"Hay loft," he croaked and pointed toward a narrow ladder some distance away that led upward through another, smaller opening in the loft flooring.
"Come on," she urged him, and he followed as she sprinted to the base of the ladder. She began to climb, and he fell in behind her, putting his hands on the rungs above him, as her feet lifted from them. He looked up to assess their progress and was thrilled by the site of the rounded slopes of her butt flexing and rolling above him as she climbed. He quickly followed her through the opening and stepped off the ladder to her side.
"Gosh, this is awesome," she giggled when he joined her on the landing that was surrounded by mountains of hay bales.
It was a tiny, cleared space with barely enough room for the two of them to stand, and he had to press his body tightly against her just to keep from falling into the hole he had just climbed through. She turned to give him more room, and he stepped behind her and instantly he felt her lush, soft curves melting into his body. She leaned backward, toward him, pressing her back to his chest, and her jeans caressed his groin as she ground her buttocks against the front of his pants. The contact, inadvertent though it appeared to him to be, sent a wave of disequilibrium surging through his body, and he threw his arm around her waist to prevent himself from tumbling through the open hatchway. She turned her head quickly, smiling at him over her shoulder, and the motion brought to him the sweet scent of her hair. His intoxication was instantly complete; the pressure of her body against his, the eager, open invitation of her smile, the scent of her delicate nectar made him drunk with unfamiliar, untried excitation, and he staggered under the weight of his burgeoning emotions. An odd, burning sensation filled his belly, and the tops of his thighs tingled with a spreading warmth. A strange, unsettling compulsion seized him, and he tightened his arm around the girl's waist, pulling her closer against the source of his heat.
Sheer, vertical walls of baled straw surrounded them and towered above them nearly to the roof rafters far above. There was scant space in their little chamber on which to stand, much less to sit or lie down, and she tossed a doubtful look at him over her shoulder.
"I can't move in here, Caleb," she complained when she felt his pressure from behind.
"Through there," he said pointing over her shoulder to an insignificant looking gap in the straw walls that her hurried examination had failed to detect.
"There?" she questioned, and she stooped to peer down the length of the narrow crevice. It would be a tight fit, she thought dubiously, barely fifteen inches wide, but she could see a reassuring patch of bright sunlight way down at the end of the crevasse.
"Yeah," he said, "through there."
"What's that light coming from," she asked uncertainly, thinking for a minute that he was leading her out of the barn and back to her parents.
"That's just the door at the end of the loft, where we bring in the hay; we're not going that far."
He stepped in front of her and took her hand. Turning his shoulders parallel to the walls, he inched himself into the tunnel and pulled her in behind him.
The interlocking hay bales pressed against her front and back and loomed above her to the rafters. She was beginning to feel claustrophobic and laughed nervously, "This is just like Fat Man's Squeeze in Mammoth Cave back home."
"Keep going," he urged, tugging her hand. "We're almost there."
She wriggled a few feet further, and then, abruptly, the corridor widened, and she was relieved to see that, for a short distance anyway, many of the bales had been removed and those that remained had been formed into a kind of stairway that led to the uppermost reaches of the hay stack.
"See?" Caleb said as he stepped up onto the lowest bale. "We can't fill the loft completely, or there'd be no way to get on top to get the hay down to the animals. So, we build a stairway with hay bales, and we can get up there and drop the bales down through the opening in the floor over there, whenever we need to."
"You climb up there?" she asked skeptically, staring into the darkness at the distant top of the stack. Pinpoints of light randomly pierced the tin roof where the metal had rusted through and gave the effect of a starlit evening sky.
"Sure, it's easy," he answered readily, demonstrating his confidence by stepping onto the next higher bale, where he turned and tendered his hand to her. "Come on up. It's really stable; we interlock the bales when we stack them, so's there is no danger of them toppling."
Together they climbed the towering mountain of hay toward the roof. She could feel the heat building as they neared the top, and the air was becoming stifling. She was close to breathless and was about to complain, when he stopped on the step just below a shallow ledge. The ledge was a couple of bales deep and three or four bales long, and it was impossible to see until she had climbed right up to it.
"Here we are," he said a little out of breath himself.
"What's this for?" she queried. She could discern little purpose to the variation in the arrangement of the bales.
"Me and the boys built it last fall while we were puttin' the hay up. Made us a place to take a nap when nobody's lookin. There's plenty of room for three of us to lay down and sleep a little without anybody missing us."