I was glad our hands concealed much of my face because I knew it burned red, not so much from the wording as from the comment’s truth. It was as if he’d somehow been witness to those moments of groping, starting, and stopping in dorm rooms and backseats of cars. Despite two years at Clemson, I still adhered to the rules of Oconee County females, a code abandoned in the sixties by most of the United States but still practiced and enforced in much of the rural South. On the surface it was simple: A woman was supposed to stay a virgin until married, but what exactly constituted virginity, that murky area between heavy petting and going all the way, was a question of byzantine complexity.

But Luke wasn’t interested in testing the limits of such a code. He stood, pulling me up as well. He freed his hand from mine.

“Let me know if you change your mind.”

His tone was matter-of-fact, in a way almost good-humored, the opposite of the exasperation I’d encountered in all of my other sexual skirmishes. This is what it’s like to deal with a man instead of a boy, I told myself. Which only showed how much of a girl I still was.

Four weeks passed before I called Luke from Clemson and told him I wanted to canoe the Tamassee again. He knew my meaning.

“It’ll have to be this weekend,” Luke said. “Next week I’m off to Florida to help a friend get Wild and Scenic status for the Suwannee. She helped with the Tamassee so I owe her.”

We launched early on a Saturday morning. Fog rose off the river and got tangled in the trees lining the banks. It was still late summer in Clemson, but here fall had already begun. Leaves were turning and the air was so cool we’d paddled a half mile before I took off my sweatshirt.

The fog finally thinned and the sun broke through. When it did we were in a section where stands of poplar trees lined both shores. As the last smudges of fog evaporated, the yellow sun-struck poplar leaves brightened like lamp wicks being turned up. The air felt charged and alive, like when lightning breaks the sky before rain. Though we were in slow water, the river’s pulse seemed to quicken. Everything, including Luke and me, shimmered in a golden light. For the first time in my life I saw the river the way I believed Luke saw it.

A Church of God preacher in Mountain View had denounced us as “false prophets” who worshiped nature, not God, as though one were not part of the other. At the community center we’d kidded ourselves about being religious zealots, the males giving each other nicknames that began with the word saint, we females adding Magdalene to our first names.