Tess and Josh

Do you love me?

He stopped. Tess knew he'd changed the words a little, they fit her so well. They watched each other for a few seconds, and then he spoke to her, obviously still thinking of the lyrics:

"So, when the worms eat into your brain, can you break free? Who can help you, or is the wall too high?"

That question reached right into her soul. Tess remembered thinking that Josh would reach much further into her than other boys, but she'd had no idea how far. As the tears flowed from her eyes, she realized that he was crying too.

Tess gathered herself. "I came here to apologize and say good bye. I came because I've hurt you too much. You saved my life, and taught me so much, you believed in me, and then I betrayed you, and I let it happen so easily. It's more than I can bear. I came to say goodbye. You said that we're through, and I know that's the only possible result of what I did. I came to say that I hope you can find a good girl one day."

Josh regarded her for a little while. "You came for that? Is that still what you want to do?"

Tess wailed. "I don't know what I want to do. All that is true, but I can't walk away from you just like that. But I'd understand if that's what you want, just say the word, and you'll never see me again. Or you can shoot me."

She stopped. She knew she shouldn't have said the last bit about shooting her, but it matched the bleakness of her mood and her surroundings.

Josh's eyes flickered to his guns, and then back to Tess. "The guns are for rabbits, Tess. Let's not hear that again."

"I called you a slut. I said we were through. I'm really sorry I said those things."

"But I am a slut. You even saw the photo." Tess looked down in shame.

"You'd be a slut if you weren't sorry. But you are sorry, and you told me before I showed you the photo. That makes a big difference."

Tess looked up to see that Josh's eyes fixed on her, and she saw that he'd taken his guitar off his lap and was opening his arms. She was in his lap, curling up and pushing into his chest before he'd even blinked, and she wept into his shoulder as she felt his arms around her.

When she calmed down, she said "I can't believe that you're forgiving me."

"I am. It hurt pretty bad, and we have to talk about lot's of things, but I knew that if you slipped, you'd slip up big time. That's what you're about, anything you do, you do it totally."

"So we're not through?"

"Maybe we're not. But we have to make some tough decisions."

Tess looked up at Josh, and wrapped her arms around his neck. "What do we have to decide about?"

Josh looked into her eyes. "Well, firstly, this can never happen again."

Tess nodded solemnly. "But I don't trust myself anymore."

"That isn't about us, that's about you and Jesus. The real question is whether you believe. I think that this is the answer for you, for where you can find trust. Will you let Jesus protect your heart for you when you can't? Do you believe in Jesus?"

"I don't know. I read the Bible, and I think I'd like to believe in a Jesus that offers me love and comfort, but I look at what I see in the church, and I can't go with that – all that telling other people what to do. And I don't know if I can give up sex like that and be a good little church girl."

"Tess, there's so much to talk about there, and we're going to. Look, when I got involved with you, I knew that I'd never know whether you were coming to church because you wanted to, you believed, or whether it was just because you thought that I wanted you to. You can come to church, you can be my girlfriend, but if you don't come to church because you believe, then we aren't going to work out – what happened on Friday night will keep happening. So I want to know: do you really believe?"

Tess didn't know how to answer, so Josh said "Look, this is going to be a long one, and I'd like you to stay here for the day. I'll take you back home tonight." Tess nodded, so he pulled a radio out of his bag and got onto his Dad. He thanked Liz for bringing Tess out, and promised to call her later.

Josh and Tess spent the rest of the day on the top of the hill, talking through their issues and making out. Josh already had some lunch, which was good, because when he fetched one of the rabbits he had shot, skinned it, gutted it, and then cooked it on a little open fire, Tess had been rather shocked, not only because Josh was a confirmed pacifist ("Jesus told me to turn the other cheek"), but also because this was all a bit confronting for Tess. "City girl", Josh had teased, and then produced quite a nice salad roll for her. "Good thing I'm happy to rough it on a rabbit so you can eat my lunch." Though Tess had to admit that the rabbit smelt pretty good, so Josh promised "Next time, I'll get a wood pigeon for you."

