The Valley Road

There was no connection. He seemed to have only two points of conversation: sports and himself.

So the object of her affections was singularly Quan Liu.

His eyes widened for just a second, but he didn't say anything, and only gave her a slight nod before turning in to the chemistry classroom.

Maria was waiting for him when he arrived.

To her surprise, he was driving an old '56 Ford pickup truck.

"Where did you get this?" she asked, climbing in to the passenger's side. She placed her blanket on the seat, which was scuffed and torn.

"Father bought it for me a couple of months ago," he beamed with pride. "We've been working on it at night. I just got it running the other day."

"You did a great job on it," she said, admiring the work and love he had obviously put into this project. It wasn't as nice as the Camaro her father had promised her for graduation, but she was not about to rub it in her friend's face.

"Where do you want to go?" he asked hopefully.

She knew he wanted to drive around town to show off his truck. And to be seen in public with her.

But she could not let that happen.

And she hated herself for that.

"Let's go down by the lake," she couldn't bring herself to look him in the eyes.

If he was disappointed, he didn't show it. The drive down the valley road was much shorter in the truck.

Maria took his hand and led him down to the field by the water.

He followed her, unsure of what she wanted.

She wore a long skirt and loose blouse, much more casual than he was used to seeing her.

Her hair was pulled back.

Maria spread the blanket out on the grass and motioned for Quan to sit next to her.

Their fingers intertwined and they kissed hungrily.

"Graduation is in two weeks," she whispered.

"I'm moving to Washington at the end of June." His words seemed to slap her in the face. "Maria . . . I—"

"Shhhh," she pushed him on to his back.

Her mind was made up in an instant.

Before she could stop herself, she reached for her blouse and flung it off. Quan looked up at her in surprise as she reached behind herself for the clips on her bra.

"What . . ."

"Shut up, Quan," She leaned over and kissed him, hard. Her hands tugged at his shirt and jeans.

As she pushed her skirt down over her hips, she paused to admire Quan's strong, tanned form.

His chest, shoulders and arms were strong, their corded muscles seeming to glisten in the sun. His stomach was flat.

Quan's eyes seemed to be glued to her breasts, their pink nipples standing out proudly.

"Take your underwear off," she said with authority, not giving either of them the chance to back out.

His hands went to her body, exploring her bare skin.

The first cock Maria had ever seen was erect and rock hard.

He was the most beautiful creature she had laid her eyes upon.

The space between her legs was already slick, and she moaned when he reached down to touch her.

An electric jolt shot through her body when his hand came in contact with her labia. His inexpert touch was offset by his enthusiasm.

She leaned over and kissed him. One of his hands went to her breast while the other continued to fondle her sex.

Maria stroked his hardness.

"I want you to make love to me," she whispered between kisses.

Any resistance he had collapsed when she thrust one of her breasts into his mouth.

She giggled when he bit just a little to eagerly, but his desire was endearing. Her own lust was fueled by his handsome face and forbidden body.

Before he could stop her, she threw her leg across his lap. His cock flexed into the space between her legs.

Maria guided the head of his cock to the opening of her pussy. She was wet with anticipation.

Clenching her teeth determinedly, she lowered herself on to him. There was a brief jolt of pain when he first entered her, but she took all of him inside her in one swift stroke.

Quan lay back as Maria rode him.

His hands grasped her hips and breasts.

Their movements were not in sync. It took a while to establish any kind of rhythm.

Maria didn't care. All she knew was she wanted Quan Liu inside her.

She was going to lose him soon, and she wanted every moment to count.

All too quickly, Quan jerked and he cried out in frustration.

Maria felt her pussy flood with his warmth. She leaned over and kissed him as his orgasm subsided.

They fell into one another's arms and lay together under the clear sky listening only to the sounds of their laboured breathing and the birds.

Quan kissed her neck.

"I'm sorry," he stammered with embarrassment. "I tried—"

"Shhhh," she nibbled on his ear. "It's okay, Quan . . . it's okay. I love that you want me."

Cuddling on the blanket, their hands roamed the other's naked body.

