Daralyn had first come to live with them, and he could still walk, she never closed a door to give herself privacy. At first, they thought it was a claustrophobia thing. Then Elaine accompanied the sheriff to the now abandoned house to see if Daralyn had any personal items to pack. She discovered only the bedrooms that belonged to her uncle and father had doors. None on the small room with a twin bed that had been Daralyn’s, or the one bathroom. Everything had been done in view of her male relatives. Modesty hadn’t been an option.
So when the younger version of himself had been shuffling out of his room on a Saturday morning, he’d happened by the room Daralyn shared with Les. All that was in his head was the hope the girls hadn’t beaten him to the upstairs bathroom, necessitating a grumbling descent to the one on the first floor. Then he’d glanced left into the open doorway and been brought to a halt.
He was a teenage boy. He had to look. But there were times since he’d wished he could unsee what he’d seen.
Daralyn had been standing in the middle of the floor, changing her shirt. She’d been turned toward the window, her back curled as she found the sleeves with her narrow hands. What came to mind instantly, disturbingly, was the skeleton in his biology class. Every vertebra was visible. Her ribs were painfully prominent. Until then he hadn’t realized the extent of her malnourishment.
He should have, but he’d been an idiot high school kid, caught up in his head. At just over five feet tall, she’d weighed less than ninety pounds when the police took her out of her family home.
She’d filled out now, he reminded himself. Still thin, but not scary thin. Yet he could see it, the image of the past overlaying the present, as she faced away from him, smoothing invisible wrinkles out of the dress. There was nothing deliberately sexy about her pose, yet he couldn’t take his eyes from the wave of her hair on her shoulders, the pull of the panties across one buttock, how the bra strap followed a horizontal line beneath her shoulder blades.
“Turn and face me.”
She did, but he could tell something was unsettling her. He reached out, palm up. She came to him and laid her wrist in it, the way she’d done the other day. When he closed his grip over it, she settled. His surge of reaction, impossible to describe, was the exact right feeling for the moment.
“Bring me that throw pillow on your bed.”
When he released her to do that, he bent and removed his feet from the foot plate, spreading them out to either side of it. She returned, holding the pillow before her midriff, and he nodded to the space between his feet, in front of the plate. “Put the pillow there, and kneel on it, facing me. Put your hands on my thighs.”
Every time he doubted whether this was the right path or not, he’d get a reaction like the one she demonstrated now. The flush climbed higher on her chest and throat, and she moistened her lips, her fingers tightening on the pillow. As she obeyed, he noted something else, equally important. She settled once she was down there, her breathing evening out. He was about to disrupt that some, but they had to go down this path. He knew it.
Her eyes closed as he stroked her hair, threaded his fingers through it, over and over. It was nice just to do that, watch the way she swayed and moved with him. The dark and quiet held them, so when he spoke, his voice was husky. “Put your head on my leg.”
She scooted in and did so with a little sigh, her arm curling around one of his calves. He kept stroking, following the smooth path between her shoulder blades, down to the strap of the bra, and back up again.
“I want to know what was happening the other night. When we stopped.”
She tensed, as he expected. But instead of letting his own guilt about whatever had happened derail him, he sharpened his focus on her reactions. What she was struggling with, yes, there was shame, but it was balanced by those same elements of desire. He saw her knees tighten and would have bet money she was replaying it all in her head. He decided to confirm it.
“How much have you thought about it, Daralyn? What we