“Good morning, and happy Saint Valentine’s Day, girls!” Reverend James began his sermon with particular emphasis, making his way up the aisle of the school chapel to the pulpit. “Can anyone here tell me what this day is all about?”

It was my last semester at True Light School for Girls, and Valentine’s Day had happened to fall on a Sunday this year.

I was sure that what I knew of this notoriously lascivious day was not the answer Reverend James was looking for. Or, maybe it was exactly the answer he was looking for so that he could shoot it down, but it was definitely not the right answer.

Whatever knowledge my classmates had, none of them seemed ready to offer it up either.

“Come on, don’t be shy,” said Reverend James. “Everyone here has heard of Valentine’s Day before today, right? From friends? Family? Sneaking some TV in the summer?”

Cautiously, three hundred and fifty-four girls bobbed our heads in acknowledgment.

“All right, then!” he said triumphantly. “Tell me. What have you heard?”

We all knew that he would pry some participation out of someone, sooner or later, but he hadn’t done it yet.

“Everyone who can tell me one thing associated with Valentine’s Day gets one of these,” he sighed, pulling a giant bag of heart-shaped, foil-wrapped chocolates from under the pulpit and holding one of them up to the light.

“Chocolate,” a girl near the front spoke up, just loud enough for everyone to hear, thanks to the choir-friendly acoustics.

“Chocolate!” Reverend James repeated for any who had not heard, tossing her the candy in his hand. “That was a gimme. What else?”

“Hearts,” said someone else.

“Hearts! Too easy,” he said, but tossed her the heart anyway.

“Roses,” another girl offered, and received her prize.

I was sitting in the second-to-last pew, between my two best friends, Hannah and Barb, with my hands on my knees, careful as always not to whisper, not to laugh, not to touch my friends or sit too close or look directly at them. Careful not to do anything that would get us shuffled.

My mouth was watering. I hadn’t had chocolate in I didn’t know how long. But I didn’t shout out any Valentine’s Day symbols.

I didn’t, because Barb’s chosen method of rebellion for the day consisted of sitting with her legs apart, taking up too much space for the rest of us to fit in the row while still “leaving room for Jesus,” and making her pleated plaid skirt ride up above the tops of her knee socks. None of the adults had noticed yet.

Well, none of the adults with authority, I should say, since the three of us were technically adults now too, for all the difference it made in our daily lives.

In any case, seeing little slivers of Barb’s bare thighs peeking through into the daylight in the presence of adult adults was a little like watching someone juggle knives. Someone you knew to be mediocre and juggling.

I knew I probably couldn’t save her, but I wasn’t going to be the one to knock her over, either.

So, I kept quiet, and I did my best to listen.

I didn’t always love our reverend’s style or his interpretation of the Word, but I did love God, and between expanding my biblical knowledge through his sermons or doing nothing at all, I’d take expanding my knowledge.

Barb, as usual, made this way of getting through the service as difficult as possible. She had recently pointed out the way Reverend James tended to over-gesticulate with his eyebrows when he got animated. So, now, every time his eyebrows moved, I could sense her looking over at me and mirroring him in search of laughs.

Hannah challenged my focus in her own way. She kept her ankles crossed, knees together, hands folded neatly in her lap, and eyes on Reverend James wherever he went in his rambling about the room.

She smiled faintly at his jokes, nodded and shook her head correctly when he asked his semi-rhetorical questions, but mostly watched him with perfectly unobtrusive, appropriate attention.

She did everything right, to avoid stealing any attention back onto herself, and yet even more than I wanted to giggle with Barb, I wanted to look at Hannah.

I always wanted to look at Hannah. But when she was closed up like this, I felt that I needed to, as well.

Whereas Barb’s casual contempt for the proceedings was right out in the open for all to see, anything could be happening inside Hannah’s head. She could be formulating the mother of all jokes, or incisively contemplating the nature of the universe, or silently imploding, trying once again to crush her whole self into the tiny but endlessly sucking patch of emptiness her father’s indifference seemed to have left inside her.

Whatever the case was today, Barb and I were the only people in the world who knew Hannah well enough to have a chance of catching the near-microscopic clues. It seemed like our duty to be on the lookout.

“Cupid!” someone contributed, in return for candy.

“Cupid,” Reverend James tutted. “He’s a pagan idol, you know.”

“Cards!”

“Yes, definitely cards.”

Just when I thought she wasn’t going to, Barb did it.

“Sex!” she shouted, plain and clear, without changing her position.

Oh well, I tried.

The many, mostly pale shades of skin throughout the room grew collectively pinker.

Two spots of pink even appeared on the reverend’s own cheeks, though they were gone almost as soon as they’d come.

To my surprise, he tossed Barb a candy.

“Yes, sex,” he said to the congregation. “Well done, Barbara. Sit up straight and consider this your warning.”

Barb crossed her arms with a self-satisfied smirk, but she crossed her legs too, and tugged her skirt down over them.

On a school day, the teacher would have shuffled her already and probably assigned some additional punishment too. Reverend James liked for us to think of Sunday mornings in the chapel a place of warmth and refuge, so there was a tiny bit more wiggle room. It wouldn’t stretch beyond that first warning, though.