After a little while, Maria reached between Quan's legs and found his soft cock. It was still wet with their juices.

She began to slowly bring him back to life.

This time, she rolled over on her back, pulling him to her.

They kissed again.

Quan paused for a moment before entering her. "Shouldn't we . . . um, have a rubber or something?"

"I just had my period," she said dismissively, with the certainty of a teenager who knew everything from the insufficient sex education provided by Jefferson County in 1968. "I can't get pregnant until at least next week."

They found their rhythm easier. Quan didn't last much longer than the first time, but Maria didn't care.

When he went off inside her again, she tingled from head to toe. They came together, laying on a quilt her grandmother had made, under the bluest skies in God's entire Creation.

Wanting nothing.

They cleaned themselves up as best they could and returned to her house in his truck.

Quan walked her to the door, giving her one last kiss.

Sharing a look of longing, he almost stepped inside, but Maria knew he couldn't stay. She had to clean up before her mother came home.

She squeezed his hand tenderly before he got back in his truck and drove home.

Although neither knew it at the time, that was to be the last time they touched for almost five decades.

**************

Maria woke in the king sized bed alone. Soft morning light shone in from behind the curtains.

The covers were bunched up from where they had slept and made love.

A thin layer of dust covered the nightstand and the dressers. She made a mental note to have the housekeeping service do a thorough cleaning before she left at the end of the week.

Her robe hung from one of the posts on the dark oak bed.

She put it on over her still naked body.

When she stepped into the hallway, she smelled the aroma of fresh coffee.

Quan sat at the kitchen table fiddling with his tablet.

Even in his rumpled dress shirt and reading glasses, he looked so dashing. He stood from the stool by the counter to greet her with the kind of smile she never wanted to be without.

Maria folded into his arms, resting her head on his shoulder. The comfort of his embrace felt so familiar.

"Would you like some coffee?" he asked. "I would have made breakfast, but there's not a lot of food here and I didn't know if you wanted me going through your kitchen."

"It's not my kitchen," her reply was harsher than she meant. "It belonged to Mamma."

"You never came back here." It wasn't a question.

"I was home for one summer after I went to school. But after that, I never wanted to come back here."

"Why not?" he asked softly.

"It stopped being 'home' when my father threatened to kill you."

"I deserved that," her lover said.

"No you didn't, Quan," Maria snapped. Her blood pressure began to rise. "You never deserved anything he did to you."

"You were way out of my league," Quan's voice was so soft, she could barely hear him. "I was a fool to think you would ever be with me."

"I wanted you." Maria reached out to take his hands. "I wanted to run away with you more than anything. I wanted away from here."

She waved around at the giant, empty house around them.

"I wanted all of this to go way. I never wanted to be Sterling Charles Bradford the Fourth's daughter. He never wanted me, either. He wanted a son to carry on his name. A son to play football and take hunting."

Quan took her trembling hands.

Maria choked back tears. Her voice was a raspy, angry whisper. "I wanted to tell you we made a beautiful baby boy. I wanted to raise him in a house full of love."

He took her in his arms again as the tears came.

"I wanted to raise him with you."

Both of them were crying. They were the tears of tragic heartbreak for the family they never had.

It had been years since Maria had allowed herself to cry like that. With her secret out, it was as if a weight had been lifted from her soul.

A part of her expected Quan to strike her, as her father had done when he found out she was pregnant. To shame her for being a whore to bedded a chink. A slut who couldn't save her virginity properly for her husband, who had no such expectation.

Maria waited for the barrage of questions about why she never told him. About why she had never spoken to him again. About why she had kept this to herself for fifty years. But those questions never came. Not from Quan.

She knew he would never hurt her. Not physically. Not emotionally.

He had always been good to her.

"Our son wants to meet you," Quan said gently once the fit passed.

"How did you find him?" she wiped her eyes with the handkerchief from Quan's pocket.

"My daughter got everyone those home DNA kits last year for Christmas," he replied with a smile. Reaching for his phone, Quan opened up an app. "Once all of our results came back, two cousins no one knew popped up. They were his twins, and well, we got to talking and he sent his own kit in to be sure, and boom! Instant family."

