The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,8

the foal that was coming. He never mentioned seeing me in the pasture that day. The swirl of his dark brown hair above his forehead made him appear continually windblown and slightly surprised, qualities that I began to find endearing. He’d never teased me about my hair or my freckles. I found myself thinking of him.

Then one night, he showed up at my back door with a bouquet of cornflowers and lilies, and a little Mason jar of moonshine. The day’s chores were done; there was no work for him to do, so I fed him supper. We drank the moonshine for dessert. I cut mine with cider, but he drank his down manly, grimacing. Outside of family, it was the first time I’d had company for supper on the farm. I felt like a grown woman, entertaining in her own home.

I was fine until he slid his hand over mine as I passed the jar of shine back to him. Once he touched me, it was all over. I lost my virginity that night and so did Cole, the two of us fumbling at each other until we got the job done. I don’t think either of us was very impressed. I had brought myself more satisfactory pleasure alone at night—a pleasure I’d never associated with boys. But the intensity and how badly I had wanted it stunned me. We were suddenly shy and sober afterward, the booze sponged up by our amazement at what we had done.

The next day, I waited for God to strike me down. I thought I would feel bad, but I didn’t. I felt relieved that the first time was over. I was curious to try it again, to get a better look at Cole. The barnyard can take some of the mystery out of the mechanics of the act, but a man is not a hog, a bull, or a stallion, though some do aspire to be one of the three.

A week later, Cole was back at my door. He had flowers again, but no shine, and asked in a shy, sweet whisper if we could try “it” again. There had been no punishment from God, so, being curious about both God and Cole, I said yes.

After that, he would wait until dark fell and cut across the pasture instead of coming up the road. For the first time in my life, I made a conscious decision to sin and continue sinning. I braced myself for God’s retribution. I was careful though, making Cole withdraw. I didn’t want a baby to be the payment for my sin. Cole would have married me. He was that kind of boy, but I didn’t want that either. We were just very young and doing what nature told us to do.

Still, I was doing something I had been warned against all my life. A terrible sin. I continued listening, expecting some punishment from God. But there was none. In that silence, I kept remembering something I’d once heard that contradicted all else I’d heard about sex and sin.

When I was about twelve years old, Grandpa Mac, Momma’s grandfather, came to Sunday dinners at our house. Rail-thin and nearly blind, he sat on the front porch one evening with Momma. He rocked in the cane chair and she shelled peas beside him. I stood just inside the screen door behind them, bored until I realized they were discussing the mother of a boy I knew and a man she snuck around to see. I got very still, wishing Grandpa would stop creaking in the rocker so I wouldn’t miss a word. As if he had heard my wish, he paused. I thought he stopped to listen better to Momma, but he looked off toward the mill and said, “I don’t understand how something that beautiful between a man and a woman could ever be so wrong as people make it out to be.”

To my amazement, Momma nodded, smiled, and kept shelling as if he was discussing the beauty of sunshine, not sin. Grandpa spit off the side of the porch and went back to rocking.

Being quiet around adults, I was often rewarded with gossip or bawdy jokes. But suddenly, I realized that there were other worlds and ways of thinking, secret agreements and understandings among adults.

After I had been with Cole, I thought about what Grandpa had said. “Something that beautiful between a man and a woman” didn’t seem to describe what I did with Cole. But what