Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

a veil, slip her blouse over her head. And then, as he laid himself down on her, she stretched her arms high above her head and parted her legs until the eventual, mild protest of her hips, as if she were making an angel.

Muscled in the way that men who pick corn and shovel snow and tote ice are muscled, Joe mourned the lack of a blanket between Rachel’s back and the million stems of moss. He wanted nothing to distract her now, not a single, small discomfort to refract her attention. So, even as he made himself as close to her as it was possible for him to be, he rolled with her deeper into the bed of moss so that she soon lay atop him, gasping, and immediately began to love him in the fashion of females.

It was, perhaps, nothing more than this simple reversal that accounted for the intensity of Rachel’s arousal. While the blue jays screamed and the trees shuddered in the wind, Rachel regretted the fact that there was no way to press herself any closer against Joe than she already was. But it was more than their coupling that aroused her. It was that this was Joe. This was her Joe. These were his hands holding her down hard against him, his belly straining against hers. When she sat up suddenly and put her freed hands down against the place where they were joined, felt it wet with her own thick juice, smelled their raw smell, she could not prevent herself from panting lightly, like a cat. When Joe heard her, he grabbed her hips and she could see the muscles in his belly harden like the ribs of a seashell. She clenched him, and he dug his fingers more insistently into her, closed his eyes, and began to rise up from the moss, lifting her with him.

Joe had done something, moved against her in some way she could not isolate, and she quickly lowered herself back down along the length of him. She laid her hands on the smooth caps of his shoulders, tucked in her folded arms, and as she gently kissed him, made love to him in an entirely selfish, inexperienced way that seemed to be exactly what he needed. As her rhythm became more emphatic and her mouth grew suddenly slack, he took her head in his hands and lifted her face away from his so that when she opened her eyes she saw, in his, the unbordered scope of his desire.

Chapter 20

        “None,” she said as they walked back through the woods toward her house.

“Jesus Christ, Rachel. What do you mean, ‘none’?”

“I mean none. That’s what I mean.”

“You’re not on the Pill?”

“No.” She snorted. “I’m not. I wasn’t expecting to have any sex this month, and even if I had, I wouldn’t be on the Pill. Why should I pop hormones every day of the year on the off chance that I’ll be ravaged under a pine tree on Mother’s Day?”

“I can’t believe this,” he said, stomping into her kitchen and letting the screen door smack shut behind him.

“I don’t understand.” She took two bottles of beer out of the fridge and handed one to Joe. “You mean you haven’t ever bothered to think things through?”

“Things. I hate it when you do that. What are things?”

“How can you go around making love to people and not be prepared for fatherhood? Seems to me you should have given some thought to procreation before you took off your pants.”

“Look who’s calling the kettle black.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, taking a long drink of beer.

“Of course you are.” He set his bottle down on the counter so hard that the beer foamed up and out of the neck. “Maybe I was wrong to assume you’d … taken care of things—”

“No maybe about it.”

“But what you did was worse. You knew what kind of chance we were taking, but you took it anyway.”

She nodded. “I’d be quite happy to have a baby anytime soon,” she said calmly. “Wed, unwed, whatever. I’ve got plenty of money, a house, friends, and I’ve wanted a baby ever since I was twelve. So if I get pregnant, that’s fine.”

“But you’re only twenty-one, Rachel. Barely that.”

“I’m an old lady, Joe. My body just hasn’t caught up with me yet. I’m temperamental. Set in my ways. Not very wise, but I will be.” She sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed the cold bottle of beer up along the inside of her arm. “I saw a woman named Mrs. James in the park last week,” she said, smiling. “She was walking very slowly, as if her hips were locked. But when she got to the swing set, she settled down onto one of the seats and began to work herself up into the sky. She grabbed hold of those two chains with her old-bird hands, leaned back so far I was afraid she’d fall, and stretched her legs out to get herself going. She was wearing horrible, thick stockings and big, heavy black shoes. She swung as high as anyone I’d ever seen, with her sweater flapping out around her and her hair coming loose. And then, after a bit, she slowed down, had to wait until she had stopped completely, and then she got off the swing and hobbled away down the path.” Rachel looked up at Joe and shook her head. “It was like looking into a mirror, Joe. It was just like looking into a mirror.”

“Then that’s even worse,” he said, taking her cold hands in his.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not safe for old women to have babies,” he said.

That night Rachel did some thinking. She sat on her moonlit porch and thought about lying with Joe on the moss in the woods, resting, letting their bodies cool. She thought about the differences between the first time she’d been with someone—with Harry—and this second time, with Joe. She remembered how terrified she’d been, for two long