That day, for the first time, both Josh and Tess actually opened their hearts to each other. Tess told Josh everything about her past, and Josh told Tess about his own past errors, like how he had been a bully in school. By the end of the day, they had come to some conclusions. Josh had argued that Tess was wrong about what following Jesus was, that it wasn't about telling other people what to do, but about a very personal trust relationship with Jesus. They had agreed that they would put their relationship on hold while Tess figured all that out. They had also decided that Tess had a real problem with her mother, and Josh wanted to see if he could improve things there.

Tess wasn't sure about this. Did she really have to give up everything she liked about herself to believe in Jesus? And to have a relationship with Josh, did she have to make all the changes? Was it a one way street, or would Josh be prepared to make changes for her?

* * * * *

Chapter 4: Learning to Dance

On Thursday night, Tess was astonished to find out that her parents were going to spend Friday evening at Josh's farm, and that she wasn't invited. She hadn't expected to see Josh until church on Sunday, but she still felt amazingly rejected and lonely. So when Jane rang and invited her to come over for dinner the next night, she said yes, when normally that would be the last place she'd ever want to visit. Jane was a good Christian wife, a quiet woman whose life was dominated by her husband and their two young children. Tess felt sorry for her, since she had no life of her own. She could have been a real attractive outgoing woman too.

When Tess arrived the next day, the house was in chaos. There was a small boy and girl running around the house naked, and Jane was yelling at them, trying to get them dressed after their bath. "Welcome to the mad house. These two never like clothes," she laughed.

A few minutes later, the children were dressed and eating dinner and Jane sat down with Tess.

"I'm glad you got here before David gets home, there's something I wanted to talk to you about."

Tess heart fell. Maybe she shouldn't have come here?

"Josh came by and poured his heart out to Dave on Tuesday night."

Tess gasped. "What did he tell you about me?"

"Remarkably little, given how much we talked about you. He didn't really tell us anything we hadn't already figured out."

"Oh."

"Yes. But I wanted to talk to you about something that Josh said. He said that you thought that you'd have to give up sex and become a good Christian girl."

"Yes, that's what he wants me to do."

"I thought we'd talk about that. I know that you're wrong, and I know what you think about me, I heard you telling Jo once, so I thought maybe I could set you straight."

Tess recalled that conversation with Jo, and thought that she'd die on the spot. It was before she'd turned sixteen, and she'd laughed at how someone could be so demure, and called her Plain Jane, and goody-goody two shoes.

"Tess, appearances can be deceiving. And you don't have to give up sex. For now, until you are married, you put it on the shelf and treasure it, and then, once you are married, you get it down, open the box, and dive in."

Tess looked at Jane. What would this homely woman know about it?

"I'm going to show you something, something very private to David and I. Please don't ever tell anyone about this."

Jane jumped up and walked out of the room. Almost immediately she came back with a photo album in her hands. "David doesn't know I'm going to show you this."

The front of the photo album was plain white, with a heart on it and the letters D and J intertwined in the heart. Tess opened the album.

"David is a photographer. We decided to make a photographic record of our private lives. I've never showed this to anyone else, and if we didn't love Josh so much, I wouldn't risk showing this to you."

The first page of the album was a lovely sepia photo of Jane and David at their wedding. Jane looked lovely in a simple dress. Tess looked at the photo again, and realized that the background was actually a hotel room.

"Yes, this was after the wedding, when we got to our hotel room."

David looked very proud. Jane looked smug, excited, happy, every good emotion that you could feel.

Jane turned the page, saying "We were virgins on our wedding night."

The next page was the same photo, in sepia again, except that David and Jane were wearing only their underwear. David looked good enough to eat, with a very evident bulge in his jocks, but Jane, wow. Tess gasped. Jane was wearing a half bra, stockings and suspenders with a little frill, like a tiny 3 inch skirt. She had a garter, and nothing else. Tess could see her landing strip. She looked good, Tess hadn't realized how good her body was.

"So, I think you can figure out what kind of album this is. There's a couple of pages I won't show you, but you can look through the rest of it. I want you to see that you can love a man, be a good Christian wife, and have great sex."

