Joe pushed his plate back. "Well, if Nat and Twila hadn't kept those girls on such a short leash, they wouldn't have reached the end of it so soon."
"There's that," Dennis admitted.
"Anyway, Grandma and I went back to my place and Eden got dressed. Right after she put her glasses on, she discovered that my refrigerator contained three slices of dried up pepperoni pizza and two cans of beer. She and Grandma took the car keys, extracted some more of my cash, and headed off to Stevenson's Supermarket. And that was when my life really started to change." Harlan grinned. "What with Twila being a home ec teacher and all, Eden had some really distinct views on what it was good for a person to eat. Most of them involving broccoli or fiber—or both. You win some, you lose some." He looked at his wife again. "Overall, though, having Eden move in was a winner."
"You'd better believe it," she answered.
"If you were living together anyway, why did you get married?" Noelle asked.
"We weren't just living together," Eden protested. "We were engaged. I wore the ring and all. Why did we decide to get married? The day we decided to—not the day we actually got married, because it took us a couple of weeks to pull things together and make sure Joe and Aura Lee could take time off from work to be our witnesses—was a little personal anniversary that we celebrated. Not when I moved in with him. That was in June. This was from November, a year and a half before that. When we started dating, Harlan kept taking me places that weren't exactly private."
"Harlan," Eden's husband said of himself, "had a pretty clear idea of how Nat and Twila would react if he deflowered their tenderly cherished virgin daughter. The age of consent might technically be sixteen, which she already was, but given that they weren't likely to see it that way, good old Harlan believed in playing it safe and waiting until the girl was altogether of age and at her own disposal. There were still a couple of years during which Nat Davis could have made dramatic paternal gestures and said things like, 'Never darken the door of our home again, you villain.' "
Eden picked up the story. "So there we were, up in the state park. There was a nature trail, about seven miles or so, and we picked that. It was a nice Sunday afternoon, sunny, not too cold, but not many people were out. Some, mostly families, but it wasn't crowded. We were about halfway along it, talking and holding hands. I kept feeling odder and odder. Finally I stopped. Harlan looked at me and I said, 'I feel really weird.' "
"So I looked at her closely and thought, 'Gee, thank you, Mother Nature. Not only do we have to deal with me wanting to have sex with Eden, now we've got to deal with Eden wanting to have sex with me. Not romantic feelings; plain old physical ones. And she doesn't even know what's bothering her. Time for a little instruction.' So I tugged her off the trail a few feet, backed up against a tree to have a little support, pulled her up against me, and started to kiss her the way I wanted to rather than the way I thought I ought to limit myself to."
"By the time we'd been leaning against the tree a while, kissing like that, with Harlan holding my hips against his, I figured out what the problem was. Which was a considerable relief. I had been starting to wonder if I was getting the flu or something, and I had tests in geometry and world history coming up on Monday."
"Flu?" Aura Lee asked.
"Well," Eden protested a little defensively, "It had been making me feel that wobbly. The health class at school told us something about the mechanics of it all but didn't say a word about the way a person feels while it is going on. At church they just warned us about places like the back seats of cars and the quarry. And the evils of dancing. They sure never said you could start feeling like that while you were hiking along a trail, wearing a down vest and boots, and listening to a guy tell you about improved standards and techniques for air quality measurement."
"About what?" Dennis sounded distinctly startled. "Harlan, you didn't! What a courtship!"
"Well, we had to talk about something. Other than the impact her bosom had on my testosterone, that is." Harlan put his arm around Eden's shoulders. "I was trying to minimize that train of thought about then. And it wasn't exactly courtship. That's when the male bird struts around displaying his plumage and the female tries to decide if she wants him. We had a done deal by that point. We were just working on procedures and implementation."
"It was interesting." The tone of Eden's voice was fiercely protective. "All the stuff Harlan told me about it was one of the reasons that I decided on lab technology when I went to choose a post-secondary course later on."