“Yes,” Maggie said. “Smart.”
Claire snorted. “I’ve jumped out of a plane.”
“I know,” Maggie said with a wink.
Alice squirmed on the couch. “I’m serious though. There are countless things any one of us or all of us have never done. We’re not given freaking titles for it. If you have intercourse—”
“I really wish you’d stop being so profane,” Miss Mills said.
“That’s also a social construct,” Alice said. “What’s profane to one group is not necessarily profane to another. But as I was saying, you don’t lose anything when you have intercourse for the first time—”
“Actually, I lost a bracelet the first time I did it,” Anna said.
Everyone started laughing again, but Alice felt tears welling. It was so frustrating to know something was true and not be able to properly convince others. But she wasn’t giving up. “We are not defined by our sexual experiences. After having intercourse for the first time, neither person leaves with anything—”
“Oh, I for sure did,” Trista said. “And her name is Sammie.”
Alice stood and stomped her foot. “There is no such thing as virginity! And furthermore, we don’t need men in order to learn how to pleasure our own bodies. We’re perfectly capable of pleasuring ourselves. Most women require clitoral stimulation—”
“Goodness,” Miss Mills said. “The only thing worse than premarital relations is a woman ringing the devil’s doorbell.”
At the mention of the devil’s doorbell, the room dissolved into mayhem. Maggie laughed so hard that she slid off the couch, while Claire howled into a pillow. Anna giggled uncontrollably, and Trista and Brittany grabbed their phones, presumably to Google devil’s doorbell.
Miss Mills just sat quietly, fanning herself frantically with a copy of Ladies’ Daily Devotions.
Alice had lost control of herself and of the meeting.
“I just think this conversation is making people uncomfortable, is all,” Alice said. “Particularly Miss Mills. How do you think she feels with all this talk of virginity? Miss Mills, I apologize if we’ve made you uncomfortable.”
“No apology necessary. All is right with me and the Lord. He has forgiven me for my past transgressions, including the one in the church fellowship hall with the son of a Bible salesman in 1965.”
Everyone gasped, and then Trista squealed as Alice covered her mouth with her hand.
“Miss Mills!” Trista said. “I just assumed—”
“The good Lord says that when you assume you make an a-s-s out of u and me,” she said.
Alice didn’t think that was anywhere in the Bible.
“And anyway,” Miss Mills continued. “I was tricked by Satan. And I doubt very seriously, especially in this day and age, that there is a grown woman walking around who hasn’t been. The devil is a rascal, and only the good Lord himself is perfect. The rest of us are sinners.”
Everyone in the room had their mouths hanging open, and Alice was no exception. She snapped it shut.
Oh my God, was it possible that she was literally the only thirty-two-year-old virgin on the planet?
She squared her shoulders, crossed her arms, and harrumphed quietly to herself.
“I think it’s time to change the subject,” Alice said. “I have plans tonight, so we’d better discuss this book and be done with it.”
Everyone went completely silent, as if what Alice had just said was even more shocking than Miss Mills’s revelation.
Claire raised an eyebrow. “Are you okay, Alice?”
Alice was almost never rude. And by almost, she meant never. Never ever. What had gotten into her? “I’m so sorry. Please excuse my manners. It’s just that—”
Claire raised the other eyebrow.
“I’m seeing Beau later, and I’m looking forward to it,” Alice finished.
Claire couldn’t raise her eyebrows any farther without surgical assistance, so she switched course by narrowing her eyes. Everyone else nodded in understanding, as if it was perfectly reasonable for Alice to be so excited and anxious to see Beau that she’d let her manners slip.
But not Claire. She was still eyeing Alice suspiciously. Had she just figured out that Alice wasn’t really dating Beau, and that on top of it, she was a virgin?
Not that virgins existed.
Chapter
Seventeen
Beau sat on the porch with his feet propped up on the railing. He’d had to drive all the way to Fort Worth to pick up a new bull, a purebred Angus named Abiding Dude. Gerome said he didn’t think anyone ever named a bull while sober.
In the nearly eight hours Beau had spent on the road, he’d finished listening to the third book. Now he was looking closely at the paperback Alice had given him. And he was doing more than simply picking out recognizable words on the pages. He was actually decoding the ones he didn’t know, and it was getting easier and easier. Allie had told him that if he kept using the reading program, something would click. And it definitely had. You build words like you build anything. With parts. And the parts go in a certain order. And for some reason, they were now going in the same order every time.
Beau was feeling more and more confident by the day. Bryce had been at the Rockin’ H nearly all week, and Beau had handled everything himself. By the time his contract with Alice was up, everything was going to be working out just fine.
His gut clenched. At exactly midnight on the night of the wedding, everything would go back to the way it was before where he and Alice were concerned. Which was to say, back to the occasional howdy in the library or the Corner Café. Unless maybe . . .
Nah. She wouldn’t be interested in continuing their friendship. That’s why she’d gone to the trouble of typing up a fucking contract. The woman wanted a definite end date for their arrangement. And why wouldn’t she? They had absolutely nothing in common. She had her lady friends in Austin who were busy smashing the patriarchy and whatnot. Allie wasn’t going to want to go fishing or skinny-dipping or stargazing with a cowboy.
He closed his book at the sound of tires
