Page 6 of Putting Out
2
“Tell me again why you decided we were doing this?”
Kenny was looking out the airplane window over the frozen, barren tundra that was Nebraska. They had left seventy-two and sunny in San Diego to return to twenty-two and overcast. Kenny had never been a cold -weather person, even when they had called the farm home.
He’d been ten and Reilly two when their parents had dropped them off for a summer stay on the farm.
Russ and Cindy Carr were going to sail a twenty-footer around the Caribbean as a second honeymoon. Tropical Storm Ellen had other ideas. They were lost at sea and their bodies were never recovered.
As young as Reilly was, she couldn’t say she remembered them, but sometimes she lied to make Kenny feel as if he wasn’t alone in missing them.
In reality, Seamus and Roberta O’Reilly, her mother’s parents, had been the only parents she’d ever known. Their home and this farm had been the center of her universe. Not only hadn’t they blinked when left with a recalcitrant, bitter little boy and a mischievous terrible two-year-old, they had gone on to provide them with the most stable and loving home two orphans could ever imagine.
There were chores. Battles over not wanting to do chores. Rules. Battles over not wanting to follow the rules. But through it all there was love.
And there was golf. It was her Pop’s passion.
“You told Erica to come, right?”
“She’s got a tournament coming up this week. She’ll come next Monday.”
“You made sure she had a car and everything, right?”
Reilly glared at him over the first-class armrest.
“She’syourgirlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend yet, and she’s your best friend.”
“A fact you might have considered before you decided to mess around with her. What happens when this doesn’t work out?”
“When? Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Unfamiliar with the tone in his voice — it sounded like sincerity — she faced him.
“Kenny, this is me. Remember? I’ve had a front-row seat to every fling you’ve had with every attractive straight golfer on tour. And two non-straight ones who wanted to ‘experiment’ and picked you. This is what you do.”
He shrugged as if to suggest there was no defending himself.
“Well, maybe I’m tired of doing what I do. I’m going to be thirty-eight next month and I’ve been thinking. Maybe it’s time I started to look at women with something other than sex in mind. Which is why when Erica asked me out…”
He let the sentence hang there for a prolonged moment.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. She asked me out first. Anyway, I told her I was done messing around. If we were going to do this thing for real, then there was going to be no sex until it was serious.”
“So you’re not having sex with her.”
“Correct,” he affirmed.
“But you want to,” Reilly followed.
“Uhh… she’s smokin’. I’m a man. Do the math.”
Reilly smirked. “Right.”
He heard the cynicism. “You don’t think I can be with a woman in a relationship without sex?”
“No,” she answered. “But if it makes you feel any better, I don’t believe there are many straight men who could.”
