“My mom needs this job, so this house is my prison.” He shook his head, and it was hard to tell if he was still talking to me or himself when he said, “But I’ve only got a year left on my sentence before I can go away to college. It ain’t worth it.”

Colin released my hands and drew back, looking at me like I was a pile of trash that had just walked out of a dumpster and tried to convince him to do it with her.

“You ain’t worth it.”

Those words, more than any he’d said before, cut me bad. So bad, I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t think of anything to say in my defense.

Then he drove the knife in even deeper, pointing at me, as he said, “You need to git.”

This time, he didn’t wait for me to say no again. Just wiped his hands on his threadbare jeans and headed up the stairs. Leaving me to stand there on that wall, still shaken to my very core by our kiss, still cut raw by his words, as I watched his stork-like body disappear.

The sound of his receding footsteps was soon followed by the slam of the back door. And I was left with no doubt whatsoever in my mind that I wouldn’t ever see the housekeeper’s son again.

But I was wrong about that.

I did see him again. Just a couple of years later, on my grandma’s 35” TV.

Turned on CMT one day, and there he was. At least, I was halfway sure it was him. The guy singing on my grandma’s TV looked like a suped up version of the one who’d kissed me on that hot Alabama summer night. His hair was no longer stringy, but fell in gorgeous waves that shone like spun gold underneath the studio lights. He’d put on quite a bit of muscle. I mean, he wasn’t muscle bound like Beau Prescott, but he definitely wasn’t a bag of sticks anymore either. I could see how well defined his body was under the long-sleeved Charlie Daniels Band varsity t-shirt he wore. He also still had those pretty blue eyes, and that good ol’ southern boy smile, both of which he unleashed on the audience as he sang.

Colin, the housekeeper’s son, was, I realized as I watched him singing on my grandma’s TV, drop dead gorgeous. The nerdy air he’d carried with him had completely disappeared, right along with his glasses.

And the song he was singing wasn’t bad either.