Page 52 of Freak
Her skin—pale and smooth, with a light scatter of freckles over her shoulders and across the top of her chest. Her breasts—ample but firm, large nipples wreathed by dark areolae. Her shape—beautifully curved and soft, like the muse of a Renaissance artist. At the join of her creamy thighs was a natural bush of dark hair.
Even her beauty was somehow beyond this world. It was uniquely hers, untouched by the pressures of conformity. She was only and completely Abigail.
“Goddamn,” he muttered.
At the sound of his voice, Abigail crossed her arms over her belly, suddenly shy.
“Hey, no,” he said and closed the space between them to catch her wrists and draw her arms open. “You’re perfect, and I want to look.”
Color rose high in her cheeks, but she didn’t deny him or rebut his claim. Instead she smiled and let him look.
Looking wasn’t enough. Releasing her wrists, Mel slipped his hands up her arms, over her shoulders, down along her sides. Beneath his palms and finger pads, gooseflesh rose and she trembled lightly—not, he thought, with anxiety, but with excitement. A dashed glance at her smiling mouth and sparkling eyes told him he was right. She might be nervous, but she wasn’t worried. She was eager. And praise all the gods for that.
When he swept his fingers over her belly, letting them skim low enough to trace the edge of her bush, she gasped and shuddered. But he went no closer to the gift nestled there. Not yet. Instead he brushed his hands over the sides of her hips, her thighs ... and paused at a sudden roughness under his left hand. He looked and saw a long, ragged scar that began near the hip joint and curved up and around to the top of her right butt cheek. The remnant of a serious injury.
“What happened here?” he asked, tracing the gouged mark.
Abigail’s laugh was light as she set her hand on his. “When I was little—just six or so—I was playing in the woods, hopping on the rocks across the creek back there. I slipped and fell in the water, and I landed on a stick wedged down in the bed, sticking up just below the surface. Took a hunk out of me, ended up needin’ more’n twenty stitches. Worst of it was trying to get home to get help. I’d wandered pretty far, and my leg didn’t want to work too well right then.”
A typical childhood injury, then, a bit more serious, but no less common. Mel had several scars from various similar incidents of childish clumsiness or recklessness. But he heard something else in her lighthearted explanation: Six years old, hurt that badly, and she’d had to make her way home to reach any help?
He lifted his eyes to her face. “You were alone?”
Her brow furrowed lightly. “Well, yeah,” she answered, as if it should have been obvious, as if aloneness were her lifelong natural state. As if she hadn’t ever had a friend.
Mel’s own childhood clamored in his memory and took on the golden gleam of nostalgia: the suburban neighborhood with kids his age in every other house, running evenings, weekends, and summers with his particular crowd of buddies, four boys and three girls. Summers especially had been chockablock with adventures and mischiefs. They’d played Nintendo in Mel’s basement one day, ridden bikes to the school playground the next, clambered through the construction zone of the new part of the development after that. They’d built a tree fort in the woody part of Jackson Boone’s back yard, played hours of Marco Polo and Beach Ball Bash in Rhiannon Esterman’s aboveground pool, biked miles and miles around the neighborhood and especially to the strip mall up at the main road, where Timmy Estevez’s older brother Mike worked at the 7-11 and let them fill their military-surplus canteens with Slurpee for free.
Every day had been an adventure. On school days his mom had had to drag him bodily out of bed, but on free days he’d bounced up at dawn and could barely stay in the house long enough to inhale a bowl of Count Chocula to meet his mother’s demand for “Breakfast first, hijinks after!”
Born at the beginning of the 1990s, Mel was of the last batch of kids who’d gotten through the chunky part of their childhood before social media took over and everybody either buried themselves indoors or got dragged by their parents to fourteen different ‘enrichment’ activities so they could post about how well they were raising their children.
His childhood had been a childhood, completely unstructured and fun as hell. He would have had to make a special effort to ever find himself alone. Not that he’d ever wanted to be.
For the first time, Mel understood that Abigail’s solitary life hadalwaysbeen so. She’d made multiple throw-away comments about not getting much company, liking her own company, and so on, but not until right now did those comments converge and show him howaloneshe’d always been. Not until right now did he see emptiness there.
If Abigail were uncomfortable with company, if she were reticent and reluctant to talk, if she seemed to dislike people in general, a solitary life would fit her perfectly. But none of that described her. She loved people, she loved company, and she loved to talk—not aimless chatter, but real conversations, the kind that made connections. She was really physical, too: lots of light touches throughout a conversation, and a natural inclination to hug everybody, and she also had a keen sense of when a hug was wanted or needed, or would simply be welcome—and when it was not.
Her spirit was profoundly generous. She loved people, she understood them, and she respected them. She was a ready helper and not shy about asking for help when she needed it. She was not someone for whom aloneness should fit so well.
Mel thought of her anxiety about being at the clubhouse. He thought of that nasty incident with Maniac’s woman and how it had blown all out of proportion, and in ways that seemed bizarre. He still wasn’t straight on how or why she’d been mad athimfor defending her. That was something they’d have to talk about (later!), but now he wondered if it all weren’t related.
Had Abigail built a solitary life out of desire or necessity? Did she truly prefer her own company, or had she accepted solitude as her fate? Understanding that felt like an important part of forging a clear path between them.
“Mel?” she asked, her voice exposing a tremor of doubt. “You went away.”
Blinking out of the vortex of his thoughts, he smiled down at her and, with his fingertips, brushed the worry from her brow. “No, I didn’t. I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere. I was thinking about you walking home on your own, hurt so bad. You’re a tough little cookie, Miss Freeman.”
Her simultaneous grin and shrug showed pleasure at the compliment but a need to set it aside as well. “Everybody’s tough in their way, I think. Life shows us what we can do, and what we can’t.” Her color rose all at once, until she was truly blushing. “Like now, for example. Standin’ here like God made me and you still all covered up—that’s startin’ to feel a little challengin’.”
Mel laughed fully, tossing his head back as the humor hit him head-on. “Sorry, babe. My bad.” He stepped back and stripped. Abigail had made a show of it, and bless her for it, but he was in a hurry. He got it done as quickly as he could, shoved the whole mess aside with his foot, and stood tall before her. “Better?”
She didn’t answer until she’d done a full-body scan, starting at his feet and working her way back to his face. “You’re beautiful,” she said simply, her voice soft with awe.
He knew he looked decent, but even so, the toasty warmth of deep pleasure floated through his veins. It felt good to look good in this woman’s heaven-blue eyes.
Reflexively, he brushed a hand down his chest and over his belly. Abigail watched that move and reached out to copy it, sweeping her own smaller hand from his shoulder down.
“The hair is so soft,” she observed quietly as her palm moved back up over his chest. “I thought it’d be wiry.”
