Many Waters

  Chapter Eight - Cody

  I don’t know why, but I was happy that day, in a way I hadn’t been for a long time. I felt whole and at peace, like I suddenly had something back that I’d never known was missing.

  About ten o’clock, I grabbed my truck keys to take Lisa home before it got too late.

  “I’m really glad you came today,” I said while we walked out to the driveway. The air was full of the mingled scent of mimosa blossoms and wild honeysuckle, the sweet smells of a southern summer night, encouraging both of us to walk slowly.

  “Yeah, we’ll have to do it again sometime. But next time you’ll have to come over to my house,” she told me.

  “Sure,” I agreed, and then we were getting in the truck for the drive back to town.

  I walked her up to the front porch when we got there, and then lingered for a few minutes in the darkness, not wanting the evening to end. I just stood there, looking down at her beautiful face while she gazed up at me. I noticed that her lips were slightly parted, and I thought to myself how amazingly kissable they looked.

  So I did the most natural thing in the world at that moment. I leaned in and kissed her, soft and sweet and tender, just like it ought to be. I certainly hadn’t meant to do it, but I found that for once temptation was irresistible. Almost without thinking, I slipped my hand around her back and pulled her closer, and she pressed up as close to me as she could. Before long, the kiss which had started out so sweet and soft had become considerably more passionate.

  “I better go,” I finally said, breaking the kiss reluctantly. I didn’t want to, and I could tell she didn’t want me to, either. But I had to be strong.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said faintly, and I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  Maybe it was just a moment of weakness, brought on by reading that sorrowful poem and spending the day talking about things I ought not to have talked about. But even so, whatever delusions I might have had that I could keep things safe and friendly between us were officially blown to pieces, never to be believed again. I was kidding myself if I tried to think otherwise.

  I realized with a dull, hopeless kind of ache that I ought to have known better from the very beginning. I’d been flirting with disaster ever since the first time I ever laid eyes on the girl. I should have known there’d come a day of reckoning, sooner or later. Now it had, and I was snared no matter what I did. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t had much choice but to hang out with her. I still should have been stronger.

  I made it home without wrecking the truck, a minor miracle in its own right considering the state I was in. But by the time I pulled in under the pecan tree I knew what I had to do.

  The only honorable choice at that point was to tell her everything, to lay it all on the table and try to explain to her the situation I was in, and then see what she thought about it herself. There was no more middle ground and no more wiggle room.

  Knowing what to do is not quite the same thing as doing it, though. I went through the motions of brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed, wishing I could bury my head in the sand like an ostrich and make the whole nasty mess somehow go away. But that was impossible, and I soon found that even sleep was beyond my reach. Even after lying in bed for almost an hour, I was still wide awake.

  I got up and went to the computer for a while, looking for a monster truck rally like I promised her I would, hoping the distraction would help. But sleep still eluded me even after I found one, so finally I decided to take a walk and maybe think about something else for a while, if such a thing were possible.

  I slipped on a t-shirt and some cut-off jeans before quietly making my way barefooted down by the lake and finally to the gazebo, where I sat on the swing and threw green pecans across the lake. The water was lit up by one of the biggest full moons I’d seen in a long time, an especially pretty one with a ring of blue around the outside edge. I lay down on the swing and wondered if maybe Lisa was looking at that same moon and thinking about me, too.

  After a long time, I decided there was absolutely no way this could wait any longer, not even till morning. I’d be out of my mind by then.

  It was well past midnight at that point, but I decided to give her a call anyway.