Terri decided to be the bad guy. She blew her whistle and told everyone to go away. She then yelled at Billy that he was to go with her so she could give him a lecture about water safety.
Brody was standing in the doorway, his brows drawn together in anger. Terri knew she was going to get the lecture for allowing this to happen.
She got Billy up the stairs. At that time, she was living in the apartment at Club Circle and Brody had a cabin. Once inside, she got Billy onto her bed, put a mask on his face and gave him oxygen.
He was shaking his head, but she ignored him. “Just be still and breathe.” The stethoscope wasn’t in her emergency kit, so she put her hand on his heart to feel how hard it was pounding.
Billy managed to smile under the mask and held her hand to his chest.
She started to pull away, but when he wouldn’t release her, everything hit her. She looked into his blue eyes and understood it all. He wasn’t gay. He’d just been waiting for her. And he’d known her well enough that he’d not approached her until they were close to graduation. He intuitively knew that if he’d tried to do the boyfriend/girlfriend thing earlier, she would have knocked him across the sandbox.
When he saw that she finally understood, he closed his eyes and his heart slowed down—but he didn’t release her hand.
He dozed a bit and Terri stayed beside him.
Brody came in to check on them, saw that they were holding hands and gave a grunt. “Poor guy. I think he was about to give up hope.” He left the apartment.
To Terri’s astonishment, several people at the lake had seen that Billy Thorndyke was mad for her. Only she hadn’t known it.
After that day, she and Billy took their time. He was slow and cautious, never rushing anything. He asked Terri to give him private swimming lessons and she did teach him how to cut the water more smoothly. She taught him to float and do the backstroke.
They began spending more and more time together. Billy started helping her get her work done so they could go out alone.
They made love the first time when they got caught in the rain on the Island. Billy had been ge
ntle and sweet, worried that he was hurting her.
It took a week before the “gentle and sweet” left them and their hormones kicked in. They were young and athletic and adventurous. They made love everywhere and in every possible position.
In normal circumstances, they might have received disapproval, but not in their case. Billy was as popular in town as Terri was at the lake. It was like the prince and princess of two neighboring kingdoms uniting. Terri’s family of Brody, Jake and Frank was very happy about the union. The Thorndykes were so glad that their son might marry a hometown girl and stay in Summer Hill that they never quit smiling.
And Terri and Billy were ecstatic. By the end of the summer they were rarely apart. They ran in and out of each other’s houses freely. Terri came to know the big old Thorndyke mansion as well as the cabins at the lake.
When school started, Terri’s place in the ruthless teenage hierarchy had changed. No one could understand why the-boy-every-girl-wanted had chosen her, but he had. Terri was asked to parties and overnighters, and even let in on the school gossip. At the lake, Brody hired three boys to do what Terri did so she could have time with Billy.
Their senior year was sublime. Laughter, lovemaking, arguments, making up. It was all there. LIFE. That’s what they’d shared.
And it had all ended in one horrible, devastating, irreversible moment. One day heaven, the next hell.
Billy wanted to go on, but Terri couldn’t. The sins of her mother hung over her too strongly. She’d spent her life trying to make people look at her family differently. She could not go through the rest of her life with yet another mark against her.
Billy’s family left town. He told her they were going to leave—and he begged her to go with them.
“You’re asking me to choose between you and my father.”
“I am,” Billy said. “But in return, I will give you my life. You will have it all.”
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go with Billy, knowing what she did, any more than she could make an effort to take Nate away from Stacy.
She wasn’t so innocent that she didn’t know how much Nate liked her. Whereas she and Billy had been different people, it was as if she and Nate were two halves of a whole. Never had she ever felt so at ease with a person as she did with Nate.
She’d had to teach Billy things. “No! Pick up that end,” she’d snap at him.
One time she was so bad-tempered at his not knowing how to do things, that he’d put his arms around her—then fallen sideways into the lake. It had taken him an hour of kisses to calm her anger down over that.
There was nothing like that with Nate. He’d done so much in his life that there wasn’t much she needed to teach him. And his way with people! She’d never seen anything like it. Billy was likable, but Nate went beyond that. He soothed people, made them feel better. He joined them, matched them up. He—
Terri took a breath. They didn’t belong to her. Neither man was hers and was never going to be. It should help that each separation was her choice, but it didn’t.