Holly Grace could see he was still worried. "I think you care more about her than you're letting on. Although to tell you the truth-other than the fact that she's knockout gorgeous-I don't see exactly why."

"She's different, is all. I'll tell you one thing. I never in all my life got involved with a woman so different from me. Opposites may attract in the beginning, but they don't stick together too well."

She looked at him, a brief sadness in her eyes. "Sometimes people who are the same don't do too good a job of it, either."

He walked over to her, moving in that slow, sexy way that used to melt her bones. He pulled her into his arms to dance, humming "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" into her ear. Even with improvised music, their bodies moved together perfectly, as if they'd been dancing with each other for a million years. "Damn, you're tall when you wear those shoes," he complained.

"Kinda makes you nervous, doesn't it? Having to look at me straight on."

"If Bobby walks in here and sees you wearing those high heels on his new basketball floor, you're on

your own."

"It's still hard for me to think of Bobby Fritchie as Wynette's basketball coach. I remember hanging around the office door while the two of you served morning detention."

"You're a liar, Holly Grace Beaudine. I never served a morning detention in my life. I used to take swats instead."

"You did, too, and you know it. Miss Sybil raised so much hell every time any of the teachers gave you swats that they got tired of tangling with her."

"You remember it your way, and I'll remember it mine." Dallie rested his cheek against hers. "Seeing you here reminds me of that homecoming dance. I don't think I ever sweat so much in my life. All the time we were dancing, I kept having to put more space between us because of the effect you were having on me. All I could think about was getting you alone in that El Dorado I'd borrowed, except I knew that even after I had you alone, I couldn't touch you because of the way we'd talked. Most miserable night I ever spent in my life."

"As I remember, your miserable nights didn't last too long. I must have been the easiest girl in the county. Damn, I got so I couldn't think about anything except having sex with you. I needed to wash the feel of Billy T off me so bad I was willing to go to hell for it…"

Holly Grace lay back on the narrow bed in Dallie's shabby room, her eyes pressed shut as he pushed his finger up inside her. He groaned and rubbed himself against her thigh. The denim of his jeans felt rough against the bare skin of her leg. Her panties lay on the linoleum floor next to the bed along with her shoes, but other than that she was still more or less dressed-white blouse unbuttoned to the waist, bra unfastened and pushed to the side, wool skirt modestly covering Dallie's hand while it explored between her legs.

"Please…" she whispered. She arched against his palm. His breathing sounded heavy and strangled in her ear, his hips moved rhythmically against her thigh. She didn't think she could stand it any longer. Over the past two months, their petting sessions had grown heavier and heavier until they could think of nothing else. But still they held back- Holly Grace because she didn't want him to think she was fast, Dallie because he didn't want her to think he was like Billy T.

Suddenly she crumpled her hand into a fist and hit him behind the shoulder. He jerked away, his lips wet and swollen from kissing her, his chin red. "Why'd you do that?"

"Because I can't stand this anymore!" she exclaimed. "I want to do it! I know it's wrong. I know I shouldn't let you, but I just can't stand it anymore. I feel like I'm on fire." She tried to make him understand. "All those months, Billy T made me do it. All those months he hurt me. Don't I have the right, just once, to choose for myself?"

Dallie looked at her for a long time to make sure she was serious. "I don't want you to think- I love you, Holly Grace. I love you more than I ever loved anybody in my entire life. I'll still love you even if you say no."

Sitting up, she pulled off her blouse and slipped her bra straps down over her shoulders. "I'm tired of saying no."

Even though they had touched each other everywhere, they'd made it a rule to keep most of their clothes on, so it was the first time he'd seen her bare from the waist up. He looked at her with awe and then reached out and stroked a gentle finger down over her breast. "You're so beautiful, baby," he said, his voice choked.

A surge of wonder shot through her at the emotion in his expression and she found that she wanted to give everything she had to this boy who treated her with so much tenderness. She leaned forward, thrust her thumbs into the tops of her knee socks, and stripped them off. Then she unfastened the waistband of her skirt, lifting up her hips to slip it down. He pulled off his T-shirt and his jeans, then slid down his briefs. She drank in the beauty of his thin young body as he lay down beside her and tenderly wound his fingers through her hair. She lifted her head off the crumpled pillow to kiss him and slid her tongue into his mouth. He groaned and accepted it. Their kisses grew deeper until they were moaning and sucking on each other's lips and tongues, their long legs twisting together, their blond hair dampened with sweat.

"I don't want you to get pregnant," he whispered into her mouth. "I'll just-I'll just put it in a little bit."

But of course he didn't, and it was the best thing she'd ever felt. She uttered a low moan deep in her throat as she came, and he quickly followed, shuddering in her arms as if he'd been shot through with a bullet. The whole thing was over in less than a minute.

By graduation day they were using rubbers, but by that time, she was already pregnant and he refused to help her find the money for an abortion. "Abortion is wrong when two people love each other," he shouted, pointing his finger at her. And then his voice had softened. "I know we planned to wait until I graduated from A &M, but we'll get married now. Except for Skeet, you're the only good thing that's ever happened to me in my life."

"I can't have a baby now," she cried. "I'm seventeen! I'm going to San Antonio to get a job. I want to make something of myself. Having a baby now will ruin my whole life."

"How can you say that? Don't you love me, Holly Grace?"

"Of course I do. But loving's not always enough."

