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Stormy Weather

Ciara M. Blecka

    The two sisters couldn’t be less alike. The eldest sister was tall, raven haired, quiet, and a proper lady, and the youngest sister was blonde, small, hot-tempered, and a tomboy through and through. They never agreed on anything either, except, perhaps, on their fondness for the young gentleman that worked for their father. Katrina, the eldest, by rights deserved him being that she was the eldest, but her father assured her her time was past. Charles Dawson would go to her younger sister Melanie. Melanie, the fool, that wouldn’t make a good husband for any man and would rather spend her time getting dirty in the barn than running a decent household.
    “Do you ever get dirty, Katrina?” Mr. Dawson asked her one evening when she returned home from church services and a storm had been brewing. The air was electric with it. Thunder rumbled and it shook her bones. She could hear the patter of rain on the skylight above them. The way he looked at her was criminal. She felt an odd kind of yearning in the pit of her stomach. Mr. Dawson did not belong to her. In fact he was quite forbidden to her, but in the dark of the evening with the windows misting up with streaks of cold water and the outside drive turning into muck and mud, she thought perhaps she might not mind getting dirty for once.
    “Not...physically,” she said carefully. She was not as much the withered old maid as some might think. She had passions stirring within her and she had nothing on under her skirts—if only she just lifted them a bit...
    He seemed to notice her squirming and drew closer. His proximity made her breath catch in her throat and the angles of his body where his clothes clung to his form made her heart skip a beat. He did not touch her nor did he ever touch her—could not touch her—but her entire body burned with the mere thought of it.
    “But you are a dirty girl nonetheless,” he said quietly, almost inaudibly. He winked at her and smiled warmly, mischievously.

    “I’m a lady,” she said primly, “but I don’t mind a little splatter of mud now and then on evenings such as this.”
    He withdrew an umbrella and reached out for her hand, beckoning for her to follow him out into the dark night that was so full of possibilities.

    “Then let’s find a puddle and see what splatters,” he invited her, twirling the umbrella, although careful to shield her from the barrage of droplets pouring from the pitch black sky. It was a warm night: wet and steamy and sticky and she thought it felt like temptation outside.
    “Can the rain wash our responsibilities away, Mr. Dawson?” she asked him, hesitating even as she felt her blood rush hot.
    “Does Melanie matter?” he asked, his face drawn and serious.
    She thought about it. She and her sister had never seen eye to eye and Melanie had always been quick to put a knife in her back any chance she got. Did she matter? “No,” Katrina said carefully. “Not to me.”
    “And haven’t you done this sort of thing before, Katrina?” he asked her, withdrawing the umbrella and allowing the rain to soak her white bodice and dampen her curly hair. The bottom of her skirts were soaking up water and mud and growing heavy, but Mr. Dawson just kept drawing her further out into the wilderness, and the mud had spattered across his trousers, too.
    “I have,” she admitted, recalling the many suitors of her past that had been almost good enough, but not quite. There had always been one reason or another to reject each and every one of them—but not before having a good roll in the hay with them, of course. Maybe that’s all she had wanted from them in the first place. She enjoyed the romance but not the reality.
    “Will you never marry anyone, Katrina?” he asked her, drawing back, growing a bit hesitant.
    “Never,” she said, and there was nothing more for it.
    “It’s always raining in your back yard isn’t it?” he said to her, and she wasn’t sure what that meant. But it hardly mattered. They were here alone in the rain now, both bodies slick and spattered with dirt, hearts beating fast, gasping for breath. Here now where no one would see them in the sultry darkness. For a moment, Mr. Dawson melted in the palm of her hand, and that was all she wanted. He kissed her, fierce, passionate, his tongue in her mouth and his lips an exquisite dream. She felt herself slipping backwards into the mud until her body was as dirty as the things he was doing to her.

    But their affair didn’t last long. No sooner had he finished making love to her and she had tied her bodice and straightened her skirts than she heard a tornado coming. It was Melanie. She was carrying a flashlight and shouting, carrying on, crying. “How could you do this to me? You are both sluts!” She was grasping her flat chest as if she may be suffering from heart failure.
    “I have done nothing, quit your squawling,” Katrina scolded, struggling to rise from the pool of sticky mud. Her dress, once so white, so covered with elegant lace, so ladylike, now so fouled. How unlike her. To be standing there with her mascara running down her face. And for Melanie to be clean and tidy, standing there glaring at them from underneath her umbrella.
    “I am very angry right now,” she said through gritted teeth.
    “You have nothing to be angry about,” Mr. Dawson assured her, wiping his hands on his trousers and scooping the umbrella back up.

    “You know I get jealous,” she said with a pout.
    “You have no reason to be jealous,” he said simply. Charles Dawson, a man so very practiced at smooth lies. “Katrina was returning home from church services and was caught without an umbrella. The rain became a downpour and she got caught in the mud. I merely came to her rescue.”
    “You really are a gentleman, Charles,” Melanie said, linking arms with him and walking back towards the manor, back to her bright bubbleheaded self.

    “Yes, I know,” he said with a smile.
    Katrina followed slowly behind, twirling Mr. Dawson’s umbrella as she walked, her skirts heavy and her bodice soaked through. She was fairly certain the entire week ahead called for stormy weather. And maybe the week after that. As long as Mr. Dawson was still around, she was sure there would be lightning.

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