“Sex,” Reverend James repeated, putting the chocolate bag back in its notch. “That’s really what the secular version of Valentine’s Day comes down to, doesn’t it? The chocolates, the roses, they’re all involved in various rituals people use for arranging sex, aren’t they?”

Heads bobbed again.

“But in case anyone missed that great big clue I gave you at the beginning, Valentine’s Day is a saint’s day. So, as you might imagine, it’s actually about something much higher than that.”

We settled into more comfortable silence, prepared for the meat of the sermon, which we would not be required to assist with.

“Now Saint Valentine lived just a few hundred years after Jesus Himself,” said Reverend James. “Does anyone know what he did to become a saint?”

We answered with more silence. Lovely, permissible silence.

“This was during the time when Christians were still living under Roman rule,” said Reverend James. “The emperor at the time, Claudius II, had outlawed the holy sacrament of marriage. He wanted to make sure the men living under his rule had no commitments higher than serving in his army. So, of course, the thousands of Christians living in the empire who fell in love, who heard God’s call to be fruitful and multiply, they had a choice to make. They could turn away from the call. They could live in sin. Or they could go in search of someone who would marry them against the emperor’s decree. Saint Valentine was the man they turned to. He granted those couples holy matrimony, at the risk of his own life.”

There were a few quiet sighs around the room. Stories of romance were rare at True Light, and usually shared in whispers after lights out. This was about the sweetest thing to be said aloud in the chapel.

Reverend James held the moment only briefly. He was gaining steam, as he usually did when he shared with us some horrific injustice suffered by our earliest spiritual ancestors.

“Eventually, Emperor Claudius found out what Saint Valentine was up to, and threw him in prison. And what do you think Saint Valentine did then? Did he apologize for serving God’s will, and sharing God’s love, and promise not to do it ever again?”

There were headshakes, but still no need for an answer.

Reverend James provided his own impassioned, “No!” which echoed around the vaulted ceiling.

“Now, it just so happened,” he went on, “that Saint Valentine’s jailer had a daughter, and the daughter was blind. And at this point, the safest thing for our Saint Valentine to do would have been to keep his head down and try to convince everyone that he was not a threat. Instead, he reached out through the bars of his cell, put his hands on that young woman’s eyes, and prayed to God to show His love through her. And when he pulled his hands away, praise Jesus, that woman was able to see, literally see the light of His love and all His creation around her.”

There was a tenser sort of silence for a moment. This sounded dangerously close to a happy ending, which could never be right in a saint story, so it could only come crashing down from here.

“That was Saint Valentine signing his own death warrant,” Reverend James explained. “Because once everyone saw that miracle, that woman accepted Jesus, and her daddy accepted Jesus, and everyone working in the whole blessed jail accepted Jesus. And old Emperor Claudius, he didn’t like that one bit. The weddings, maybe those could have been brushed off, but converting that many of the Emperor’s servants to serve God instead? That could only be answered with death. So that’s how Saint Valentine came home to God’s arms knowing that he had helped spread His love and truth to every last person he could, right up to the end.”

Faces around the chapel varied in their combinations of joy and solemnity.

Barb wiggled her eyebrows some more. I couldn’t help noticing.

“There’s one more chapter to Saint Valentine’s story, though,” said Reverend James. “In the short time they had on Earth together, he and that young woman fell in love. There was no one to marry them, of course. Saint Valentine never got to share in the same earthly joys he helped sanctify for so many others. He never touched any part of that woman but her eyes. But he went to his death leaving her a message of love, his own and God’s, written on the shape of a heart and signed, ‘Your Valentine.’”

A few more sighs escaped.

Mine was one of them. The mouth-watering feeling I’d had at the sight of the chocolate spread through my whole body at the thought of the two lovers spending their whole brief relationship on the opposite side of bars. My skin was all tingly with what I was pretty sure was hunger to touch someone. Once it got started, that feeling was maddeningly hard to get rid of.

Well, there was one thing I’d found that helped for a little while, but I tried to keep it a last resort.

“That is the love we Christians celebrate on Saint Valentine’s Day,” Reverend James raised his finger emphatically. “True, pure, selfless love of the soul. Love that exists in harmony with the love of God, and not against it.”

#

After services, there was brunch, the most flavorful meal of the week, with fruit and even bacon. After that, we were supposed to spend the afternoon of our day of rest in quiet contemplation of our reverend’s words.

In practice, it was some of our freest time. We could go wherever we wanted within the campus’s common areas, as long as we didn’t run, didn’t shout, and stayed in our assigned groups of three.

The privilege of choosing our own groups was one of the most precious we could earn, and the threat of being shuffled out of them was the only thing that could force even Barb to somewhat toe the line.

Legend had it, True Light girls used to be allowed to walk in pairs, until what happened with Madelyn and Ginny.

No one I knew remembered their last names, or what had become of them, or even exactly what it was they had been caught doing, but their first names were immortalized together, etched into the hidden side of a loose brick at the back of the chapel that none of the staff knew about.

If we asked about the policy, we were simply told, “Threes are safer than pairs.”

Once we were outside, Hannah stretched her arms up and outward, fingertips extending to embrace the whole cosmos. She twirled around on the toes of her Mary-Janes, like she was shaking off the crumbling remains of her best-behavior shell.

“Would you look at that sky?” she sighed blissfully. “It’s like a painting. It’s like the painting of the sky all other paintings of sky are trying to imitate.”

