Free The Donzerly Light by Ryne Douglas Pearson

was ablaze, and she knew at that moment what it was to be in love.
    Then she had run home. Just next door it was on McChesney Street in West Porter, Wisconsin, but still she had run. Faster than she could ever remember running. Flying, almost, up her own steps, across the deep porch, through the door and toward the kitchen, and slowing there before entering. Catching the breath that had left her along the way, regaining some sense of calm before strolling casually (casually with her thoughts all ajumble and her heart still thumpthumpthumping ) to the counter where her mother was rolling out a sheet of cookie dough.
    She had returned the cookbook, she told her mother, and her mother had smiled and kept on rolling. Carrie picked at the corner of the dough and slipped the piece into her mouth. It was sweet, but the whole world was a sweet thing right then. And then she had asked the question. Or rather she had made the statement that begged a reply. She had said some boy (he was tall, and had green eyes, and kind of red kind of blonde hair, and he looked kind of sad but maybe it was just a serious look in those green eyes that shimmered like gemstones, and oh God he was handsome!) Answered the door, and her mother explained that that was Miss Wells’ nephew Jay, and that he had come to live with her because his father and his mother—who was Miss Wells’ sister—had died in an automobile accident. A tragedy, really, the way it happened, a police car chasing someone had broadsided his parents car at an intersection, killing them horribly, but miraculously leaving their only child, Jay, in the back seat with nary a scratch. And then her mother had said something to which Carrie had almost let a giggle slip. She had said it would be a kindly thing to do if Carrie would make nice with Jay.
    And make nice she had.
    They weren’t in the same classes at Roosevelt Junior High once summer ended and school began again, but she found enough reason to bump into him in the halls between class or in the cafeteria during lunch. Sometimes they would sit together over trays of small hamburgers and dry, saltless fries. Often they would walk home together, her books always ending up under his arm somehow. Twice she was able to drag him to the movies. All were practices which began to draw the inevitable taunts of ‘Two little love birds sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G’ from their schoolmates. But she didn’t care, and it seemed to her that Jay was also able to tune them out, and in the end the teasing became a strangely accurate footnote to the beginning of THEM. Because the Saturday after Thanksgiving, side by side on the low branch of a tree in the field behind his aunt’s house, their legs dangling and every so often touching about the knees, a close crack of dry thunder had startled her and she had leaned close to him. Then she felt his arm come up and his hand settle on her shoulder, and when she looked up she saw that he was already looking at her, and with every part of her tingling with anticipation it happened. His face moved toward her, and hers toward him, and their eyes closed slowly as if some sudden drowsiness had set upon them both. And in the second, the minute, the eternity after that, all that there was was...feeling. Their lips coming together so softly, with a tentativeness that made her want to pull back and made her want to pull him closer, to kiss him hard like people did in the movies. But she did not kiss him harder. She let it be gentle, and tender, and awkward, just lips and no tongue, and still she found herself thinking during the heights of this mini-passion ‘ Were making love ’.
    And they had, she still believed. Maybe not in the biblical sense, but they had made new love. Had made their love real .
    And real it was. Real it became. A giddy, infatuate love that grew with them over the years. Through junior high and high school, raging and cooling as young love could, but never dying, not even when she