Tess browsed through the pages. She was amazed. Jane was a stunner. She dressed in the most conservative of clothes normally, but Tess could see, looking across at her in her t-shirt and shorts, that she was still hot even now. When Jane and David let their hair down, they really let it down. In most of the honeymoon photos, Jane was wearing the bottom half of a pretty racy bikini. Rarely, she was wearing the top half too. Rock climbing, Kayaking, lying on the beach, in the spa, hiking in the wilderness. David was mostly only wearing shorts, and sometimes less. She wouldn't be able to look at him the same again. There was a few classic playboy type poses thrown in, and even a couple of playgirl ones too.

Tess had to adjust the way she was sitting. There was a photo of Jane and David riding a horse, both naked. In the next photo, Jane was leaning forward on the horse, clearly also mounted on David, with a big grin on her face. When Tess turned over the next page, Jane quickly flipped it over to the page after, but not before Tess got a distinct image of the top half of David's face looking up over Jane's crotch, and a second photo of Jane with her lips around his penis. But the page Jane left her looking at was nearly as astounding. Jane was riding David in abandon, in the throes of an orgasm. It had a strong likeness to that photo of Tess, but Jane was clearly not drunk, and definitely wasn't going to need to be sorry about it.

Tess pushed the album away. She couldn't look at any more. "I can't believe that you are showing me this. What will David say?"

Jane giggled. "I'll tell him tonight after you leave. There'll be a big explosion, and then, well, then we'll both sleep well tonight."

Jane looked at Tess. "Tess, I want you to know that you don't have to give up on sex. You can hide it like I do, or you can be open, as long as you don't flaunt it at the wrong time. If you and Josh are right for each other, then you'll never look back."

"How do I know? How do I know whether we really work, when we won't find out until it's too late?"

"Ok, so I said that Dave and I were virgins when we married. But I knew Dave really very well before we got married. I knew exactly what I was getting from Dave, and what I get from Dave in bed is exactly what I get from him out of bed. And it'll be the same with Josh. Tell me what you think he'll be like in bed."

Tess thought about that. "Well, he always cares about how I am feeling, whether he can do anything to make me feel better, and mostly he just figures it from watching me. He's very energetic, and I know he's got the right gear."

Jane smiled and nodded. "And is there anything you aren't sure about?"

Tess had to think about that for a while. "Well, I've been around, I know that I like, and I like my man to go down on me. Will Josh do that? But the thing that really concerns me is that he's so self-controlled. Even last weekend, when I hurt him so bad, he never even raised his voice. I wonder whether he really feels things properly."

"So, talk to him about it."

"Jane, I really appreciate you showing me the album. It's really made a difference for me. But please, put it away. If I look though any more of it, I'm going to disgrace myself."

"Ok, I'm going to show you one last photo from it, because it's my favorite one of all." It was taken when the younger child was maybe only a few weeks old. They were all naked. Jane was breast feeding the baby, and leaning over to kiss David who was sitting next to her, with the older child in his lap, holding tightly to her mother's arm and holding the baby's foot with her other hand.

Tess was extremely moved. "I can see why it's your favorite. I've never seen anything like it." Tess had never really had a maternal instinct before, but this photo had awoken it with a bang.

"We had to wait a long time till we could afford our babies, but they are what my life has always been about. I'm so happy." Tess wasn't sure that it would ever be all that her life had ever been about, but she certainly understood why Jane was sitting there looking like the cat that ate the canary.

When David came home, Tess looked at him in rather a new light. He came through the door like a thunderclap, slamming the door and filling the house with happy homecoming sounds. He picked the children up and threw them in the air, then gave them a huge hug. Then he put them down and came up to Jane. He stopped, focused on her, and then it was like the world stopped. He held her face in both hands, leaned into her and kissed her gently but surely, and then Jane leaned into him and wrapped her leg around his, and changed the kiss into something more urgent.

Tess watched, and knew that she had just seen exactly what she wanted to have in about ten years time. And she knew exactly who she wanted to have it with.

Even before the door closed as she left, David had his hands all over Jane. Tess knew exactly what they were doing before she even got to her car. She sat in her car and thought. Once David had got home, they'd spent most of the time telling her how exciting it was to have Jesus as a personal savior, and how important it was to them that they showed Jesus' love in their own lives. It almost had Tess excited about giving her life to Jesus, but then, there was always her mother to change that.

