Love

She'd bought a bathing suit during her last trip to the mall--a green and blue one with string ties on the hips that consisted of less fabric than some napkins--and every so often she would stand in front of the full-length mirror in her room and try it on, holding her thick hair up with both hands to watch the play of the thin straps over her shoulders. He almost always knew when she was in one of these moods, and almost always he was a dark shadow crouched on the sill of her window. Sometimes, he thought perhaps she knew he was there, but she never said anything about it. And she was quite the type to say something about it.

It had all started as a measure of ego; the unreachable goal, the unexecutable heist. She was the one thing he couldn't simply take without effort, the one thing in the world he would really have to work for, and the idea of challenge after so long at being the best had thrilled him more than he'd really cared to admit. So he'd thrown all his considerable charm into the chase, latched on dogged and tenacious and learned just what he needed to say to worm his way as close as one could get to her.

But he had learned, slowly over those first few weeks when he watched her as she walked and ate, the little idiosyncrasies and larger spirit that lay beneath that skin he could not touch. He learned that she loved to work with her hands, hated having to wait for things, and feared the loneliness that gnawed at her in the deep of the night when she remembered all the things she couldn't have.

Gradually, inexorably, what was once just an elaborate job evolved into something more; something changed in the way he looked at her, the way he stood around her, and one night while he was standing on the porch enjoying the last of a cigarette with his back to the cool wood he'd realized, abruptly, that he'd fallen in love with her.

It wasn't like these things had been before; before, the love had been a matter of convenience, a matter arranged by others and agreed to by those involved because there was no better alternative. He'd cared then, of course, and cared deeply, but he knew with a biding certainty that before, he would have laid his life down for no one, just as he knew with a biding certainty that now, he would lay his life down for her.

It was after his epiphany that things had started to go awry for them; now that there was something truly at stake, those joking, gambling-on-her-reluctance offers for brief touch, for short contact were no longer joking but filled with an undercurrent of absolute seriousness. He'd offered her his hand once, ungloved and without pretense, offered her to share with everything about himself that he loved and everything he hated, and he'd astonished even himself with the absolute verity that if she'd reached for his skin, he would have never once even flinched.

She didn't know how to handle his reckless, careless, crazy sort of abandon, his disregard for his own person in an attempt to bring her something like happiness. She had been managing well enough when she kept everyone at an equal range, all out of arm's reach and temptation's sway; or at least, that was what she had told herself. He could tell that there was a hollow chamber inside, and she ached to fill it. He knew that he could fill it, if she'd let him, but she was afraid. Afraid of what she'd been running from for so long, afraid of learning how to control it so that she'd have no excuse, any longer, to keep from growing serious about him.

He watched as she posed before the mirror, holding in the sigh that would surely give away his presence. White flickered through brown as she shifted her hair up, to the side, over her shoulder, tumbling free and moved her weight over her feet, a hand on her hip now, now both free by her side. He held still as he watched the tears well forward in bright green eyes, biting his lip, and crept back to the very edge of the sill as she turned violently to throw herself on her bed, back twitching sobs she refused to let free from her throat.

As she wound tighter in her sheets, curling fetal and despairing, he slipped back down from the window and to the ground. He had wanted to go the other way, to curl next to her in the bed and assure her that everything would be all right, but he knew that would only make things worse. It had all grown so complicated once he'd discovered love.