Chapter 5: Noon in the Rows

At noon I carried a paper sack of ham sandwiches down the lane and into the rows.

The pecan trees on Jesse's forty acres were old and wide.

Their limbs met overhead, and the ground under them was gold with fallen leaves.

I had woken at four that morning for a glass of water and found him at the kitchen table with a laptop.

He had closed it when I came in.

"Farm books," he said, and I had gone back to bed without a second thought.

Now I found him at the far end of the fourth row, checking the bark on a trunk with one flat hand.

He had his sleeves shoved up past his elbows.

The sun came down through the branches in stripes across his back.

"You came," Jesse said.

"I said I would."

I put the sack down in the leaves.

I did not give him a sandwich.

I walked up to him, took hold of his belt with both hands, and backed him against the tree.

"Susie." He looked over my head at the lane. "It's noon on a Saturday."

"I know what day it is," I said.

"The neighbor's place is a quarter mile off, and his boy drives that road."

"Then you'd better be quiet."

"I don't know how to be quiet with you," he said.

"I noticed."

I opened his belt and undid his jeans.

He did not stop me.

His hands came down on my hips, and his breath went uneven in the cool air under the trees.

"Tell me what you want," he said.

"I want you to turn me around and put my hands on that tree."

His pupils went wide.

"Yes, ma'am."

He took me by the shoulders and turned me.

I spread my palms against the rough bark of the trunk.

His hands went to the front of my jeans and opened them.

He pushed them down my thighs with my underwear, slow, so I felt every inch of cool air.

"Look at you," Jesse said behind me. "Bent over a tree in my shirt, with your jeans around your knees."

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