* * * * *

On the Sunday morning, as Tess was getting ready to go to church, her mother knocked on her bedroom door. "Tess, would you be happy to stay home with me instead of going to church? There's something I really need to talk to you about."

Tess wondered what this was about. Was she finally going to get a birds-and-bees talk from her mother? It was rather too late for that, and her mother knew it. Was it another rules-of-the-house talk? But her mother looked rather scared and little, which was unusual.

"Okay Mum."

Once everyone else had gone to church, Tess' mother made coffee and they sat down at the kitchen table.

"Tess, I'm sorry that I've wrecked your life. Really, I have, and I'm just so sorry."

Tess looked at her mother in amazement. This was really an incredible week. She didn't know how much more she could take.

"Before I talk about us, I'd like to know how serious you are about Josh."

Tess was so surprised by all this that she answered with the truth. "Mum, I think we might be marrying serious."

He mother nodded. "Ok, what I am about to tell you, you can tell to Josh, but no one else."

Tess nodded, scarcely believing her ears.

"It's a long time since we've done anything but fight like cats and dogs. Do you remember a particular time when this started?"

Tess remembered. She remembered it all too well. It was a black letter day in her own personal diary she kept in her head, from when she was fourteen years old. "Yes, the day that you wouldn't let me go with my cousins to the show." She'd had a crush on one of them, she had been so upset. They'd been upset too, so upset that they never came back.

Her mother nodded. "Yes. That was the day. I know that you didn't understand, and I know that I didn't do it right then, and I've never done it right since. On Friday night, your father and I had a heart to heart with Josh's parents, and last night I spent a long time talking to your father about this. It's long past time that I told you the truth, long past time that you know why I have screwed you up so badly."

Tess didn't know what to say.

"Please don't interrupt. I'll answer any questions you want when I've finished."

"My fourteenth birthday was the last time I was truly happy. I had this really cool boyfriend, and after school we went to the swimming pool. We snuck around behind the change sheds and started kissing. I let him take my bikini top off, and what he was doing felt wonderful. Then I looked up and I saw Adam watching. My parents had asked him to watch over me. My brother smacked my boyfriend up, real good, because he was a couple of years older than my boyfriend."

"The next night, Adam came to my room and said that if I didn't want him to tell my parents, then I'd let him kiss me and feel my breasts. So I let him, and it felt pretty good. A few nights later, we did it again, and he told me that he loved me. It felt good, and he was bigger than me, and I was so afraid and also lonely because my boyfriend had dumped me, so even though I knew it was wrong, he took my virginity."

"I hated it, because I knew it was wrong, but I didn't have any choice. And when he told me that he loved me, I told him I loved him back. We did it for a year, and then he told me to screw his best friend. And I had thought he loved me."

"When I was seventeen, they both got real girlfriends and stopped screwing me. I knew he never loved me, they just screwed me up real good. I went on a couple of dates, but I was screwed up, so much guilt - I thought it was my fault – and then the second guy date raped me."

Tess reached out and held her mother's hand. Her mother was crying, but hadn't stopped talking. It was the first time that Tess had touched her since she had turned sixteen.

"I nearly committed suicide. I was desperate. And then I found Jesus, and I gave him all my problems. It was such a relief, he saved my life. After three years, I felt normal enough to date, and I found this wonderful man who loved me for what I was."

"I married him as soon as he let me, and we had three lovely children. You were so cute when you were a baby, and so were your sister and brother once they came long. So I thought that Jesus and your father had made everything better, and I was nearly happy again."

"Then you father had an affair."

Tess gasped. "Dad had an affair? No way!"

Tess' Mum nodded. "He's been a wonderful man, but I'm not good in bed." She saw the look in Tess' eyes. "Being good in bed is not about getting a man into bed, anyone can do that. It's about making him want to come back again and again for years. And I wasn't good at it – that's what Adam left me with. So your father had an affair with another lady in the church, it lasted for a year. Her husband found out about it."