I felt a breath of relief slide out of me, now that I could see her properly and be sure she was well.

Then I joined her in looking up.

I loved that she noticed things like that, when she was in a happy mood. I never did. A moment ago, the weather had been nothing to me but a tolerably mild winter afternoon. Now, it was a postcard, saturated with brilliant blues and fluffy whites.

By silent agreement, with Barb slightly in the lead, we headed down toward the boathouse on the campus’s small private lake. There were never any boats in the boathouse, except for when the school rented a few for brochure shoots or open house days, but it was far from everything and had two whole walls, which made it a rare bastion of privacy.

“So, let me get this straight,” said Barb. “Saint Val performed secret weddings for people who legally weren’t allowed to get married. Even though everyone involved could get in big trouble. Even though when the couple said, ‘Guess what? We’re married,’ the emperor could just say, ‘Guess what? No, you’re not. Come fight for me and die, asshole.’”

“They’d still be married in the eyes of God,” Hannah pointed out. “I think that’s why it’s important. He gave people a chance to declare their love before God, so that no matter what happened to them on Earth, as long as they did their best and had faith, they’d get to be together forever in the end.”

The corner of Barb’s mouth that was closest to us curled upward. “Shit, I could do that.”

“Do what? Secretly marry people?” I asked.

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, you’re not ordained, for one thing,” I said.

“So? Those are men’s laws for marriage,” said Barb. “It’s only God’s laws that count, right?”

Barb was really good at saying things like that. Things that you knew were tugging you toward danger, but gave no footholds for argument.

“Are you actually spending your Sunday afternoon contemplating this morning’s sermon?” I teased her instead.

“Fuck no!” said Barb, pulling a cigarette from the pack she kept in her bra, and lighting it.

She and God alone knew where she got them from.

This was the third boarding school Barb’s parents had sent her to, after finding her fooling around shirtless in their basement with her boyfriend and an open bottle of Kalua. Apparently, they’d decided on the spot that she was an alcoholic slut, who needed to be either broken down to her component elements and rebuilt into someone else, or removed from their house and lives forever.

When she’d first arrived, Barb had tried pretty hard to get kicked out of True Light the way she had out of all the others, but True Light was different. They understood that escape was not a punishment, and that their reputation among parents hinged upon being the never-fail place you could contain a troubled girl who had been kicked out of everywhere else.

In her first week, Barb had stayed awake and on her feet in a featureless room for five consecutive days (a school record), rather than join prayers so she could go to bed.

After that, it was like nothing could touch her. She eventually shelved the idea of getting expelled, and instead started to revel in the idea that no matter what she did, no matter how much punishment she incurred, True Light was never going to be able to get rid of her any other way besides putting a diploma in her hand on graduation day.

There was a certain freedom in that, I supposed, though it took a person tougher than me to take advantage of it.

Barb had once made me put my hand on her bare rear end in the dark of the dorms at night, just to show me what all the canings had done to her skin. It was like touching a leather purse.

“Seriously, though,” said Barb, releasing a snort of smoke through her nose, “I kind of like Saint Val. Stain glass windows have a lot of worse role models than him.”

“Well, if we find anyone who needs a secret, not legally binding wedding,” I said, “we’ll let them know where to go.”

The ember of Barb’s cigarette glimmered as she took a draw on it. Her eyes did the same, as she let the smoke out through smiling lips.

“Oh, I think I’ve already found them,” she said.

Her gaze flicked between Hannah and myself.

“Ha,” I said, and followed it up with a little actual laughter, of the nervous variety.

Hannah did the same.

And then the laughter was over, and the moment was still going, and now we had to deal with that.

“No offense,” I said, trying to keep the mood light, “but isn’t this all a little sudden?”

“Sudden?” Barb laughed. “You two have only been joined at the hip, figuratively, of course,” she rolled her eyes, “for the last four years. When you’re not finishing each other’s sentences, you’re planning out your whole future together. How’s it going to go again? You’ve told me a million times.”

“I’m going to be a reverend,” I said, suddenly feeling more guarded about it than the last million times.

“And I’m going to be the music director,” Hannah added in a small voice. “And we’re going to get our own cottage or apartment somewhere, where we can serve the same congregation together.”

“Just the two of you?” Barb prodded her.

I reached out and squeezed Barb’s free hand, trying to root her to us.

I knew that Barb couldn’t wait to leave True Light School and the whole church behind, and build herself a life in “the real world,” as she always put it, but I hoped that she at least felt the same way about Hannah and me that we did about her.

This trinity, this family, that we had formed together, was the whole reason why, in spite of the beatings, the boredom, the mostly flavorless food, the isolation, the ban on physical contact, and all the other things about True Light that Barb kept insisting were not normal, I was not yet ready for senior year to end.

I had never been to Barb’s mythic “real world,” but I had spent time in this world both with and without friends. The with part made True Light the happiest place I had ever been.

“I’m so sorry if we’ve ever made you feel like a third wheel,” I said. “If we thought—”

“Shut up, this has nothing to do with that,” Barb waved me off. “I just feel like doing something nice, something saintly, even, for my two besties. So, go on, stand right there.”

We had reached the boathouse, and she was pointing to the swinging walkway at the lake-facing end, which was now, as always, closed.

