Chapter 16

Cal

I rang the doorbell of Jake and Shelly's farmhouse at 5:32, with a big bunch of wildflowers, mostly black-eyed Susans and daisies, in my hand. From what I'd read about Grace, she came from the city, so I wondered whether she'd get snooty about them because she'd grown up in a place where, as far as I could tell from the videos, they had a florist on every corner. When she opened the door, though, looking so pretty it made my heart ache a little, the surprise on her face as she noticed the flowers seemed genuinely happy.

She didn't expect kindness and courtesy, I realized suddenly. The courtship program clearly put so much emphasis on discipline and training that a girl like Grace would have felt certain her suitor wouldn't behave like a gentleman. She had probably expected that I'd barge my way in and tell her to bend over for a paddling, just to make my authority clear.

I couldn't deny that the thought of doing that had a rather remarkable appeal; I felt my cock stir along my thigh as I pictured it. Not really my style, though—at least on a first date.

"Grace?" I said, as if I weren't sure. I planned on telling her at some point about everything I'd seen, and how sure it had made me that I wanted to be the man to court her, but, again, not a first date kind of thing.

She took her lower lip between her teeth in a way so fetching my heart had another of those little pangs. Man, that New Modesty algorithm had something going for it. I'd never imagined I could start falling like this the moment I saw a girl.

"Cal?" she asked. Something about the tentative sound of her voice, saying my name, told me that Jake and Shelly had said nice things about me. I couldn't help smiling.

They ought to. I fixed the carburetor on that tractor practically for free.

I nodded. "Yup."

We stood for a moment just looking at each other. I had an odd moment of hesitation, very strange for me, as I wondered whether she liked what she saw as much as I did. Grace Franklin, whom I'd already had the amazing privilege of seeing naked, of middle height, so she came up pretty much to my collarbone. Green eyes and red hair, and a lovely blush that maybe indicated that, yes, she did think I cleaned up well. Little, frankly delicious-looking breasts and slim hips, well outlined in the old-fashioned green dress, the whole of her silhouetted in the light from the Carpenters' kitchen.

"Grace!" I heard Shelly say from somewhere inside. "Don't make him stand on the doorstep, honey!"

Grace's mouth twisted to the side, and she looked into my eyes with a hesitant expression that seemed to say, You're on my side, right? Please?

"She's not, Shelly," I called past her, not taking my own eyes from her face. "We're just saying hello!"

Grace's tentative look turned into a radiant smile that brought a surge of warmth into my chest.

I held the flowers out.

"For you," I said, despite it being completely obvious. I lowered my voice. "Shelly will like it if you put them right into some water."

Grace

Yet another blush came into my cheeks—a gentler one this time, though. Not like the blazing lava feeling that had come over me when I saw Cal's face, and his flowers, at the same moment.

No one had ever brought me flowers, obviously. The fact that they clearly came from a field—that he had picked them himself, and gathered them into something that looked almost like a professional bouquet… I pretty much couldn't handle it.

I reached out both my hands for them, almost like a little girl about to pray. I kind of felt that way, too—as if I wanted to ask some higher power to make sure I didn't regret the strange, pure happiness I felt at having gotten flowers from an older guy. As I took the stems into my grasp, and Cal let go of them, our fingers brushed against each other, and a little shiver traveled through my whole body as at the same time I noticed that he had just a tiny bit of grease stuck in one of his cuticles.

Time seemed to stop, because the single tiny moment, the microsecond when I shivered and noticed the grease, grew into a sort of meditation. I couldn't tell whether I had shivered because our fingers had touched or because I had noticed the grease—or maybe just because. It made a little wrinkle on my forehead as I thought about it, even though at the same time I knew it didn't matter at all and I should be paying attention to a zillion other things, the first among them being Cal's incredibly handsome, bearded face.

"Damn," he said, pulling my focus back up to that face, framed in tousled, light brown hair that seemed to set off his blue eyes in a way that should have been as illegal as my shoplifting. "I missed a spot, didn't I?"

My lips parted, but no sound came out; too many different things fought to get said. My eyes went down again as Cal spread out his left hand in front of him to inspect the speck of grease.

"You…" I started.

Cal's eyes rose to meet mine, as he put that hand down to his hip and rubbed the nail briskly against the faded denim of his jeans. I watched his face as he studied mine. At first his expression seemed a little guarded, and even stern—as if he wondered whether I would judge him for having the grease on his finger, and he felt perfectly prepared to teach me to respect the hard work he put in every day at his shop. Then he seemed to realize that my own reaction had nothing to do with disrespect, and the side of his mouth quirked up into a smile.

