and had smiled when she’d thrown her arms around him and buried her face in his shirt.
“Why do people even come to these awful haunted houses?” she’d wept, and he’d tightened his arms around her, and kissed away her tears, and forbore to point out the obvious.
The next week, he finally talked her into attending a movie with him, but she had made him promise not to take her to something that involved people getting hurt, or stealing, or basically breaking any of the commandments. He had ended up taking her to a children’s movie about a lost dog, and she had loved it.
After the movie, when he had driven to a pretty, moonlit spot and they were sitting together in his truck, he’d asked her to take her hair down again, and she had pulled out the pins that held it. That glorious, coppery hair had tumbled down like a waterfall, and he had taken it between his fingers, held it up to his mouth and inhaled its fragrance.
“I love your hair this way,” he told her. “I wish you’d wear your hair like this all the time, Duchess. You could, you know,” he added, and stared at her meaningfully.
Then he had presented her with the fluffy pink barrettes, and had begged to put them in her hair. She had blushed, and looked at her hands, and finally said yes; so he had slowly and reverently placed them in her silky hair.
They had been even prettier than he’d imagined, and he couldn’t help wondering what Jemima would look like, if she dressed like any other woman. She’d be breathtaking – but a part of him was almost glad that she didn’t.
He had enough competition already.
He raised his hand to caress her cheek, and she turned to him suddenly. She looked into his eyes so intently that he thrilled with the hope that she was going to throw herself into his arms. But instead, she knocked him completely off balance by asking the most unromantic and off-topic question he could imagine.
“Brad, did you—did you ever have time to – read the books and the magazine I loaned you?”
He raised his brows, sputtered a little and was glad that he’d taken the time, because he was able to say that he had.
She got shy suddenly, and looked down at her hands. “What did you think of them?” she asked.
He’d hesitated over his answer. He reminded himself that this was a very big deal for Jemima, and that it was important to be politic.
“Well, I think I got my head around the big picture,” he told her cautiously. “I think I understand the main points of what you believe. And a lot of it is – is admirable. Really, I don’t have a problem with most of it, because it’s mainly the Golden Rule, and minding your own business, and working hard, and – all that kind of thing.”
He stopped, and rubbed the back of his neck, and cast about in his mind for a way to change the subject. Religion always made him uncomfortable.
He looked over at Jemima, to see how his answer had gone down with her. She was still looking at her hands.
“I’m glad that you took the time to read them,” she said at last, in a small voice. ‘That was very sweet of you, Brad. I know you think – differently.”
She looked at him just then, with something almost like hero worship in those big eyes, and he allowed himself to bask in the glow of her admiration – just a little.
He shrugged. “I try to keep an open mind,” he told her nonchalantly. “It’s part of my training as a reporter.”
The part of his brain that policed idiocy struck him smartly upside the head. He caught himself and winced, imagining what Delores would’ve made him suffer, if she’d caught him preening about his “training as a reporter.”
But of course, Jemima knew no different. She beamed at him.
“Oh, Brad, it really is so good of you to – to see our side,” she told him warmly, taking his hand. “Most people on the outside don’t even try,” she added sadly. “They just laugh, and make fun of us, or, or seem to be fascinated, which is almost as bad. They ride by our house sometimes on tour buses and point at us, as if we’re some kind of exhibit in a museum.”
Her eyes looked unbearably forlorn, and he leaned over and kissed the sad look away and stroked the softness of her hair.
“Not cool,” he told her sympathetically. “So not cool.”
“I really appreciate that you try, Brad,” she sighed, pillowing on his chest. “That at least you take the time to try to understand why we’re different. It means a lot to me.”
“Anything to oblige,” he murmured, and caressed a silky skein of that amazing hair.
“I mean it,” she answered, and turned to look at him. She held his face in her hands and looked into his eyes. Her expression was serious.
“I pray for you every day, Brad,” she whispered. “I pray a long time. I pray that one day, you really will understand. That you’ll know God for yourself.”
He sighed, and looked down at her. It was adorably sweet, and it melted his heart; and it simultaneously made him intensely uncomfortable. So he’d stopped Jemima’s mouth with a kiss.
That sweet, silky mouth had made all the words slide away, made them the only two people in the world, made his hands itch to wander, but he forced himself to exercise restraint. That part had always been hard, and now it was approaching torture, but something else, something stronger, held him back.
Love, yes – but more than love. The dawning suspicion that the delight of discovery was keenest, most intense, when it was achingly gradual.
He was falling in love with Jemima by delicious inches, a little more every time they were together. He felt privileged to witness her delight as she turned her face to the world for the first time – like a flower opening up to the sunlight. She was blooming into womanhood before his eyes, like a young rose.
Brad looked down at her as their lips parted. She beamed up at him, laughing, her beautiful eyes alight.
He wanted to be the one to carry her through that last door. It would be a supremely tender moment, and even in imagination, it was precious to him. He’d planned it a hundred times, but had always turned away.
Because he was coming more and more to the conclusion that he wanted to marry Jemima. And for once in his life, he wanted to be unselfish.
He wanted to give Jemima what she had imagined.
