He stooped down on his haunches and rubbed his hand hard across the grass. He held the hand up, palm out, to show her that it was dry.
She sat down, drawing her knees up before her and clasping her arms about them. He stretched out on his side beside her, lifting himself onto one elbow and propping his head on one hand while the other rubbed lightly over the grass.
The sun beamed down warm on their heads.
“Oh, listen,” she said after a few moments.
His hand fell still.
“The waterfall?”
“Yes.”
They both listened for a while before he lifted his hand from the grass and set it lightly over one of hers about her knees.
“Susanna,” he said, “Iamgoing to miss you.”
“We are not supposed to be thinking about the future,” she said, but she had to draw a slow, steadying breath before she spoke.
“No,” he agreed. His hand slid from hers and he tossed his hat aside and lay back on the grass, one leg bent at the knee with his booted foot flat on the ground, the back of one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.
There was the rawness of threatened pain at the back of her throat. It was no easy thing to hold the future at bay. She concentrated her mind again upon the distant sound of the waterfall.
“Do you ever wish,” he asked after a couple of minutes, “that you were totally free?”
“I dream of it all the time,” she said.
“So do I.”
Two weeks ago—less—she would have assumed that such a man had all the freedom he could possibly want or need. Indeed, it had seemed to her that most men were essentially free.
“What ungrateful wretches we are,” he said with a low chuckle.
“But it is not freedom from school or from relative poverty or from anything else in my circumstances that I yearn for,” she said. “It is…Oh, I once heard it described as the yearning for God, though that is not quite it either. It is just—mmm…”
“The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?” he suggested.
“Yes,” she said with a sigh.
“Are we talking philosophy again?” he asked, and he removed his hand from his eyes, turned his head, and grinned up at her. “Twice in one afternoon? I think I must be sickening for something.”
She laughed and looked back at him.
And something happened.
Suddenly the moment was very present indeed, as if past and future had faded to nothingness or else collapsed into the present. And the moment was simply magic.
And unbearably tense.
Their eyes held, and neither spoke as their smiles faded—until he lifted his hand and set the knuckles lightly against her cheek.
“Susanna,” he said softly.
She could have said or done any number of things to cause time to tick back into motion. But she did none of them—did not even consider any of them, in fact. She was suspended in the wonder of the moment.
She turned her head so that her lips were against his knuckles. And she gazed down into his eyes, violet and smoky and as deep as the ocean.
He slid the hand down and pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet. He brushed it backward and it fell to the grass behind her. She felt the air warm against her face and cool in her slightly damp hair. He cupped her face in both hands and drew it downward. She released her tight hold on her legs and turned so that she was kneeling beside him.