As she saw the agony in his eyes, that familiar helpless feeling closed around her. It stayed with her right through the wedding in Pastor Leary's study.

Dallie quit humming in the middle of the chorus to "Good Vibrations" and came to a stop on the free-throw line. "Did you really tell Bobby Fritchie you'd go out with him tonight?"

Holly Grace had been performing an intricate harmony, and she continued singing for a few measures without him. "Not exactly. But I thought about it. I get so aggravated when you're late."

Dallie let her go and gave her a long look. "If you really want a divorce, you know I'll go along with it."

"I know." She walked over to the bleachers and sat down, stretching out her legs in front of her and putting a small scratch in Coach Fritchie's new varnish with the heel of her shoe. "Since I don't have any plans to get married again, I'm happy with things just like they are."

Dallie smiled and walked forward along the center court line to sit on the bleachers beside her. "I hope New York City works out for you, baby. I really do. You know I want to see you happy about more

than I want anything in the world."

"I know you do. Same goes for me."

She began to talk about Winona and Ed, about Miss Sybil and the other things they usually discussed whenever they were together in Wynette. He only listened with half his mind. The other half was remembering two teenagers with troubled pasts, a baby, and no money. Now he realized that they hadn't had a chance, but they had loved each other, and they had put up a good fight…

Skeet took a construction job in Austin to help out as much as he could, but it wasn't union work so it didn't pay too well. Dallie worked for a roofer when he wasn't in class or trying to pick up some extra cash on the golf course. They had to send Winona money, and there was never enough.

Dallie had lived with poverty for so long it didn't bother him too much, but it was different for Holly Grace. She got this helpless, panicked look in her eyes that sank right into his veins and froze his blood. It made him feel that he was failing her, and he started arguments-bitter fights where he accused her of not doing her share. He said she didn't keep the house clean enough, or he told her she was too lazy to cook him a good meal. She countered by accusing him of not providing for his family, insisting that he should quit playing golf and study engineering instead.

"I don't want to be an engineer," he retorted during an especially fierce argument. Banging one of his books down on the scratched surface of the kitchen table, he added, "I want to study literature, and I want to play golf!"

She threw the dish towel at him. "If you want to play golf so bad, why are you wasting money studying literature?"

He threw the towel right back. "Nobody in my family ever graduated from college! I'm going to be the first." Danny started to cry at the angry sound of his father's voice. Dallie picked him up, buried his face in the baby's blond curls, and refused to look at Holly Grace. How could he explain that he had something to prove when even he didn't know what it was?

As similar as they were in so many ways, they wanted different things from life. Their fights began to escalate until they attacked each other's most vulnerable spots, and then they felt sick inside because of the way they hurt each other. Skeet said they fought because they were both so young that they were pretty much raising each other right along with Danny. It was true.

"I wish you'd stop walking around with that surly look on your face all the time," Holly Grace said one day as she dabbed Clearasil on one of the pimples that still occasionally popped out on Dallie's chin. "Don't you understand that the first step toward being a man is to stop pretending to be one."

"What do you know about being a man?" he replied, grabbing her around the waist and pulling her down on his lap. They made love, but a few hours later he was scolding her for not standing up straight.

"You walk around with your shoulders hunched over just because you think your breasts are too big."

"I do not," Holly Grace retorted hotly.

"Yes, you do and you know it." He tilted up her chin so she was looking him straight in the eye. "Baby, when are you going to stop blaming yourself for what ol' Billy T did to you?"

Eventually, Dallie's words took hold and Holly Grace let go of the past.

Unfortunately, all of their confrontations didn't end as well. "You've got an attitude problem," Dallie accused her at the end of several days of arguing about money. "Nothing is ever good enough for you."

"I want to be somebody!" she countered. "I'm the one stuck here with a baby while you go to college."

"As soon as I'm done, you can go. We've talked about it a hundred times."

"It'll be too late by then," she said. "My life will be half over."

Their marriage was already rocky, and then Danny died.

Dallie's guilt after Danny's death was like a fast-growing cancer. Right away they moved from the house where it happened, but night after night he dreamed about the cistern cover. In his dreams he saw the broken hinge and he turned away toward the old wooden garage to get his tools so he could fix it. But he never made it to the garage. Instead, he found himself back in Wynette or standing next to the trailer outside Houston where he had lived while he was growing up. He knew he had to get back to that cistern cover, had to get it fixed, but something kept stopping him.

He would wake up covered with sweat, the sheets tangled around him. Sometimes Holly Grace was already awake, her shoulders shaking, her face turned into the pillow to muffle the sound of her crying. In all the time he'd known her nothing had ever made her cry. Not when Billy T hit her in the stomach with his fist; not when she was scared because they were just kids and they didn't have any money; not even at Danny's funeral where she had sat as if she was carved out of stone while he cried like a baby. But now that she was crying, he knew it was the worst sound he had ever heard.

His guilt was a disease, eating away at him. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw Danny running toward him on chubby legs, one strap of his denim coveralls falling down off his shoulder, bright blond curls alight in the sun. He saw those blue eyes wide with wonder and the long lashes that curled on his cheeks when he slept. He heard Danny's squeal of laughter, remembered the way he had sucked his fingers when he got tired. He saw Danny in his mind, and then he heard Holly Grace crying, and as her shoulders quaked helplessly, his guilt intensified until he thought he might die right along with Danny.