Page 2 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

Katie had heard about this spot from three different girls at school. They had all described the same hickory, the same dirt turnaround, the same beer cans crushed in the dust. She’d caught sight of the cans glinting in the headlights before Josh turned them off. This was the place, all right.

Josh reached for the radio and turned it on. A Morgan Wallen song was already playing, and the slow melody began to ease the tension in her body. Maybe she was overreacting. Others came out here all the time, and nothing bad ever happened to them.

She and Josh sat in silence, listening to the music for a while.

“We don’t have to stay here, Katie.” Josh was the first to speak. He tried to hide his disappointment, but he wasn’t very good at it. “I can drive you home.”

The dashboard glow lit one side of his face as he studied her. His straight nose. The way one corner of his mouth always sat a little higher than the other, even when he wasn’t smiling. The small notch in the lobe of his left ear from where his cousin had talked him into getting it pierced freshman year. The piercing had closed up, but the indentation remained.

“I’m sorry, Josh,” Katie whispered, leaning forward slightly. She didn’t want the evening to end like this. She wanted more. Much more. “I didn’t mean to ruin it. I want to be here.”

“You sure?” Josh asked, his eyes searching hers.

“I’m sure,” Katie murmured, lifting her hand from her lap.

“Because we don’t have to do anything,” Josh added, his voice low and serious, and her stomach did something small and warm at the sound of it.

“Josh,” Katie whispered, reaching across the console to lay her palm against the side of his face. His skin was warm under her hand. He was close enough now that his cologne had replaced the sweet-sour smell of the corn, and for a brief second, the field was somewhere far away. All thoughts of Missy Claymont, Kalen Telfort, and the Threshing Man began to recede into the surrounding dark. “Kiss me.”

He kissed her.

The first one was a tentative question.

The second one was a perfect answer.

By the third one, she slid her fingers from his cheek to the back of his neck, where his hair was clipped close. The first boy she had ever kissed had been all hurry, teeth, and fumbling touches. Josh was the opposite, so unhurried that she wasn’t quite sure what to do with her hands anymore.

They managed to move into the back seat, in a clumsy way that left them both giggling against each other’s mouths. Her knee hit the front seat. His elbow hit the back door. Her hair caught on the seat buckle, and she huffed a laugh while he worked it loose, and by the time they were untangled, the doubt she had been carrying since the bowling alley was gone.

He kissed her properly after that, his hand settling at the small of her back, warm against the bare strip of skin where her shirt had come away from the waist of her jeans. The seat’s leather was cool on her arm. And underneath everything, the radio kept playing low, while the corn kept up its dry whisper through the half-open windows.

Somewhere out past the tree, a screech owl called once, and Katie paused with her hand half under his shirt. The radio cut to static. A short, hard burst of white noise where the steel guitar had been.

Katie froze.

Josh didn’t seem to notice.

Then the steel guitar came back, mid-phrase, as if it had never been gone at all.

“Did you hear that?” Katie whispered against his lips, pulling back slightly with her hand still on his chest.

“Hear what?” Josh murmured, his mouth following hers in the half-inch she had drawn away.

“The radio. It just⁠—”

“Bad reception, babe,” Josh said softly, kissing the corner of her mouth. “It happens all the time out here. We’re probably picking up Emberwood off the bounce.”

“Right,” Katie agreed somewhat hesitantly. “Bad reception.”

“You sure you’re good?” Josh asked, his thumb finding the line of her jaw.

“I’m good,” Katie whispered, lifting her chin to kiss him before he could ask a third time. She was choosing this. She kissed him harder. “I⁠—”

Something moved in the corn.

Not the wind. Not the chaotic whispers that had been there the whole time, but instead, a gradual movement of dry leaves giving way against something or someone. She was certain the sound had slowly passed through a place that had once been still.

It was a deer.