“I love you, Uncle Haskell,” she said.

“I’ve always loved you, Liz.”

The screen went dark, and she put the sweater back in the closet, went to the living room, and flipped the switch to turn on her Christmas display. An adage that she’d heard for years came to mind. It said that when a person looks back on their life, it wouldn’t be what they did that they would regret but what they didn’t do. If she didn’t get her butt into jeans and her feet into boots or shoes, she wouldn’t be going on a real date with Raylen, and in twenty years she’d regret that decision.

She went back to the closet, pulled out a pair of skinny jeans, a black shirt with rhinestone buttons and long, fitted lace sleeves ending in a wide ruffle at the wrist, and a pair of black spike heels. When Raylen knocked on the door, she’d just finished running a brush through her hair one final time.

***

Raylen didn’t want to leave the dreams of Liz dancing in a field of clover the next morning when he awoke. In the dream, he was sprawled out on a quilt and she danced for him in that orange costume. The bells on her ankle bracelets jingled in his ears, and her body moved to music that they shared in their minds.

Time was going so slow that morning while he plowed a field that he started talking to himself.

“I think I’m falling in love, and it’s miserable,” he said as he drove in monotonous laps around the pasture.

He got through the noon meal at his grandmother’s house, but he was so distracted that Grandma asked him if he was coming down with the flu.

Sitting in a saddle usually made him happy, but that day he kept visualizing Liz riding a horse in her costume. Finally, he traded places with Dewar and offered to muck out stalls. By the time the day ended and he got to her front door, he was ready to jump right into bed. But that’s not the way a real date started, so he knocked on the door and waited…impatiently.

Raylen didn’t even look at what she was wearing until after he’d cupped her cheeks in his hands and planted a sexy kiss right on her lips. Then he laced his fingers in her hands and stepped back to scan her from toes to eyes.

“Beautiful doesn’t begin to describe you, Liz. Your perfume makes me think of an exotic woman in a sexy orange outfit doing a belly dance. And you taste like something the angels brewed up,” he said.

“You are a romantic, Raylen O’Donnell. And honey, looking at you makes my heart do double time,” she said.

He motioned toward the door and said, “Darlin’, we’d better get out of here soon or else we’re going to wind up in bed and there’ll be no Christmas tree when your mama arrives, but thank you, my Madam Dammybammy, for saying that I affect you like that,” he said.