Hannah and I looked at each other. I was back to not knowing quite what she was thinking.

“Like you’ve got something better to do with your afternoon? Come on,” said Barb.

We really didn’t, so by the potent twin forces of boredom and peer pressure, Hannah and I sidled out onto the walkway. It was barely even a walkway, really, more of a fancy plank tacked onto the top of the gate that held our nonexistent boats in place. It took a continuous effort not to fall into the frigid water.

Barb grabbed the closest thing we did have to a boat — Reverend James’s personal paddleboard — tossed it into the water inside the boathouse, and stepped out onto it, so that she could stand next to us in a reverend’s position.

“Take each other’s hands,” Barb instructed.

At that moment, the wave from Barb steadying herself on the paddleboard reached the gate walkway and jostled it. Hannah and I grabbed each other’s hands tightly for balance.

Somehow, all three of us managed to stay dry.

“Naomi Eloise Page,” Barb addressed me, her voice pompous and dignified between drags of her cigarette and wobbles of her ankles on the board. “Do you swear before God to love Hannah for as long as you both shall live?”

Even in Barb’s mocking fake reverend voice, it felt so serious, with my full name and God included in there.

I reached for another mood-lightening joke, but I couldn’t think of a gentle way to point out the funniest thing about this whole bit of playacting we were doing. It was downright absurd, the way we were all dancing around the elephant in the room.

Hannah and I were both girls.

Well, women, technically. But that didn’t shrink the elephant, any.

Two girls, two women, didn’t want to marry each other, unless they were….

Which we weren’t, of course.

I mean, not that that made them bad people, the women who did want that. That was one point on which I was willing to fight Reverend James, at least inside my head.

There was nothing in the Bible specifically about lesbians. Well, there was that thing about being fruitful and multiplying, but that was in the beginning, when God had only made a few of each creature. The Earth wasn’t exactly hurting for humans anymore, and no one would tell a celibate preacher, or an infertile husband and wife, that they were defying God by honoring the love they felt for their work or each other.

Two women or two men who loved each other seemed no different to me.

Most of all, I knew that God was love, and what flowed through Reverend James when he talked about those people, was not.

When I had my own church, gay people would be welcomed with open arms.

I just happened not to be one of them, that’s all.

Of course I loved Hannah. Of course I loved her more than anyone else in the world.

But there was nothing unusual about best friends being super close, even at regular high schools. And True Light girls lived together most of the year, with no one but each other.

There was nothing unusual about the fact that I was in no rush to be someplace that had boys, either. The faculty made a point of explaining at every open house how much safer and less stressful it was for us here, secluded from all that.

And there couldn’t be anything unusual about my noticing other girls’ bodies, and finding my attention wandering to them. If it were unusual, why would the adults go to such lengths to keep everyone covered up and distraction-free, even with no boys around?

These were all just parts of a perfectly typical teen girl experience. If I were gay, there’d be some definite sign, wouldn’t there? I’d look at Hannah, and I’d feel….

I looked at her now, and she looked up at me, curiously, anxiously. She lifted one of her hands to brush a lock of her mousy, pin-straight hair behind her ear, and then immediately returned it to mine. I could feel the full weight of her slight frame wavering left and right in my grip, and knew that there was no way on Earth I was letting go.

My heart ached, my body thrummed with the most concentrated form of touch-hunger energy, and I struggled to imagine any sensation I could add to that cocktail to make it more definite than it already was.

Cripes, that was that, wasn’t it?

That was gay.

Gay was me.

Not them, but me.

Every organ inside me seized up, every muscle clenched, and I turned my head reflexively toward the boathouse entrance, absolutely sure that someone was going to be standing there, ready to confirm the righteousness of the paralyzing shame inside me.

But there was no one, and I could not be the one to confirm it myself.

I believed in inclusion. Truly, I did. So why had I fought so hard to kill this part of me that needed it? Why was I still fighting?

Hannah waited for my answer, and I was able to catch a few glimmers of hope slipping into her expression.

If she was hoping for a yes, then that meant she was the same. Gay wasn’t me, after all. It was us. And nothing that Hannah was could be wrong.

“I do,” I said. “I swear, I’ll always love her.”

Hannah beamed at me, and my rigid insides loosened, just a little.

“Hannah Nicole Marshall,” Barb went on. “Do you swear before God to love Naomi for as long as you both shall live?”

Hannah bit her lip, squeezed my hands in half a dozen nervous little pulses, and smiled like I was the most miraculous sunrise she’d ever seen. “I swear,” she whispered.

I felt for a moment as if I were seeing our surroundings through Hannah’s eyes, without her needing to point them out to me.

Barb had picked a beautiful spot for this. In spite of the neglected old boathouse itself, people probably paid good money to get married for real in front of a view like this. The lake beside us was a brilliant reflection of the sky above, so brilliant that it was almost painful to look at from the dim shade of the boathouse itself. Like light at the end of a long tunnel.

“Naomi, would you please tell Hannah about the moment when you first realized how special she was?”

“Uh, that’s not in the script,” I pointed out.

“People personalize vows all the time,” said Barb. “It’s romantic.”

