He had touched the tip of her chin with the outstretched fingers of his right hand, lifting it upward, to his gaze.
"Yes," he said. "You are blushing."
She had smiled.
“I know,” Emma said.
Emma nodded toward the house, three-quarters of a football field away.
“He’s home,” she said, referring to her father. “He’ll get me if he sees you. He might get you too. I’m sorry. It’s just…he thinks you are a hippie and a heathen.”
“And he doesn’t like you around boys,” Michael said. “I get it.”
“Walk with me,” said Michael, nodding toward the back of the parsonage grounds where a cluster of pecan trees gathered.
“No,” Emma said.
“He’ll find out.
“I have a better idea.
“Meet me at Mr. Denton’s barn on Sunday night. About eight o’clock. He won’t know.”
Michael’s smile widened.
"What will we do?" he asked.
"Whatever you want," Emma said.
He moved his hand to bottom of her left cheek, brushing it softly with the backside of his fingers. He looked into her glistening eyes.
“Until then,” Michael said.
“Until then,” whispered Emma.
Michael turned and slowly walked away.
Emma watched his Wranglers wiggle as he stepped, and she rubbed her cheek with the tips of the fingers from her right hand, watching the stitching on the pockets of his jeans fade away with each step until she could no longer make out the detail. She poured the water from her pale onto the ground, turned and trotted to the house, reciting in her mind with breathy anticipation the line that had lingered -- until then.
Yes, Emma sighed. Until then.
3.
Emma Wants a Bite
The hungriest of hearts wants only full and complete nourishment for satisfaction. Nothing else will do.
For Emmaline Margaret Mays such reality spelled a problem, since, by the time she had told her father she felt bad that Sunday night just as the snake handling was about to begin and that she was going home from the service early, her heart was running in complete starvation mode.
She wanted to swallow up Michael Mooney in one big bite.
Gulp, just like that.
It’s all she thought about for every moment of every day since they had parted upon the promise -- until then. She wondered if the bulge in Michael's jeans was a big as it looked. She what it might feel like if she wrapped her hands around it. She wondered what it might feel like if he rammed it inside her.
On the Saturday night the day before they were to meet Emma had wondered what it might be look to wrap her legs around Michael. She had taken her pillow when the house had grown quiet at night, turned it longways, hiked up her gown, and wrapped her legs around it. Emma had humped her panties-clad crotch against the pillow, pretending to kiss the air she imagined was Michael's face as she worked her body against it, exploding into orgasm after just four or five pumps.
She had lost count.
Her pillow had become so wet when she came that Emma couldn't sleep on that side. She had turned it over, bedside down, when she went to sleep, drifting to the scent of her hopeful come.
On the Sunday afternoon before the evening church service on the night they had promised to meet, Emma had sat under an oak tree on the back of the parsonage grounds that cast a cooling shadow 15 times as long as her outstretched legs.
Lounging in the shade, while picking up acorns from the ground and tossing acorns to her left, she had imagined what Michael’s skin might feel like against hers.
Emma had dropped open her mouth repeatedly at varying degrees of openness in practice of the kiss she so longed for. She had flexed her right bicep and clutched it with her left hand, imaging she was gripping Michael’s arm.
In her room later that day, Emma had picked her newest dress off a hanger in the closet, a bright blue one she and her mother made just weeks before, and pulled from the top dresser drawer undergarments she had washed and folded the day before.
Emma had pressed them to her nose, and inhaled, smelling the early summer sunshine and lazy afternoon breeze they had absorbed from hanging outside on the laundry line. She exhaled and smiled, ever so slightly, without breaking her lips.
Instead of walking to the evening church service as usual, since her parents went early so her father could prepare the building and his notes ahead of time, Emma went early and rode with them to the sanctuary, taking a seat in the back of the family Taurus.
The afternoon sun was still strong enough that she did not want to sweat on the long walk and wrinkle her fresh wardrobe. In the backseat, she cracked her window every-so-slightly since the air was hot and leaned against it for the breeze.
Until then, she had thought.