Lightning That Lingers by Sharon Curtis, Tom Curtis

Why, why, why?
    In one short sweep of words he had laid bare her lame rebuffs, with their curious residual touches of adolescent hysteria. And it brought her an unlooked for, painful relief, like sharp fresh air washed into a stale passage. And now, making no move to touch her, he watched her face in perfect silence with a patience that seemed as limitless as it was without effort.
    The hot-cold pump of embarrassment beat through her. Tears formed, and yet a feathery peace had settled within. When the indelicate tears had been subdued and she was sure that her voice was going to do what she wanted, she said, “I panic around men.”
    “Tell me.” The voice, the patience were a soft invitation.
    “I … I have to know. Did you come for me tonight for revenge?”
    “For telling me you were allergic to penicillin? Not at all. I don’t have that kind of energy. Why do you panic around men?”
    “I don’t know. I’m just not …” She grappled briefly for a word, “debonair.”
    His smile, a startled slash of delight, consumed the word before he began to laugh, an alluring sound, winsome and melodic, kindling to her senses. “I’ll admit debonair isn’t the adjective that comes most readily to mind. But thank God. Beingthat well-protected is like living on the cutting edge of a scythe. You can never let anyone too close. I’ve been like that too much of my life. Tell me, why isn’t Jennifer debonair?”
    Purling breezes stirred the corn stalks. Crisp blackness held up the stars in broken chains. The night gave the quiet between them the intimacy of a confessional and she folded her hands on the dash and dunked her chin on them, gazing at the bright moon. Tell me, the voice had softly beckoned.
    “It’s a little hard to say. I didn’t grow up with a father and my mother blames that for everything. But I’m not sure.… It might be because I never wanted to grow up, you know? When my friends started getting interested in makeup and clothes and … and other things, I just kept thinking: It’s happening too fast! It’s happening too fast! And puberty—” she gave a low disdainful whistle—“puberty was disgusting. I thought it was going to kill me. These crazy things happening to your body and who asked for any of it?” Dear God, I can’t believe I just said that. Am I drunk? Falling apart? In suspended animation? Is he a hypnotist?
    “I understand that,” he said. “A happy childhood, the warm cocoon that splits open slowly and there you are in a world you never expected. Famine. Aging. Competition. Sex. And you think, what am I doing here? I thought this place was going to be safe. You go to sleep in Kansas and wake up in Oz. I don’t know if it’s any consolation, but as puberties go, yours looks like it was a smashing success.”
    “Thank you.” She blushed slightly. “No one’s ever admired my puberty before.”
    “They have. Trust me.” A pause. Then, gently, “Jennifer? Why don’t you like to be touched?”
    She felt an echo of buried pain and the sudden stomach-tightening awareness of him as a man. He was sweetly, tinglingly close, a motion away, and she squeezed her eyelids tightly shut, feeling the heavy pinprick sensations that anticipated his touch. She lied. “There isn’t a reason. It just makes me uncomfortable.”
    Through the back of her thighs, she felt his shifting weight on the car seat and then the light presence of his arm, slowly stroking on her back.
    “Does this make you uncomfortable?” he asked, a soft inflection in his voice.
    “Yes.” The word barely escaped her dry mouth.
    She felt the warm sliding pressure of his flesh as his hand followed the outline of her chin and then raised it gently.
    “And this?” he whispered against her mouth as his lips found hers with the lightness of drifting shadow.
    “Yes,” she breathed as he laid her back against the seat and slid one hand underneath the high knit collar to lay a sensuous massage into the curve of