Make Hay While the Sun Shines
Lit Up — August’s Prompt: Harvest Season
“I have to go,” he says, sitting up unexpectedly in my bed.
“What?” I ask, both startled and insecure. He is way out of my league and I am still so inexperienced. I’ve never had a boyfriend and he certainly isn’t that. Not yet.
“Can you smell it?” he asks.
I sniff the air and can only smell the scent of my clean sheets and his Polo cologne. “Smell what?”
“The dew. It’s that time of the night. I have to go cut hay.”
“At 2:30 in the morning?”
Pulling on his boots and sliding his battered gray Stetson onto his head, he says, “Yeah, you have to bring it in when it’s wet. We only have a couple of hours and my dad will be pissed if I’m not there to help.”
He kisses my cheek, lingers not one moment, and is gone.
My bedroom looks out onto a dirt road and our pebble driveway. I roll to my side and watch the taillights on his rusty Ford 150. A farm truck. He turns right at the front gate and I roll back over and stare at the ceiling. Restless.
We’d only been making out a little, shoes off but everything else on. We’d just gotten to the point where he tentatively slipped a hand under my bra.
