Snapshots by Pamela Browning Page A

bodice.
    He breathed in deeply, and his fingers tightened under mine. I wasn’t sure how we’d manage to do what was supposed to happen next with my parents asleep upstairs and Martine apt to waken at any moment. It didn’t matter. I wanted to do it. Maybe a blanket of dogwood blossoms would be our bed. Or—or—
    â€œWe shouldn’t,” Rick said, his mouth still close to mine. “We can’t.”
    I disagreed. His hand clasped in mine, I urged him down the steps. He was willing—oh, yes. Our footsteps thudded in cadence with our heartbeats as we ran together through the backyard and into the woods, stopping to kiss and touch more than once, then breaking away and slipping through the shadows as if we were shadows ourselves.
    I hadn’t visited our old tree house in a while, but I knew Rick and his buddies used it for a gathering place where they could drink beer or smoke cigarettes away from the watchful eyes of parents, and I’d long suspected that some of them met girls there. When we reached it, I turned, wanting to remember always the way Rick looked—hair rumpled, eyes heavy lidded, the rest of him a dark outline against the moon-dappled forest.
    Rick circled his arms around me. He backed me against the tree trunk and we kissed lingeringly, passionately, lost in the sense of doing something forbidden. For the first time in my life I felt voluptuous, wanton, with the power to make a man desire me. From the direction of the Finnerans’ house came the sound of laughter and the smell of charcoal smoke, but it seemed far away and in a different world.
    It wasn’t much of a climb to the platform, which was only five feet above the ground, and I shimmied my dress up over my hips before I started up the ladder. Rick followed, and, standing there in the place where we’d spent so many good times together, I went tremulously into his embrace. Slowly and ceremoniously, he unzipped my dress in the back. Unhooking my strapless bra, he released me from those dreadful stays, and I looked down wonderingly to see my breasts cupped perfectly in his hands.
    He bent and kissed one, then the other, and I could have swooned with the heady excitement of it. Together we moved beneath the roof, lost in our mutual desire, kneeling to face each other on a thin mattress that someone had put there, exploring each other’s bodies with reverence and a remarkable lack of self-consciousness. In a way, it seemed as if every single moment of our childhood and the abiding faithfulness of our friendship had led us to where we were at that moment.
    The mattress smelled musty, but there was a clean blanket over it. Someone had camped there recently and left not only the blanket but some towels and a few empty beer cans, which glimmered like gold in the moonlight. The leaves rustled above us, allowing light to shimmer across our bodies. Our kisses deepened, lengthened, and it was as if I’d always known the taste of Rick, the texture of hard muscles braided beneath his skin. I shifted into a mindless absorption, a state where sensation was all. When he settled himself between my thighs, I was overcome with gladness. I wrapped my arms around him and took him into me easily and as painlessly as if he had always belonged there. In those moments, I felt wrapped in his love, and I loved him in return.
    When it was over and we lay quietly in each other’s arms, I touched Rick’s eyes, traced his lips with my fingertips and contentedly fitted my head to the hollow of his shoulder, sure that nothing could have been more moving. As we listened to the plaintive music of a lone guitar drifting from the Finnerans’ backyard, Rick stroked my hair, lost in his own thoughts, which I could barely imagine. I hoped he felt what I felt. How could he not? An act so earthshaking and so fulfilling couldn’t have failed to complete him in the same way it had me.
    â€œHey,” he said after a