A New Beginning

Scars

*Chapter contains sexual content*

"Just me, Buell'n the wild, open land..." Arthur lifts his chin. The corner of his mouth quirks a wistful smile. His gaze is distant and dreamy and his shoulders lax, as if the mere thought of the aforesaid is enough to reduce his stress. "Buy myself a piece of land, build a farmstead, a wife–"

White bubbles in honey-colored hair, enthrallingly complemented by a bashful smile...

Stripped off his guise you see him for the man he truly is beneath this sullen façade of dourness and ire, forged by years of insalubrious comradeships and insufferable conditions that has scarred both soul and skin of this broken man who has long yearned for the warmth of a lover's gentle hands. This covert amity might be hard to see at first to tenth glance but now you know Arthur to be an ocean of loyalty to what he holds dear. His layers shed, like an orange sans peel and pith, bares a man who knows compassion, kindness, and consideration, with a proclivity to offer his aid to those he deems deserving. Your initial conjecture of him, rosy-red, naïve, and spellbound by some ineffable je ne sais quoi, hadn't been so far off after all.

"Hmm, sitting by yourself with your journal open, riding alone across the wild, open land..."

While a certain degree of suffering might be merited so is a future of repose. You scoot closer so that he feels your presence, your succor, your love, as he mulls over the words exchanged and all that is stirring within making him look so sad and lost, sweet, wonderful Arthur. You feel his muscles tense.

He is certainly not for want of sense. Rather, he employs a great deal of wit, in all meanings of the word, and though verbal eloquence is not his forte, his narrative speech, far above your expectations (though no conscious thought of any such expectations or lack thereof has ever been applied), is not without its flair of linguistic creativity, yet, despite the shift of paradigm, including his recantation of a once firmly held stance of herd-loyalty and allegiance to a life of deceit and joint renouncing of reciprocal ill-will and prejudice, your education and sanguinity against his unfavorable amalgamation of tempestuous propensity and want of subjection to the fancies of nuance and subtext that begets liberality, good sense, and a deeper understanding of humanity and civilization outside the purview of his knowledge and experience can be your saving grace as much as it can be your downfall.

A memory spurs, of your first encounter with an elevator and the initial reluctance to step into such a small compartment, whose sole purpose is to move up and down between floors, until a mechanical engineer at St. Denis university had allayed said concern by the enlightenment of the counterweight, a heavy block of metal or concrete providing balance and stability to a mechanical system, such as an elevator, by the appliance of an opposite force. In short, it is the counterweight that prevents the elevator from plummeting down in free fall at the mercy of gravity.

Your virtues can be such a counterweight, metaphorically speaking of course, to Arthur's coarse, uncouth demeanor, cynical worldview, and past misguidance of propriety and values, as he will be a counterweight to your whims and wanting experience of life's ruses, deceits, and ensuant scrapes, thought the past fortnight has taught you more on the matter than all of your youth combined.

By differences in experience and temper, you both possess conduct, wisdom and insight that can be of benefit to the other.

"Look, Arthur..."

Your sociable, though far from loquacious disposition is perfectly qualified to engage him in proper conversation to exercise understanding of human interaction yet not so much for it to be tiresome.

"There's a whole lot you should've done differently and a whole lot you shouldn't've done at all but you said it yourself, we can't change what's been done, we can only move on."