“Well…” I took a breath and looked at Hannah’s hands in mine to avoid the pressure of her gaze. “I guess that would have to be the very first time I ever met you. We were on cafeteria duty together, and it was the quietest duty period I’d ever had. I must have tried to start a conversation six different ways, and I hit an ice wall every time. After a while, I figured you probably just didn’t like me.”

When I glanced up at Hannah’s mouth, it was pressed together, toward an apology I didn’t want.

“And then I dropped a sandwich bun on the floor,” I went on. “I leaned down to pick it up, but you got there first. You tossed it up in the air and tapped it with a ladle so that it flew right into the trash can. And with that same serious look on your face, you pointed, and you said—”

Hannah groaned with half-hearted protest and shook her head.

“You said, ‘Did you see that? I bun-ted it.’”

“That was what did it?” Hannah shouted in disbelief.

“No one who was cold all the way through would share a joke that bad.”

When Hannah finished shaking her head, Barb reversed the question, and I waited, almost afraid to hear what Hannah had seen in me.

I had always wondered. It was no surprise that this girl who could see beauty everywhere had found something to like, but what it could be that had held her interest for years, while surrounded by plenty of other choices of best friend, baffled me.

It felt vain to ask, or even to listen to the answer.

Now Hannah was the one looking down.

“It was fall semester,” she began unsteadily. “After that summer I spent with my dad, trying to ‘make it work.’ When I ended up back here, I was crying every night. I didn’t think anyone knew. I thought I was pretty good at just switching it off when people were looking.”

“You were,” I confirmed.

“And yet, every time I went to bed, there was an extra packet of tissues already under my pillow.”

She looked up at me, with the faintest hint of a smile.

“I thought I was so stealthy,” I said.

“You were,” Hannah confirmed. “It took me weeks to figure out who was doing it.”

There was a warmth creeping upward inside me that the winter breeze couldn’t touch.

“They were only tissues,” I mumbled.

“They weren’t,” said Hannah. “For two months, I’d been trying everything I could think of to get my dad’s attention. To make him look at me, without looking for the quickest, easiest way to get me out of the way of whatever else he had planned for the day. And then I was here, getting too much attention, all of it on my grades, or the length of my skirt, or the respectfulness of my tone, or whatever other way I might be messing up. Most of the time I just wanted to disappear completely.”

She was squeezing my hands very hard now.

“But then you saw me, without even needing to be asked. You saw me in a way that didn’t hurt.”

A rare daytime tear slid out of the corner of one of her eyes.

I swallowed, hard, and cleared my throat. “Uh, can I get a do-over on my personalized vow?”

“Nope!” Barb chirped, and went on. “Naomi, will you love Hannah above all others? Will you be faithful to her, forsaking all others, except, you know, by enthusiastic mutual agreement?”

Faithful. Forever. Gosh, this was heavy stuff.

Love was easy to promise. Love had so many meanings, from romantic love to more of a general, “love thy neighbor” type. Now we were getting down to the real promises, the ones that could be broken, and break hearts with them.

My ears were ringing, resonating with significance, so loudly that I couldn’t even process the extra part that Barb had tacked on to the end of the question to make it more Barb-like and ask her what the heck she was talking about. I was done with jokes.

“I swear,” I said.

Barb reversed the question.

“I swear,” said Hannah.

“Then in the tradition of Saint Valentine,” said Barb, “I hereby recognize your commitment to each other before God. And what God has joined together, let no man rend asunder.”

Barb let these words hang in the air for a long moment.

I found myself looking at Hannah’s mouth, the natural brightness of it, the way her tongue slid repeatedly over the inner edges of her lips. I wondered if this was a new tell of hers I was learning, a sign of unconscious preparation.

“Go on,” said Barb.

My body was convinced it was teetering on the edge of something much deeper than True Light School's little no-name lake. I wanted this, and in my experience, things I wanted were either to be resisted, or to be waited endlessly for.

“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” Barb pretended to cover her eyes with parted fingers but went on chanting, “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”

Everything before this was just words. Not that words didn’t matter, but—

Hannah pulled me closer and brought her mouth up to mine.

#

There was no going back. I had a fleeting image of a quick, dignified peck on the lips, like at the end of a Disney movie, but the reality swept it instantly aside. Hannah’s kiss was simultaneously soft and forceful, and she worked her way methodically around my mouth, drawing one of my lips between hers, and then the other, stroking them with her tongue and gently sucking my own tongue out toward her.

My ears rang louder, and my heart hammered, high on that same sense of significance, like it was one of those terrifying stimulant drugs we were warned about in seminars.

If Hannah didn’t stop soon, I thought I might just die from it, because there was no way in Heaven or Earth that I was going to be able to pull away while she was still going.

It was the sound of Barb clambering off the paddleboard and back onto the wooden floor that eventually led us to turn our heads away from each other.

“Where are you going?” I panted, my voice barely reaching across the boathouse, as Barb hung the paddleboard back on the wall and then kept walking.

“To contemplate,” she answered sarcastically, sitting down right in the middle of the landside entrance of the boathouse, facing outward. “And start loud theological discussions with anyone who happens by.”

Hannah and I shuffled our way carefully off the gate walkway and back onto solid floor, catching each other’s stumbles.

As we moved, we realized together that, with Barb on one side and the winter-cold lake on the other, this little house around us almost had four walls.

“Huh. I guess threes really are safer than pairs,” said Hannah, somehow both breathless and deadpan.