Maria looked down at the app, which showed Quan's family tree with three children: the oldest was named Marc Thompson, and two others from his marriage, Kai Liu and Michelle Harrison.

The family tree also showed Marc had two children, David and Isabella Thompson. Their grandchildren.

Her heart jumped into her throat at the sight of her son and his family.

Quan steadied her and sat her down in the stool by the counter.

"Do you want to meet him?"

"Of course I want to meet him! Why would you even ask that?" her voice trembled.

"We haven't spoken in almost fifty years, Maria," Quan reminded her. "I told him I would see what you wanted to do."

"I want to meet him," she said resolutely. "Whenever and where ever they want."

"I'll take care of it."

He took her in his arms once again.

"Don't you want to know why, Quan?"

"I figure you'll tell me when you're ready," he shrugged. There was no blame, judgment or reproach in his tone.

She started to cry again. This time, they were tears of joy. For the first time in years, she felt completely safe.

**************

They went out to breakfast once they had cleaned up.

Jefferson County had grown and changed. Not as much as the rest of the world. But enough that an Asian man and white woman going out as a couple did not draw curious stares, threats or worse.

It helped that neither of them were well-known in the community anymore.

Dr. Liu had retired many years ago, and Maria's family, while wealthy, had mostly withdrawn from local politics and been supplanted by other families in the community. A fair number of families and immigrants came to town, mostly drawn in by the new hospital and the school system which was in dire need of teachers; both paid signing bonuses and moving expenses in exchange for the promise of staying for several years.

Where their reunion was filled with their classmates from 1968, none of them were out for breakfast on a Sunday morning. Maria and Quan didn't run in to anyone they knew by sight or by name.

Quan drove them back to her family house.

In public, they could not have any kind of meaningful conversation. In the car, Quan drove. Maria mostly rode in silence.

She was used to being private and guarded. Some of it was her high profile public role. Some of it was a defense mechanism.

They went inside and sat at the kitchen counter. There was so much she wanted to say. So much she wanted to know.

But she didn't know where to begin.

"Can we call him?" she asked out of the blue.

"Let me see if he's free." Quan picked up his phone and fired off a quick text message.

Almost immediately, his phone buzzed. Maria's heart began to race.

"They're out running around right now, but will be free in a few minutes." Quan reached out at the disappointment which was obvious on her face. "I've got an idea. I want to show you something."

He led her out to his SUV.

Quan drove down the old valley road, past the barn which was slowly falling apart. There was a gate where the gravel ended.

On the other side, the old trail had been paved and joined to a road which intersected just past a fence which she didn't recognize.

Maria frowned. "When did this happen?"

"Your dad had some money problems a few years ago when the market crashed," Quan replied as he got out of the SUV. "He sold a bunch of land to some developers to cover his debt."

"How do you know that?"

"You'll see." Quan went to the gate, which opened on to her father's land. Her land.

He got back in the Lexus and began driving down the paved road, which apparently she did not own. The asphalt looked relatively fresh.

What used to be a ten minute walk through the woods took virtually no time. The road let out on the same field and pristine lake where they had made love all those years ago.

Maria gasped when she saw a huge round gazebo set out in the lake connected to the shore by a short walkway. It looked brand new.

The road ended at what looked like a gravel parking area. Quan stopped the car and got out.

She followed mutely, her eyes wide.

Quan took her hand and led her across the field to the gazebo. The supports for the gazebo rested on metal beams which poked up out of the water. The decking was all composite. The lower level was easily fifty feet across. It had a metal railing all the way around lined with bench seats. The faint smell of wood stain hung in the air.

A spiral staircase led to the upper level, which was about half the diameter of the lower level. Both levels were covered with a light aluminum roof.

"What is this?" she asked. "Aren't we trespassing?"

"You might be. I'm not," he winked.

"You own this?" Maria held the railing as he led her up the steps. The view was incredible. Everything was just as quiet and peaceful as she remembered.

And she was there sharing it with the one person who appreciated it as much as she did.

"Yes," Quan waved all around them. "I own all of this. I bought it for you."

For once in her life, Maria Bradford was rendered speechless.

