French Silk(135)

Involving her friends would force them to divide loyalties, and she couldn't risk them telling their parents, who in turn would tell hers. She considered confiding in her aunt Laurel, who had an understanding and kind heart, but she decided against it. Aunt Laurel might also feel duty-bound to inform her parents of her newfound love.

She was confronted with a grown-up problem, the first one of her life, and it must be resolved in a grown-up fashion. She was no longer a child. Jack spoke to her as one adult to another. He treated her as a woman.

But that was the most intimidating problem of all. Being made to feel like a woman was a scary prospect. From the nuns at school she had learned all about sex: Kissing led to petting. Petting led to sex. Sex was a sin.

But, she argued mentally, Jack had said he'd felt imbued by the Holy Spirit when they kissed. Since the nuns who condemned gratification of the flesh had never experienced it, how could they know what it was like? Maybe the lightheadedness, the feverishness, and the yearning one felt when kissing weren't carnal reactions at all, but spiritual ones. When Jack's tongue had grazed hers, she'd felt transported. How much more spiritual could you get?

A few days after their first kiss, she was waiting in his apartment when he returned home. She had a supper laid out on the scarred table with the uneven legs. She'd stuck a candle in a pool of wax she melted in a saucer. Along with a bud vase of daisies, the candlelight helped to hide the ugly squalor of the room.

Feeling awkward, she said, "Hi, Jack. I wanted to surprise you."

"You did."

"I brought crawfish étouffée and … and a loaf of French bread. And this." She slid a folded twenty-dollar bill across the tabletop.

He looked at it but didn't pick it up. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. He bowed his head as though in prayer. Several moments passed.

"Jack?" Her voice wavered around his name. "What's the matter?"

He raised his head. Tears glistened in his eyes. "I thought you were mad at me because of the other night."

"No." She quickly rounded the table so that it wouldn't be a barrier between them. "I was startled when you kissed me, that's all."

He pulled her into a tight embrace. "O God, thank you. Sweet Jesus, thank you." He ran his hands over her hair. "I thought I'd lost you, Mary Catherine. I don't deserve somebody as sweet as you in my miserable life, but I prayed and prayed that God would send you back to me. Let's pray."

He dropped to his knees, pulling her down with him. While they knelt on the grimy, peeling linoleum, facing each other, he offered up a prayer that praised her purity and beauty. The adjectives he used to describe her made her blush. Words of adoration poured from his lips, so that by the time he said, "Amen," she was gazing at him with wonder and love.

"I had no idea you felt that strongly about me, Jack."

He stared at her as though she were a vision. "If you don't look like an angel with that candlelight shining through your hair, I pray that God'll strike me blind before my next heartbeat."

God didn't, so he gingerly raised his hand and touched her hair. As he caressed it, he leaned forward and placed his lips on hers. Mary Catherine was disappointed that he didn't French kiss her again, but when he pressed his parted lips against her throat, she drew a catchy breath of surprise and delight.

Before she quite realized what was happening, he was nibbling her breasts through her thin cotton dress and undoing the pearl buttons.

"Jack?"

"You're right. We should move to the bed. God didn't ordain that I make love to you on the floor."

He carried her to the bed and laid her down. Leaving her no time to protest, he kissed her mouth while undoing her dress to the waist. The fabric seemed to melt as quickly as cotton candy beneath his hot, anxious hands. She was wearing a full slip and a stiff white brassiere as impregnable as armor, but he deftly got rid of them. His hands moved over her bare flesh in a manner that could only be described as carnal. The caresses felt marvelous, and awfully sinful. But Jack was a preacher, so how could it be wrong? He led people away from sin, not toward it.

While removing the rest of her clothing, he murmured about the beauty and perfection of his Eve. "God created her for Adam. To be his helpmate, his partner in love. Now he's given you to me."

The biblical references quelled Mary Catherine's moral concerns. But when Jack's pants came off and she felt the hard, urgent probing of his sex, she looked up at him with alarm and fear. "Are you going to bust my cherry?"

He laughed. "I guess I am. You're a virgin, aren't you?"

"Of course, Jack, yes." Her breathless avowal became an outcry of pain.

Lisbet had been right. It hurt like hell. But the second time wasn't so bad.

* * *

It was a rainy afternoon in September when Mary Catherine informed Wild Jack Collins that he was going to be a father. She was waiting for him under the arches of the Cabildo, one of their several meeting places. He had stopped preaching early because the drizzle had become a cloudburst.

Sharing her umbrella, they ran to his apartment house, where the smell of stale food and unwashed bodies made her queasy. Once they were in his room, stripped of their wet clothes, huddled in bed beneath the drab linens, she whispered to him, "Jack, I'm going to have a baby."