I had the urge to both laugh and kiss her again and couldn’t decide which, so I soon found myself with my lips locked to hers, discovering that we fit together so well that I could steal hysterical gulps of air through her nose instead of my own.

We’d have to find a way to thank Barb later. To thank her now would require freeing my mouth for an unthinkably long pair of seconds.

Hannah and I sank onto the floor in a completely unplanned, stumbling way that probably bruised my knees, but I wouldn’t know until tomorrow, which might as well be never. She found her way onto my lap, legs wrapped around me with our skirts bunched up to our waists between us. I could feel that bare stretch of her skin, that length of thigh between socks and panties, pressed warmly against the same bare stretch of mine.

She braced her feet on the ground, seemingly just so that she could brush that skin back and forth, keeping up the sensation of contact, rather than let it become static and numb.

Breaking the kiss even long enough to whisper in Hannah’s ear felt like a tremendous task, but I had to.

“How real?” I asked, looking over her shoulder, out at the lake. “How real is this to you? Is this really…?”

Hannah pushed me far enough back to look at me.

“A wedding night,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was answering my question or just finishing it.

“A wedding night?” I asked.

“A wedding night,” she said again, this time with a tiny, rapid nod, and a smile that grew steadily from anxious to wild.

When that smile had spread as far as it could across her face, I felt it spread across mine too.

Tentatively, I ran my hands over Hannah’s back, feeling the ridge of her bra, the taper of her waist down from her ribs. I wanted so much more of her skin, of that incredible sensation of contact. I wondered now how I’d lived so long without it. But there was a light breeze picking up, chilled by the surface of the lake, and I worried about making her cold.

With my left hand flat on the floor and Hannah still in my lap, I lifted myself up and turned us around so that I was between her and the lakeside wind.

After dusting that hand off on my own skirt, I started on the buttons of Hannah’s cardigan and the white blouse underneath. She did the same with mine. We put our arms around each other, under the clothes, to unfasten each other’s bras and let them hang loosely, out of place, between us.

Just like that, there was skin, so much new, bare skin between us to explore, with our clothes still wrapped protectively around the outside of our shared, warm little space.

I ran my fingers experimentally over what I could now see and reach of Hannah, starting with her sharp collarbones, her smooth abdomen. Slowly, timidly, I worked my way up to what I really wanted to do, which was hold her small, always well-hidden breasts, and turn them from a theoretical concept into a tangible reality in my hands.

As was always the case when Hannah got it into her head to do something, she was braver than me. When my hands were close, she arched her back and pressed her breasts right into them.

They did indeed exist, two soft, delicate domes, tipped with hard peaks that dug pleasantly into my palms.

Then she ducked her head down and kissed one of my breasts, drawing the nipple into her mouth with the same soft sucking motion she had used to draw out my tongue.

Pulses of sensation, the most intense kind yet, radiated through my body, raising goosebumps over every surface that could hold them, totally unrelated to the breeze.

I wanted it to continue, but wanted even more to try the same on her.

I nudged Hannah’s face gently upward to give myself room to lower mine, and kissed one of those hard peaks. I watched with sheer awe as the goosebumps spread across her skin before my eyes.

We alternated this way for a while, playfully pushing each other back and forth to take our turns teasing the other’s nipples with our lips and tongues, feeling the way the skin hardened and cinched together in response. Occasionally, one of us would bring the other back up for another long kiss, leaving our hands to keep up the contact on our chests.

During one of these kissing stretches, Hannah pulled herself even closer on my lap, rubbing the thin cotton layer of her panties right up against mine.

I could feel moisture where our positions misaligned just slightly, and the edges of her panties touched my bare inner thigh. Moisture and so, so much warmth.

Gathering my resolve to be the brave one for at least one step, I reached my right hand down and, with an embarrassing amount of shaky fumbling, slipped it under the hem of her skirt.

I brushed my fingers over the fabric between her legs, the same way I had explored her back through her blouse. She took in a breath and sighed it happily back out again.

With the same tremors still addling my hand, I tucked one fingertip just slightly under the edge of her panties, and ran it along the elastic that traced her hip joint.

“Wedding night,” Hannah whispered again, almost like a prayer.

I pushed the crotch of her panties aside, and brushed my fingers over the space again, feeling skin folds and hair much like my own, but not quite like my own. Her folds felt smaller, more orderly, somehow. I had no idea which of us, if either, was more normal.

Hannah gasped and sighed again at the contact, higher, sharper, and faster than last time.

I shifted my legs under me and leaned forward, laying her on her back on the floor, still keeping myself and the clothes on my back as a shield against the air.

I wanted so much to do this right, and I had no idea how it was supposed to go. I only had the shakiest understanding of what a wedding night between a man and a woman actually involved, let alone between two women.

I started with the basics. Everyone knew that men’s pants were hiding penises, right? Admittedly, I didn’t know exactly what a penis looked like, but I’d been able to gather from context and jokes that they had to be a long, narrow appendage to fit inside a vagina.

Obviously, I didn’t have a penis, but maybe a finger was similar?

I stretched out the middle, longest finger of my right hand. Longer seemed to have the reputation for being better, plus I knew there were people who used this finger to say something close to “eff you,” so it seemed reasonable that that might be something you could actually do with it.