"I'm a mechanic, yeah," he told me, his voice easy.

"Grace!" Jake called, his voice a little menacing.

"Go ahead," Cal told me. "Put the flowers in some water."

The thing that struck me hardest about the way he gave me this instruction was that he didn't seem to consider that I might want to do something else—something other than what he thought I should do. He had issued his command in the obvious knowledge that he knew precisely the right thing for me to do, and any different idea I might have would be simply foolish in comparison.

It brought a new wave of heat to my cheeks, and a new crease to my brow. I nodded quickly and turned away with the flowers, suddenly wanting Cal not to see how easily he could bring that flaming red embarrassment to my pale complexion.

Shelly and Jake were sitting at the kitchen table shucking peas. Terribly conscious of Cal's eyes on my back—it seemed like I could hear each of his footfalls on the farmhouse's old floorboards—I walked to the table with the flowers out before me, in both hands until I realized I must look like a bridesmaid, or a bride. I hastily dropped one hand.

"Look at those!" Shelly said.

"Aw, you shouldn't have, Cal," Jake said in an easy, joking sort of voice I hadn't heard him use before. "But you know I love wildflowers."

"Jake!" Shelly said, reaching across the table to give him a little jostle on the shoulder. "Don't make fun."

Time stood still for the second time in about a minute. Something about the scene—a girl, her foster parents, her handsome, older suitor—evoked a new conflict inside me. Part of me yearned for it just to go on like this, so that I could forget all about the shitty life I had thought I would have, in the city, scrapping and scrabbling for anything worth having. Another part screamed that I needed to run far, far away—that any rational, modern young woman would already have found a way to escape into the cornfield and make her way back to civilization.

They're pretending to be normal, I told myself furiously. But that doesn't change the fact that Jake whipped you and Shelly dressed you this way. It doesn't change the fact that they fucked in front of you, and made you watch.

I turned around to look over my shoulder at Cal, suddenly wondering what he would think if I told him about what had happened last night. Maybe he would help me escape. Maybe he would escape with me. Little bursts of fantasy seemed to be exploding every which way in my head.

Cal had stopped about two feet behind me—near enough that I felt he was close but not so near that I felt threatened. My suitor was definitely there, though, behind me. Solid, and so big: bigger than Jake, even, I realized. The easy smile on his face made the breath catch in my throat.

I turned back to Shelly, and I felt myself give in to it—to the scene, the idea—while at the same time the other, defiant part of me yelled that I hadn't seen the last of it.

"Ma'am?" I started, making sure I got that out of the way first and didn't forget it. "Is there a vase I could put them in?"

"Sure, honey," Shelly said. "You can get a jar from the cabinet next to the fridge."

I went to the cabinet, feeling the warmth come and go in my cheeks seemingly with every step. I felt lightheaded and disoriented, as if instead of meeting the older man the New Modesty Authority had seen fit to make me date, I'd just stepped off a roller coaster. What felt like a billion conflicting impulses seethed in my mind and my body, and as I opened the cabinet and stared at the three empty mason jars there on the bottom shelf, the feeling of detachment and observation took hold of me again.

The simple idea of Cal Perkins—a gorgeous, mature man with a steady job and a neatly trimmed light brown beard—seemed to send me off into outer space. Not because of anything I would have called romantic, if someone had asked. Not according to my idea of romance, anyway… or maybe, really, the idea of romance I had had yesterday, up until about five o'clock in the evening, when I had arrived at Jake and Shelly's farmhouse.

No, Cal… the big, strong man standing behind me, who had started exchanging pleasantries and light gossip about the citizens of Grasskiln with the Carpenters… my date, who had the right, if he chose, to… to correct me… who had brought me the wildflowers in my hand that belonged in one of the jars in the cabinet… he seemed to represent all of it, all the mortifying, helplessly arousing, crazy-seeming things about the life it seemed I had no choice but to lead in this little town.

"Grace?" I heard Jake say, his impatient tone indicating that it must be the second or third time he had called my name. A shudder went through my body as I came back to myself from the reverie of detachment and I became aware of the flowers in my right hand as my left reached into the cabinet, my fingers on the rim of a jar where they had apparently been for longer than I realized.

I turned my head over my shoulder.

"Yes, sir?"

The words came automatically, and when I heard my voice say them, as if it were completely natural for me to call the man in charge of me sir, it only added to the unreality of the scene for me.

"What are you getting up to over there? Get a move on."

Fire blazed up in my face. It got much worse a second later.

"She's a little forgetful, seems like," Jake told Cal, "and a bit sassy. Nothing a few good lickings won't cure."