NOTE: Ok, so finally I am going to write in the normal non-restricted dialogue format. In other words, I am going to really narrate this now. ;) However, the story will not continue like this. It will switch back and forth.

THINGS CAN GET CRAZY

Chapter Five

I sat there next to her, idly pushing food around my plate. I really wasn't that hungry. She had made some conversation with Jean and was talking away with her about something I wasn't really paying attention to. All I kept thinking about was that Jack guy. How he hit her. How he apparently raped her. Her. Natalie.

I grew tense. For some reason it just burned me up inside to think of all those guys doing all that to her. I swallowed and glanced at her. She was so beautiful. Strawberry blonde, pale blue eyes, small and fragile. So fragile...

She caught me looking at her and smiled at me. I smiled back, a real smile. She made me happy. Her face made me feel that old feeling of warmth, pleasure, belonging. She leaned over and whispered in my ear.

"Why don't you show me around?" she asked. I nodded slowly and stood. I got a courteous smile and a nod from Xavier and took Natalie by the arm to lead her out of the room.

"You don't really want to look around here, do you?" I asked. She smiled and shook her head. I nodded. "You wanna go somewhere?"

"The garden I saw in the back looked nice."

"Ok. Follow me."

We walked towards the back gardens through the giant double French doors and outside onto the elaborate deck, down the steps and through the breezeway. We stopped in the middle of the large garden and sat on a bench. My nose tickled with the overwhelming smells of flowers, pollen, and the like. I sneezed. She smiled at me.

"Are you allergic to anything?" she asked.

"No."

"Hm...oh my God! This smells amazing!" She was sticking her little nose into all the blooming buds around us. "What is this?"

"No idea," I said, tentatively scratching the back of my head. "Eh, I'm not one for flowers..." She giggled lightly, closed her eyes, and slowly inhaled the smell. She plucked it and gave it to me.

"Smell it," she said. "It's so beautiful."

It was a tiny blue flower, pale, with maybe four or five petals that spread out. I brought it to my nose and quickly, shortly, lightly, sniffed it. I had been able to detect its scent from the moment we walked out of the house, but not identify it as this particular flower. Humouring her, I nodded.

"It does smell pretty nice," I said. Moderately true. She smiled at me as I put it in her hair. She looked at me. The flower was a great compliment to her eyes. She caught me staring again and cocked her head.

"Hey, what are you looking at?" she said playfully. I smiled.

"Nothin'," I replied. I was feeling so self conscious about the shortness of my answers to her, but, like she said, I sucked at communicating. She edged closer to me and I felt my heart beating in my chest more prominently.

"Oh, is the big bad Wolverine nervous or something?" she asked, placing her hand on my upper thigh.

"No."

"You sure?"

"Yes."

I could feel myself getting hotter as she toyed with the hem on my jeans, deliberately drawing a bit too close to a certain protrusion. I swallowed. She leaned over and began kissing my neck. I closed my eyes and a very light moan escaped me. Feeling her mouth on my skin made me tingle and shiver, but reality had to go and interrupt, as it normally did.

"Natalie..." I said, catching her hand in time to snatch it from grasping my zipper. "Not here, Natalie. Not now..." She stared at me, curiously silent for a moment. My breath was slightly quicker; I breathed through my nose to calm myself. My senses were heightened immensely, and they all focused on her. She must have known this. She blinked.

"I'm sorry....was I...did I make you uncomfortable?" she asked, shrinking back.

"No....no, it's ok..." I said, breathing deeply.

"I...I just don't know how your body works...." she said quietly. She made a short laugh. "What the hell are we doing?"

"What?" I asked, turning toward her.

"Look at us. We barely know each other and we're acting like...like..."

"Like we're in love..." I replied. I said it without thinking about it, and once I realized what came out from between my lips, I swallowed and immediately snapped my mouth shut. My tongue tingled. Love was a word I was most definitely not used to saying. It had the same affect on me as it would a Japanese person trying to speak a German curse word in Berlin. It was just wrong.

She looked at me with those gorgeous grey-blue eyes and I just wanted to stare into them forever. She took my hand and held it up to her neck, where a small, intricate necklace charm lay flat against it.

"My dad gave me this," she said, still not taking her eyes off mine. I glanced at it. It was a tiny crystal angel, outlined in silver with a halo of white gold.

"He said that if I wore it I would be safe," she continued. "He said that as long as I had it on, he would be right here with me." I was silent, staring fixed now on the little shining charm not a centimeter away from my finger, which seemed giant in comparison to it.

"I take it off whenever I do something stupid, like go to a bar or meet with a guy I don't like...or go to Jack's...." I looked at her. "I just don't want him to see me doing stuff like that. I don't want to let him down...but with you, with you I can keep this. With you, it feels like I have to let him know that finally...finally I can be proud enough with what I've done to let him see." She kissed my hand three times, once on each space between my knuckles.

"I'm not afraid with you, of you," she said. "And I don't care if I only just met you by some stupid fling last night or something. I don't care. I'm not afraid of you. And I want you to know that."

I looked down with my eyes only, studied the wood bench we sat on for a moment, then looked back up at her.

"Natalie," I said, the sound of my own voice almost alien in the sudden quiet around us. "Natalie, I...I don't think you understand..." I was trying really hard not to sound like an idiot, but at this point I felt something between total failure and complete surprise.

"What do you mean?" she asked. She still held my hand; it rested on her collar bone.

"You and me..." I said. "We come from two different worlds. You come from a world where human life is nothing but something hard, sometimes easy, but something, above all, tiresome and terrible and whatever else it is to you. Where people sometimes feel pain or always feel injustice...but eventually, in the human world, you can find love, because it's there, and you can slowly bring yourself up again, no matter how deep you're drowning..."

I slowly withdrew my hand and looked down at it.

"But I come from a mutant world," I continued. "A world where people just hate, and love doesn't exist, and people get hurt and people die and sometimes you're at both ends of the killing and the dying and you can't go anywhere but dig yourself into some hole where....where love just isn't there. Where love is gone or love is the only thing that you hold onto but find out that it's a lie or a let down or something like that. My world and your world...are too different. My world...I don't want to bring you into my world, because...because if I did then I would have to take you down into that hole with me...and I don't want to do that."

I looked back up at her. Storm had always said that whenever I was feeling something deeply, like pain or sadness or anger, you could always tell by looking me straight in the eye. She said that when you looked into "those pretty green marbles", as she called them, you could find out, telepath or not, exactly how I felt, even if you didn't know me. I had never noticed that, but others did, and Natalie sure was right now. Her face contorted into probably the only look of true, heart-felt sympathy I have ever seen directed at me in my entire life. She took her hands and clasped them around mine.

"James," she said. "I love you."

I blinked. She meant it. I knew it. I would have known if she was lying. And she called me by name. She called me by my real name, as I had found out as of late. But she loved me. She loved me.

"I don't care about all that," she said. "I don't care if you drag me down so badly that I die. I want to be in your world. Mine is just too stupid, too boring, too...too empty. It's too empty, James. And for the first time, it shows signs of filling up with life, and with love. And I swear, whatever it takes, I will show you that I love you. I will show you love."

I was so shaken, no idea why, that I couldn't do anything but stare, mouth agape, at this strange person in front of me with this odd feeling in me. This odd feeling that, it seems, I haven't felt in my whole lifetime. This feeling, this person, they were connected. This person loved me. This person wanted me. She cared about me.

And this feeling...this feeling was love, wasn't it?