Beyond Nostalgia by Tom Winton Read Free Book Online

and just being with her was enough for now. I wasn't going to rush intimacy this time. When the time was right for both of us, I'd know it. But still, I wanted us to have a little privacy so I lead her to two end seats, next to the wall, three rows from the top. By this time, 'Gone with the Wind' had been playing for three straight weeks and attendance at the Keith's was beginning to wane. The flick was no longer attracting sellout crowds, and that was good. It turned out that nobody would sit in our immediate vicinity, nobody next to or behind us. We were so far up there that, when the volume dropped during the romantic scenes, we could hear the rapid-fire clicking from the projection window high on the wall behind us.
     
    It was during one such romantic scene, well after the intermission that we began to kiss along with Rhett and Scarlet. When Theresa snuggled closer to me, I figured it might be some sort of sign, a signal maybe. So I kissed her, tentatively at first, not knowing how she'd react, just a benign meeting of our lips. But soon, once we'd gotten a good taste of each other, our desires overshadowed any inhibitions we might have had. Arms locked tightly around one another, fingertips in each other's hair, massaging, we eased naturally into that ancient primeval ritual. We kissed away the rest of the theater, the whole rest of the world. Other than our two throbbing hearts and the cells of our bodies, nothing existed. For the moment, we were Adam and Eve. Everything else had gone extinct, or better yet, not yet been created. 
     
    A hundred and nine pounds of solid gold in my arms, my chest firm against her breasts, only the arm rest separating us, our breathing quickened and deepened. Then Theresa surprised me. She slid to the edge of her seat, pivoting sideways, and laid her leg over the top of my thigh. Deep in my stomach a strange wonderful feeling stirred. I felt like I was going to lift-off, right out of that velvet chair, when ever-so-gently she pulled her lips from mine, pecked them twice, then went to work on my neck. Her face brushing inside my high-boy collar, she slid her open mouth along the thin sensitive skin on my neck, occasionally pausing, kissing it, warming it with the heat of her rhythmic breath.
     
    My response to all this stimulation was purely natural, not contrived or mechanical like it had been with all those nameless girls before Theresa. I slid my hand, slowly, from the long wispy hairs on the nape of her neck down inside the front of her tennis sweater and shirt, intentionally telegraphing the movement, giving her ample opportunity to stop me if she wanted. But she didn't stop me. Unchallenged, slowly, my hand found its way beneath a bra cup coming to rest on her bare breast. Ever so delicately I began to massage her.
     
    Slowly, but deliberately, she withdrew her face from where it laid nestled in my neck. Raising her half-closed eyes to mine, she brushed aside a tress of hair. Oh no , I thought, here it comes. She's going to stop me and I'm gonna feel like an A-1 jerk. But, she didn't. Again she didn't say a word, but her bedroom eyes cried out to mine. They told me, "It's OK, Dean, but you better be who I hope you are, who I think you are. Please … please be for real." 
     
    Then, as I held her in my palm, feeling the hard swell of her nipple against my fingertips, she kissed my mouth again, lustfully and for a long time. Right then and there, in the Keith's balcony that spring night in 1967, Theresa Wayman sequestered my heart. I knew then I was deeply and irrevocably in love with her. 
     

     

     

Chapter 5
     
     
     
     
     
    Two weeks after 'Gone with the Wind', I had the displeasure of meeting Theresa's mother.
     
    It was late at night, May fifth, my eighteenth birthday. I was wearing Theresa's gift on my left wrist and had been stealing glances at it ever since she'd given it to me earlier that evening. She'd gone out and bought me that ID bracelet I liked, the one