Pressing the back of my hand to my pelvis, so that my finger was in (I was pretty sure) the approximate right position for a penis, I ran the fingertip along the folds of Hannah’s skin, looking for the curtain-like split in the center, and then, in the center of that, the entrance to a passage.

I’d attempted this only a couple times on myself, out of curiosity, and found it difficult enough then, even with the ability to feel where I was going from both sides. I mostly remembered it hurting, the passage was so small, but God had designed this all to work somehow. Maybe this moment, the shared contact, the significance coursing through my system and, I hoped, Hannah’s, would make it work better now.

By some miracle, I found Hannah’s opening without poking her too hard in any wrongly guessed spots. The way in was just as tight as I remembered from myself. Her body hugged my finger closer than any glove, and she took in a series of rapid gasps as I went along.

Her hands bunched up her skirt and then came up to rub her own face and neck, as if she were full of some overwhelming feeling she had never learned the expression for, and was not quite sure what to do with it.

“Is that okay?” I asked.

Hannah nodded. “Keep going.”

Keeping my hand to my pelvis, I tried thrusting my hips back and forth, the way the dancers did in every video the adults hated.

Hannah made a whimpering sound in the back of her throat as my finger pushed back in, and I stopped.

“Is it still—”

“Yes!” she nodded vigorously. “Please. I just, I want to get the hang of it.”

Even more cautiously, I tried again. And, at Hannah’s insistence, again, and again.

She made that same whimpering noise, but at the same time lifted her hips up, toward me, as if searching for something.

“Does it feel good?” I asked.

“Uh… partly,” Hannah answered. “But like, partly really good. Does that make sense?”

“Maybe?”

I kept going, searching her face, as ever, for clues. I watched for any sign that I was getting warmer or colder, while I searched her physically for a way to turn “partly” into “abso-heckin’-lutely.”

Hannah seemed to grow more and more restless under me, her hips moving with more frustrated urgency, until suddenly, she stopped and lay limp on the floor, with one arm crossed over her eyes.

I stopped too.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s just…” she kept her arm clamped hard over her face, which was turning a brilliant red. “When I…. When I… by myself… I….” She sighed, and her tone shifted from nervous to blank. She spoke very, very fast, as if she was worried her blankness would run out before she finished all the words, so it came out like, “WhenITouchMyselfAtNightITouchHere.”

She used her free hand to gesture at the general area right in front of her vagina.

“You masturbate?” I asked, unable to contain my amazement.

“Please,” said Hannah, her blankness receding. “Please, don’t hate me.”

“Why would I—”

“I know, I know, I know,” Hannah stopped me. “I don’t know why. I just… ugh. Please don’t. And don’t tell any—”

“I do the same thing,” I said, touching her hair with my free hand, hoping to radiate comfort through to her hidden face.

“You do not,” Hannah said, but peeked one eye hopefully out from under her arm.

“I do,” I said. “Like this?”

I swept my thumb across the spot where there was a sensitive little bump on my body, and found what felt like a matching one on Hannah’s.

Hannah moaned so loudly that I worried for a moment about the sound carrying over the lake back to the chapel, until she lowered her arm enough to stuff the side of it into her mouth.

That sound was definitely more than partly good.

I made her make that sound again, and again, like that first note I’d ever learned to play correctly on the violin, sweet and scratchless and clean.

“Ohmygosh, ohmygosh,” the moans transitioned into breathy little words, and once she was confident in keeping them low, she finally lowered her arm. “You… you really…?”

She reached under my skirt, under my outward poking hand, under my panties, and swept her thumb across that same spot.

I struggled as hard as she had to keep my voice low, as a shot of pleasure jolted out through me from under her thumb.

Hannah’s eyes widened with the thrill of discovery.

“Why,” she gasped, while I kept on running my thumb around in a circle, “why didn’t you start with that?”

I shrugged guiltily. “I guess I just always thought I was weird.”

Hannah smacked me on the shoulder. “I always thought I was weird!”

It was the truth. I’d discovered this thing my body could do all on my own. Connecting it to the word “masturbation” had only been a guess before now, based on pieced-together bits of context from Barb’s various jokes. But none of those jokes had exactly been how-to guides. I’d always assumed that, if there were any other girls who did it, they probably did it differently. After all, it was nothing like the sticking-in motion I imagined a penis doing, so it didn’t make any sense that this was what I wanted most when I was worked up and hungry to touch someone.

But here we were, two of us, built the same way, maybe even built in the image of the same facet of God.

That thought made me incandescently happy.

Hannah went on stroking her thumb right over that spot, that secret spot I could have sworn as recently as this morning that I would never, ever tell anyone about, and I had to learn quickly how to juggle the overwhelming sensation coming in with the coordination it took to give the same in return.

I soon stopped bothering with lining my hand up with my own hips at all, and only focused on how it lined up with Hannah’s.

Maybe I’d been making this whole thing more complicated than it needed to be, trying to emulate some other motion not built for our bodies in particular.

The whole purpose of what we were doing, as well as I could define it, was to act out the special closeness of our love for each other. We were certainly close, and the best expression of love I could think of was to try to make her feel as good as possible.

That was the guiding principle I used to determine my movements. I touched her first the way I liked to be touched, and then did my best to fine-tune that technique according to her responses.

