On a whim…

Sometimes love begins with absurd devotion — a sink bath, a borrowed car, and a hymn you can still hear a lifetime later.

He shaved in the passenger seat while the car hurtled south, the morning sun strobing through the pines. Each time the blade clogged, he tapped it on the paper cup between his knees and said, hit the washer, and the driver obligingly flicked the wipers so a fan of water arced across the glass. He leaned out the window, rinsed the razor in that brief baptism, and drew it down his jaw again. By the time they crossed the county line, he was half raw, half radiant, the scent of McDonald’s soap still ghosting his hands.

He was twenty, maybe, and in love, real love, for the first and only time with the kind of trembling certainty that makes a person do foolish, holy things. He had not confessed it to her yet — not in so many words — that she was the center of his orbit, the reason he was trying to be better than he knew how. He feared that naming it might break the spell, might make her step back and see him as the overeager boy he really was. So he said nothing. Instead, he “hijacked” a friend and his car, skipped breakfast at the retreat center near Tryon, and drove two hours to surprise her at church.

When he entered the sanctuary, the air was already thick with hymnals and perfume. He spotted her three pews from the front, adjacent to her parents whose posture could have been sculpted from caution itself. She saw him and smiled — not the demure, social smile of a preacher’s daughter but something that started in the eyes and made its way outward, slow and unmistakable. He slid into the pew beside her family and inched as close as courtesy allowed. Closer, maybe. The heat from her shoulder seemed to vibrate through him, a silent current he could neither escape nor complete.

Their bodies had known enough of each other by then to make nearness dangerous. They had kissed until the edges blurred, learned the shape of patience and the ache that lived inside it. They had stopped short of everything they could have done, which made everything they did do shimmer with unsustainable light. He told himself restraint was virtue, but it felt more like fever.

When the congregation stood to sing, he sang too, but softly, waiting for her voice. It came faintly — a whisper meant for God alone — and he lowered his own to meet it. For a breathless instant her voice was singled out in his ears. Then their tones mingled in the air, his rough, hers barely audible, a harmony no one else could hear. That single note of hers, shared and gone, would outlast the rest of the service, outlast the years, outlast her life.

Afterward, under her parents’ watchful eyes, there was no touch, no private word, just a shy exchange of glances that said everything: I see you. I feel you here beside me. Later, when he tried to describe it, he would call it a kind of communion — the first time he understood that desire and worship might spring from the same well. The body, after all, is only another way of praying.

Driving home, his face still stung from the shave and from the effort of holding himself together. The wipers squeaked once more across the windshield, and he laughed — at the absurdity of it all, the romance, the restraint, the way love could make even a windshield washer into holy water. He had risked the ridicule of friends, the suspicion of her parents, and the razor burn of devotion, all for the chance to sit near her and hear that small, trembling hymn.

Decades later, he would remember none of the sermon, only the scent of soap, the gleam of her hair in the filtered light, and that one pure thread of sound rising like a prayer. The note itself had long vanished into silence, but somewhere in him it was still vibrating, proof that what begins in a whisper can last a lifetime.