"After Eastern went under in ninety-one, I started a business with three other pilots. We bought a couple of Learjets and started a luxury private air service," he explained. "We rubbed elbows with the right people. One of our regular clients was a real estate developer who talked a lot when he was drinking. He liked me and brought me on as a partner in one of his companies."

Maria stared at him blankly.

"We did really well in the nineties and up to the housing bubble in oh-eight. When it crashed, we lost money on some properties, but I had enough cash to buy property at bargain prices. Some of it was your father's."

She snorted. "That explains why his books showed about half as much land as I thought he owned. I don't remember seeing your name on any of the transactions."

"Your father would never sell anything to me," Quan scoffed, the angry edge returning. "That son of a bitch would have gone bankrupt before ever letting me buy anything from him. So I hid behind LLCs and development groups. Some of my partners bought a good chunk of Jefferson County a few years ago. All that talk you hear about the country lakeside resort and golf club is them. I bought all the lots around this lake. It's about a hundred and fifty acres. No one will ever set foot out here unless we let them."

"What do you mean by 'we', Quan?"

"Do you remember what you told me? You said you wanted to run away with me. Let's do it."

"That was a long time ago."

"And now we're both retired." He motioned for her to sit next to him on one of the benches. "Your father is gone, Maria. He can't stop us. No one else around here gives a damn about us anymore."

Quan paused and reached into his pocket for a small box. A ring box.

"Do you remember that day? A week after graduation. I came to your house to ask you to marry me."

Maria was flooded with memories.

"I didn't think your father was going to be home. I hadn't seen him for weeks, but he was there that day."

"Daddy was waiting for you," she said softly. "He knew I was pregnant. Mamma told him after I missed my period. I wanted to tell you . . . but he beat me when he found out. He wanted me to get an abortion, but the only doctor around here was your dad."

"I'm surprised he didn't hold that over me." Quan's eyes got dark.

"And admit that his daughter was fucking someone he didn't approve of? No, Daddy would never have let that happen. If you thought what he said to you that day was bad, you should have heard what he said to me."

"If I'd known he hit you, I'd have killed him." The clear threat of violence hung in Quan's voice. It was a good thing her father was already dead.

"You'd have gone to jail. Or they'd have strung you up to a tree out in the woods," Maria said bitterly. "Daddy sent me and Mamma to Atlanta. I was guarded the whole time. After the baby was born, I came back. Daddy wanted to marry me off, but no one around here would lay a hand on me. There were too many rumours. Too many whispers. It was an open secret. I was damaged goods to these people."

Quan took her shaking hands.

"So I went off to college." Maria paused long enough to wipe tears from her eyes. "I tried to forget about you. I tried to forget about our son. No one there knew what happened."

"That's all behind us now." Quan opened the box. Inside was a simple, plain gold ring. "I bought this for you. I know it's not much, but it was what I could afford then. Your father told me my family wasn't worth the shit out of a cow, and that your family could buy me and sell me a hundred times over. That may have been true, but that old bastard didn't deserve a daughter as wonderful as you. Maria, will you marry me?"

"When Daddy threw you out of his house, I wanted to follow you, but I couldn't." Maria took the ring box and closed the lid. "Right now, I want two things: one of them I can't have, and one of them I don't deserve."

His hands started to tremble.

"Quan Liu, I want to be eighteen years old again. I want to be pregnant with your child—our child—and I want to run out to your truck as you drove off with the black eye and broken arm Daddy gave you and never come back. Everyone we knew back then has spent the last fifty years calling me a whore, but at least I would have been with you."

Maria reached up and caressed his cheek.

"You were always so good to me, Quan. I don't deserve you. I want your forgiveness and your love. But I don't deserve either," Maria looked away, ashamed.

It took Quan a moment to find the words. "There is nothing to forgive. We were kids, and you did what was required of you at the time. I don't care about any of that. We can't undo the past. I just want us to be together now. For the rest of our lives."

Maria still had the ring box in her hands. She opened the lid again. The single small diamond glistened in the sun. It seemed so small, but in that moment, it was the most valuable gift she had ever received.