Homecoming

As she lay there taking her pleasure, Daniel too was now caught in its gossamer web. Biting his lip to keep his own groans of satisfaction at bay and squeezing his eyes shut as if to ward off whatever demons had overtaken him to commit such an act of abuse to himself, Daniel felt the unmistakable beginnings of the cauldron of release in his belly. Fighting valiantly in a battle he knew he would lose, the young man tried to dismiss the thought of his Lu lying on the grassy bank tormenting her own body. She was giving herself the kind of pleasure he was now loathe to deny her by his own hand.

In spite of their relationship, he wanted her. In spite of their history and the history their only living parents shared, he wanted her. Stroking and pulling his own manhood, urging it to release him from the pressure of his own need, Daniel knew that only a thin thread of reality was left between the man who stood in the brush shamelessly satisfying himself and the man who fought every ounce of restraint in his trembling body. The later wanted to march out from those bushes, take Lu—then and there on those banks—and finish what she had started.

He wanted her and he knew that his thin thread of discretion was going to snap, soon if not today. His own salvation from the tortures of his self-imposed silence came to him as Lu's vocalized crescendo of ecstasy evoked his own release. As his own ecstasy threatened to explode his lungs, he bit the inside of his lip until he tasted his own coppery essence in order to avoid detection from his hiding place.

Her body now spent, skin slick as evidence of both her efforts and the oppressive humidity the late North Carolina afternoon offered, Lula's frame slackened. She lay motionless on the bank with only the ragged sounds of her breathing and the stuttered rise and fall of her chest to indicate that she was still conscious from her own sensual onslaught.

Daniel let the pressure-cooker of tension release from his lungs in silent exhalation. Reaching for the bottom of his T-shirt, he pulled the article of clothing down, using it to clean up the remnants of evidence that had not spilled onto the ground but instead rested mockingly on the hard, flat plain of his belly. In excruciating silence he backtracked down the trail, far enough to convince both him and Lu that what had transpired between the two of them had never happened.

Girding his courage to face the one person in the world to whom he could never lie convincingly, Daniel steeled himself and called out to her. It was the start of the opening act the play that had just begun this long hot summer.