Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,83

Twain said, ‘You’ll be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did.’ Or something like that.”

“Are you seriously quoting Mark Twain right now?”

She could hear the teasing in his voice, and it emboldened her. She moved closer to him.

He turned off the flashlight. In complete darkness, he took her hand. Her heart raced like it was going to explode. And then his mouth was on hers, kissing her like he’d never get enough. It was as if a switch had flipped—in Mateo, and within herself.

If anyone had asked Sadie before that moment what made her tick, she would have said, without hesitation, the creativity and intellectual curiosity she’d felt for as long as she could remember. Now, for the first time, her mind was blank. She was all body.

They tumbled to the ground between two rows of grapevines. When her clothes were off, the grass tickled her skin. She turned over, the soil soft under her fingers as she moved on top of him. She wished it weren’t so dark, that she could look down and see that lush mouth she’d been fixated on for weeks, now hers for the taking. But it was the darkness that gave them cover, that allowed them this spontaneity. She couldn’t see, but she could feel.

And she felt turned inside out.

Mateo gently pulled her down beside him, switching their position so her back was now against the grass. As they moved together, his cheek against hers, murmuring things she heard but did not hear, all of her senses muted except for touch. Deep inside, a spark was ignited and she felt like she could burst.

When they were finally still, they lay entwined, looking up at the stars, framed by the vines. She wondered, idly, if they had consummated their feelings among reds or whites. She would check the next day, and when those grapes were turned into wine and bottled, she would know it was “theirs.”

“Your family is going to wonder where you are,” he said quietly, stroking her hair. “What will you tell them?”

She wished she could tell them the truth: like three generations of farmers before her, she had finally gotten her hands down in the dirt.

* * *

Leah and her mother were in no rush to go to bed, even long after Sadie and Bridget had said their goodnights. Back at the house, they lingered in the kitchen.

“We forgot to pick a book for our next meeting,” Vivian said, setting the teakettle on the stove. “Should we ask Sadie and Bridget, or just decide among ourselves?”

“Mom, as much as I’d love to do this again next month, I can’t stay out here indefinitely. And neither can Sadie.”

“Speaking of Sadie: Where do you think she ran off to in the middle of our discussion?”

Leah sat at the marble island in the center of the room and avoided her mother’s eyes. She had a very good idea where Sadie ran off to, but she wasn’t about to share it.

“She went to the bathroom. Maybe she took a phone call. I’m sure she misses her friends.”

It was just as well Sadie had left for a half hour or so. The conversation had turned to Billy the heroine’s second marriage, and Leah couldn’t help but feel that she was pulled into a thinly veiled expression of her own marital woes—not a topic she wanted to explore in front of her daughter.

Reading Judith Krantz, it was tempting to get caught up in the more frothy, salacious elements. They were the parts that had come to define the book over time. And yet the latter chapters of the novel offered a deeper truth. Billy’s marriage turned her from a fantastical heroine to an everywoman. This was where the novel snuck up on Leah, the mindless escapism suddenly turning a mirror toward herself: Who can teach you about the times when the well of love seems to run almost dry and you just have to keep going on faith?

She asked the group, “Why do you think Billy struggled with her marriage to the movie producer?”

“It forced her to change. At the beginning of the book she’s so solitary, and by the end she has her tribe,” Bridget had said.

“But she ultimately concludes that a woman is always alone in the truth of her own marriage,” Vivian said.

Leah looked at her, and their eyes met in a moment of understanding.

Who can teach you about the times when the well of love seems to