By the time I was twenty-one, I would go out on an occasional date, but my virginity was still very much intact. It wasn't out of any sense of morality, though.  

There was just no one I cared to be intimate with. I wanted to feel something; I'm not sure what, because I was having trouble feeling anything at all. So I pushed everyone who approached me away.

"The guys are starting to call you 'Ice Maiden,' " Claudia, one of the other waitresses on my shift, said. "They're taking bets on whether anyone will ever get close enough to touch you."

Charlie Jett, an independent trucker who passed through about once a month, caught my eye and started laughing. He was tall, dark, and more than a bit handsome. He also had the greenest eyes, and when he laughed his eyes laughed with him. I found myself laughing, too. He'd been asking me out for the better part of a year. At first, he'd seemed to take it personally when I'd politely declined. But now he seemed to be teasing me, daring me to take him up on it.

If I hadn't suspected he was married, I probably would've gone out with him. Some of the guys passing through had families on both coasts, and Charlie was just too good-looking to be unattached.