The Awful Mess: A Love Story by Hutchison Sandra

Author:Hutchison, Sandra [Hutchison, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sheer Hubris Press
Published: 2013-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

The afternoon was lovely and she was feeling better than she had the week before, so Winslow walked her down a deeply rutted tractor run to the Took River, which was broad and shallow as it meandered past the Jennings’ cornfields. They picked their way from rock to rock, finally settling down together on a large, nearly flat boulder. Hot from the walk down, Mary pulled off her sandals and dipped her feet into the clear, cold current. Winslow removed his beat-up loafers and did the same. Such lovely feet, she thought again. Minnows nibbled at their toes.

“You fish in here?”

“Not in a long time.”

“Where does it go, anyway?”

“About twelve miles up, it turns east and eventually meets up with the Merrimack.”

“So it’s not completely perverse.” The northern flow of the Took had surprised and charmed her on her first visit to Lawson.

“It flows downhill like any other river. It’s just not always an obvious slope.”

She thought about Winslow’s sister. “Maybe that’s what we all do,” she said. “We just flow downhill. Sometimes the slope isn’t obvious to others, or even to us, but sooner or later, down we go. If we’re lucky, other people feel we’re going in the right direction, which is usually the same direction they are. But if it looks like we’re not, they freak.”

“I’m more comfortable with the idea of free will. That you could swim upstream if you believed that was the better direction.”

“But how long can you really fight a current? It’s your life; you can’t just pull up on shore and rest whenever you feel like it.”

He cocked his head at her. “Can’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t that what you’re trying to do?”

Mary frowned. She hadn’t expected her river metaphor for homosexuality to be used on her own heterosexual self.

“You’re trying to stay out of the river. You think you’ve had enough.”

“While you feel like you’re in over your head,” she said slowly.

Winslow nudged her and nodded at her white feet submerged in the water. “I can’t help noticing that you keep poking your toes back in.”

She felt outmaneuvered. “It’s just a metaphor. I could say, yes, but this water’s too rocky for swimming.”

“Maybe, but I know a great swimming hole right around the bend. I could say come on in, the water’s great.”

He was sitting right next to her, right in her space.

“Is it?” She was suddenly aware of the heat rising off his body.

“Uh huh.” He picked up her right hand and brought it to his mouth. He turned it over and kissed her palm and then slowly kissed his way up her arm.

At first, this was almost ticklish, and so quaintly romantic as to seem a little silly, but she didn’t pull her arm back, mesmerized by the sight of this lovely golden-haired man making love to her skinny, freckled arm. By the time he was kissing the tender inside of her elbow, she had turned towards him in expectation of those delicious lips getting to her mouth. He

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