Hannah kept up the contact under my skirt impressively steadily, even when her other hand was shaking against the side of my face, and her eyes sliding in and out of focus.

She didn't go looking for my opening, and I didn’t care, she was right where I wanted her, but my finger inside her didn’t go completely to waste. I discovered that if I worked my finger in gentle movements toward my thumb, I could make Hannah's bump stand out a little farther, which seemed to cause an even more powerful reaction as I touched it.

“It’s going to…” she squeaked, between suddenly faster, shallower breaths, lifting her head to bury her face in my shoulder. “I’m going to… I’m… I’m—”

She yelped, her legs clamped shudderingly tighter around me, and all the air in her lungs seemed to force its way out faster than her voice could handle it, extending that yelp into a whine like a kettle.

She still clung tightly to my shoulder while she caught her breath, as if she wasn’t quite ready to face anything else after that moment, including me.

Her grip tightened, and she made another involuntary-sounding vocalization, as I slid my finger out of her, as delicately as I could.

“Thank you,” I whispered, wrapping my arm under her head for her to rest on. “Thank you so much for sharing that with me.”

She mumbled something into my cardigan.

“What?” I asked.

“Your turn,” she repeated, just a smidge clearer.

I hadn’t even consciously noted the moment when her hand had paused under my skirt. I was too caught up in watching the results of my own efforts. When she started up again, there was a flash of sensation as powerful as the very first one. I had to lower the arm I’d put around her just to steady myself as it spread through me.

She got her rhythm back quickly.

With something to do, something to focus on other than her own secrets on display, Hannah lowered her head back to the floor, and smiled.

Each time her thumb slid over my bump, the fluttery feeling it left behind was a little bit slower to fade, until the flutters were stacking on top of each other, each fresh one on the tail of the last. The stack built up higher and higher, and in no time at all it was teetering like a Jenga tower ready to give.

Maybe I’d been holding back before, unconsciously wanting to be the first to bring her to that big finish (which I’d also hoped was not a unique weirdness of mine).

Now that I’d done it, now that I had no excuse to give less than my full attention to the incredible gift Hannah was giving me, it was hard to believe that I’d been able to draw this out as long as I had.

I usually held off for as long as I could stand it before touching myself this way, partly to ration out my risk of getting caught, and partly out of fear of the weirdness of my habit, and the strength of the hold it had on me.

It was about a week and a half since last time I’d snuck a touch. I was only a few days away from the point where I would usually crack. And those furtive touches in the dormitory in the middle of the night, spaced out so carefully to sound like I was just shifting in my sleep, in case anyone else was still lying awake, those were nothing like this.

Feeling Hannah’s living, breathing body moving under mine, her eyes fixed upward to watch her effect on me, her silky soft thumb tip gliding knowingly over and over that secret bump in a way so much like the way I would, but not controlled by me — it was like the sky. The perfect, breathtaking beauty which all representations imitate.

Kneeling between Hannah’s legs, straddling her hand on the dusty floor of that neglected boathouse, that was my Heaven.

I never wanted to leave. I never wanted it to end. But the stack of feeling was growing too tall for a mortal body to support, and all at once, I felt it teeter and spill.

For an instant, I was terrified. After how intense the rest of the process had been, what would the end be like? Could I even handle it?

But it was too late to worry about that. Here it came, here it was, fluttering and pounding its way outward from my secret bump through my entire body, making my legs shake, and sparking multicolored flashes of light across the insides of my spasming eyelids.

For a few seconds there, I think I even forgot what worrying was.

“I love you,” I heard myself mutter several times, barely coherently, as the outward-rushing pounding finally stopped, and left me floating in the fluttery ripples of its wake.

I struggled to shift myself into some new position that still kept Hannah warm without crushing her. Holding myself over her like this was suddenly so much harder than before.

“I love you,” Hannah whispered back, wrapping her blouse back around herself and tugging me down by one arm to lie beside her on the floor.

I wasn’t going to fight her on that.

Even this weathered wooden floor felt so good to relax onto, shoulder to shoulder with Hannah. But I only got a few seconds to savor it.

“Well, if it isn’t almost time for Song Circle!” Barb said brightly from the entrance to the boathouse, as if she were a character from an old cartoon talking out loud to no one but herself. “I should probably start walking in a couple minutes. Punctuality is how we show respect, after all.”

Barb’s laughter, barely contained and highly contagious, almost blunted the sting of having to rush to refasten each other’s bras and get all of our blouse buttons back in the right holes so soon.

I stood up first and helped Hannah to her feet.

“We owe you,” Hannah said to Barb when we reached her at the door.

“So much,” I added.

“I know it,” said Barb. “Now wipe those smiles off your faces and leave room for Jesus, before I have to find a blind chick to seduce to get me out of jail.”

“That’s definitely not how the story ended,” Hannah said.

Then she sighed and looked sadly down at our hands, still linked from when I’d helped her up. She seemed to marvel at them for a couple extra seconds before letting go, and taking a step away from me for the walk up to the music room.

For the first time, I understood the urgency so many people had to get away from True Light School for Girls.

The space between Hannah and me made me feel stretched, like there were parts of me stuck on both sides of it.

I found myself counting out how many days were left in the semester. I couldn’t imagine how we were going to hold that space through every one of them.

***

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