Since becoming interested in boys in the seventh grade, she’d been crazy wild in love with him. Yet for three and a half years, he hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction. It had made her ache to watch him drape a possessive arm around some undeserving girl’s shoulders, oblivious to the way that same girl mocked his eccentric grandmother and combat-traumatized uncle behind his back and flirted with other boys when he wasn’t available.
Then, one gray December afternoon, he’d literally bumped into Cate, almost knocking her off her feet on the salt-pocked but still-slippery sidewalk outside her father’s hardware store. The temperature had been twenty-three degrees and plummeting, her cheeks apple-red with cold, her naturally curly brown hair thickly encrusted with snowflakes.
When he’d offered to buy her a hot chocolate at Rudy’s, she’d accepted. From that moment on, they’d been inseparable, despite her parents’ strong disapproval of him. “The Finns are trash,” her father had raged when he’d found out that they were dating. Danny had been in trouble with the law. His family was eccentric. He wasn’t worthy of her.
Though she couldn’t deny Danny had been fined for underage drinking on one occasion and received several speeding tickets during his junior year, Cate had argued that the infringements were minor ones. He’d settled down since then. As a senior, he’d earned good grades, worked hard at a variety of after-school jobs and stayed out of trouble.
Nothing she’d said had changed Jack McDonough’s opinion of him. When her parents had ordered her not to see him again, she’d pretended to go along with their wishes while stubbornly following her heart.
Her best friend, Brenda Hale, who “lacked supervision” according to Cate’s mother, had covered for Cate whenever she and Danny could arrange to be together. Remaining a good girl in the sense that she was still a virgin, Cate had flirted on numerous occasions with going all the way. Each time, she’d pulled back from the brink, denying herself and Danny the intimacy they craved.
Now he was a man—nineteen going on twenty, lean and dark-haired, with the kind of smile that could melt all but the hardest of hearts, and eyes the deep-blue color of bachelor buttons. Not even Cate’s father could call him a slacker. Since graduating, he’d worked full-time, pumping gas and repairing cars at Miller’s Garage. In his off hours, he continued to make himself available for the kind of manual labor that was usually reserved for young teenagers, mowing lawns and shoveling snow, chopping and hauling firewood.
Though they’d never discussed the reason for his industry in so many words, Cate knew Danny was trying to amass enough money to bankroll their independence. Secure in his love, she’d become a woman. Or almost. She would graduate from high school seven months hence and turn eighteen a week later. Employed part-time in the hardware store by her father since she was in the eighth grade, she’d managed to save a modest nest egg of her own, in the process acquiring retail skills that would come in handy when she worked her way through college.
For most of her life, it seemed, she’d wanted to be an English teacher. Unable to count on her parents’ financial help if she married Danny, and unwilling to let him pay the freight for both of them while she continued her education, she was determined to come up with her own tuition money and contribute to their living expenses.
The previous week he’d formally asked her to be his wife. And she’d said yes. They’d agreed to leave Beckwith, the small town surrounded by farms where they’d both grown up, on her eighteenth birthday—head for Cincinnati or some other big city where she could attend college and he could find better paying employment. With the commitment, there didn’t seem to be any reason to postpone expressing their love.
At Cate’s suggestion, their first lovemaking would take place on Serpent Mound, a grassy, undulating, ceremonial earthwork that had been built on the crest of a bluff overlooking Brush Creek by a little-known Indian tribe nearly a thousand years earlier. Familiar with it since childhood, thanks to a series of school field trips and lectures about the indigenous residents of Adams County, she’d always considered the scenic promontory, crowned by the effigy of a partially uncoiled snake about to swallow a frog’s egg, to be a holy place.
Serene, enigmatic, a point of contact with the distant past, the mound wasn’t a burial site; archaeologists had long since determined otherwise. Aware the serpent’s head was aligned with the setting sun on the evening of the summer solstice, they’d speculated it had been built as a kind of earthwork calendar to keep track of the planting cycle. Or as a site for religious ceremonies.
Releasing her, he helped her up a steep, thickly wooded slope that offered a secluded, if somewhat more difficult to negotiate, approach to their destination. They caught sight of the park’s metal observation tower first. A moment later the mound itself came into view. Moonlight washed its verdant twists and coils like milk. The aroma of freshly mowed grass assailed their nostrils.
Lightly Danny rested his cheek against Cate’s hair. “Any special spot you’d prefer?’ he asked.
“Up by the serpent’s head,” she answered without hesitation, having pictured making love to him there a thousand times. “The depression in the middle of the egg can shelter us.”
It was his favorite spot, too—the most spiritually charged and welcoming, in his opinion. Thanks to the curve of the serpent’s body, it was also one of the most difficult to see from the gate.
“Suits me, darlin’,” he whispered.
If somebody caught them, it would be all over between them until her eighteenth birthday. Her parents would keep them apart if they had to follow her around with a shotgun. Or send her off to a religious boarding school. They’d probably try to have Danny arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Shivers of excitement and anticipation prickled Cate’s skin as they reached the serpent’s jaw and the frog’s egg, a much smaller, circular mound with a depression at its center, almost like a hole in a doughnut. Inside it, two sapling trees had sprung up. Despite them, there would be more than enough room for them to lie down and get comfortable together. The lights of scattered farmhouses and outbuildings in the valley below glittered like diamonds against a swath of velvet as Danny led her into its embrace.
They lay down together on the sweet-smelling grass. Though she might have been deluding herself, she thought she could feel the earth turning as she came into his arms. A deep sense of connectedness to all of creation swelled in her imagination.
For a moment the only sounds that disturbed the night’s insect chorus and the rustling of leaves overhead were the rasp of Danny’s zipper and their hushed breathing as he helped her take off her panties. I wish we could take off all our clothes instead of remaining partly dressed, Cate thought. That we could share a bed and covers. Fall asleep afterward and wake with the morning light. I wish we didn’t have to worry about somebody catching us.
His touch gentle in its suggestiveness, Danny unbuttoned the bodice of her dress and reached inside it to stroke her nipples with his calloused fingertips. As they rose to meet his caress, stabs of arousal sped to her deepest places.
They’d agreed they couldn’t afford to linger. “Come into me, Danny,” she begged, her words blunted against the warmth of his neck as she pressed against him. “I want to feel you there…”
He didn’t need a second invitation. Cradling him with her knees as he assumed protection, she marveled at how beautifully made he was.
With a flash of pain that was quickly over, Cate’s virginity was lost. Joined to Danny and in a way she couldn’t have put into words, to all the lovers who’d gone before them in the history of the world, she abandoned rational thought. Like a leaf caught up in a stream that was approaching full flood, she immersed herself in the moment as they made fumbling, imperfect, ultimately satisfying love.
As they lay together afterward, deep in each other’s arms, she vowed he’d be her only lover, her only husband.
Chapter One
Life