“That’s okay honey,” she said. “You’ll meet someone your type in college.”
Emma, of course, had never been on a date – any date, of any kind.
Holding hands with grown men during congregational prayers sessions was her closest encounter with the opposite sex. She had pictured herself on a date with Michael when she daydreamed about going to prom, but she did not know him at all beyond the fuzzy image she recalled from a few chance meetings in town that had ended without words.
They had never spoken, and all she really knew about he or his family is what her father said – that they were heathens and hippies, two things her father loathed incidentally.
After Michael had arrived for work that first day at the Denton Farm, which anchored the opposite side of the blacktop highway from the parsonage, he and Emma had the perfect alignments for gazing at one another, considering the parsonage grounds were directly across from the farm’s barn and tool shed where Michael spent most of his time.
While Emma worked in the garden and flowerbeds and hung laundry daily on outside lines, Michael had an old farm to get back into shape as part of his I’ll-do-the-work-and-we’ll-share-any-profits setup he made with Mrs. Denton, a widow.
Nobody had worked at the farm in years since Mr. Denton died. The entire farm was less than 200 acres -- not big enough for a commercial farmer to fool with but enough to squeeze some income from. Hay and garden produce would deliver the most return, Michael figured, since the farm and its assets were in need of repair.
The big water well behind the barn was tainted, the tractor was aged, and started with more than a few huffs and puffs, and the plow was rusting. But the soil was fertile and Michael figured all it needed was some sweat equity. Anyway, he needed a summer job an was able to talk Mrs. Denton into letting him plant some fields and cut and bail some hay, splitting the profits with her in turn for her letting him use the land and tools to get it all done.
His first few days on the job, Michael and Emma pretended like they weren’t gazing at each other at all. If she looked up at him, and he was looking at her, she pretended her glance was accidental, continuing to move her eyes moving to another point away from him.
But when Michael looked at her Emma tingled head-to-toe like she had just stepped into a fresh-drawn warm bath with lavender bubbles. And when she thought of him at night, her thing it barely lasted at all.
Emma imagined Michael kissing her and she couldn't help moments later but to thrust her hips up from the bed toward what she imagined was his body as orgasm rippled throughout her body.
By day, at first, at least, he too looked away if Emma’s eyes caught his staring at her. But by the fourth day, their look-away game had worn off, and Emma and Michael had come to a meeting of the eyes, a sort of understanding through the dilated, distant language that they both wanted to stare and have the other do so in return and do so without apology.
So they did, passing glances that grew deeper and longer with every passing moment of the day. Emma watched Michael, and Michael watched Emma. They grew so close she thought she could smell his musk, and he thought he could smell her honeysuckle breath.
She watched him pitch hay from a wagon to the ground, and from the ground to a shelf within the barn. He watched her bend over to fill a bucket from the water well, and pour the bucket of water over flowerbeds.
She watched him wipe sweat from his brow, and she wanted to reach out her tongue to taste it.
He watched her lift the hem of her dress just above her knees to walk through tall grass, and he wanted to reach out his lips to touch her legs, licking his way up to her crotch.
She breathed heavily when he rode by shirtless upon the saddle of the green John Deere tractor that purred along the roadside like an old cat.
He breathed heavily when she curled her left arm just below her chest and filled it with produce picked from the garden.
By the end of his first week on the job, when Michael could no longer take watching Emma glide across the parsonage grounds in her cotton pastels without approach, he had started walking toward the blacktop road that separated them, in a direct line toward her, as she stood on the parsonage grounds measuring his progress.
Emma watched his each and every step without glancing away, not even for one blink.
She saw Michael hop the barbed-wire fence that buffered the Denton farm from the road. She watched him cross the road. She watching him walking to her with his eyes fixated firmly upon her.
Eventually, he was standing before her.
“You are blushing,” Michael said to Emma, standing at her side.
“Am I now?” she had said, the redness in her cheeks deepening, her button tucked away between her legs throbbing.