Hopeless Romance

Chapter Nine

I was soon crazy about May.  I had girlfriends before I met her.  I was never in love.  If I wasn’t at work, I was with her.  Every minute spent together, every touch, was heaven.  I swear after years without touch it felt better than ever, I was super sensitive to it.  You don’t know what you have until it’s gone, right?  I remembered one time making up with a girl after a fight.  I felt like every part of my skin, and even under my skin, was extra sensitive, in need of this love like never before.  This was what it felt like every day with May, though we never fought.  We were always touching, holding hands or making out by the spring or taking naps in each other’s arms. 

She showed me every inch of the public areas of our compound.  The Spring was close and we went there often.  Pod loved walking with us.  She would run up ahead and in wide circles around us, but constantly come back to check with her pack.  It was fun watching her run, her nose to the ground. 

May loved swimming in the Spring.  She had a green swimsuit that matched her eyes.  She had given me a swim suit too, among the clothes she had raided for me.  But, I had never learned to swim.  She found it hard to believe. 

May pleaded with me from the water, once again.  I felt like I was talking to a floating head as that is all I could see of her.  “Come on, Michael, pleeeease join me?  I’ll teach you to swim.  There are worse things than my hands all over you helping you learn right?”

Well, when she put it that way it was a little tempting.  “Come up here on the shore and teach me then.”

She giggled, “That’s impossible- to learn to swim you have to be in the water.  Okay, how about you just wade in here a little?  Cool off?”

I didn’t want to look stupid.  That was some of it.  It was tough to ask for help, feel vulnerable and needy.  I wanted to impress her.  There was all of that, but it was also that water.  I decided to elaborate on that part of it. 

“Seriously May, I am not getting in that water!  Look at those gross green balls floating all around you!  Yuck.”  I motioned to the ones bunched up on the shore, worst there. 

“That means this is good water!  If you see water that is clear of life, run away!  If the water can’t sustain plant life, it’s probably not so great for human life either.  Besides there’s lots of fresh clean water circulating through here all the time from the Spring.”

“Thanks, you make another excellent point.  All the life swimming up, rubbing against your legs.  Fish, frogs, turtles, who knows what else.  And, all their, well, by products is maybe the best way to put it.”

I stood my ground, on firm ground.  Where she was unable to persuade me, she soon succeeded with Pod however.  Pod was nervous as I was about the water at first.

“Pod, little sweetie, you know you want to swim out here with me baby, come on little Pea Pod.” WTF? 

“Pea Pod, what is that?”

“You know, the shells peas come in?”

“No, peas don’t come in shells, they look kind of like those things you are swimming in.”  I laughed hard at my own joke.

“Really, they do.  I’ll show you in the garden sometime!  Trust me.”  Then she turned back to Pod who, because of May’s coaxing voice, had edged as close to the water as she could without actually being in it. 

“Good girl, come on, a little further.” May was closer to us now, out of the water to her tummy.  I laid back and enjoyed the view.  “You’re not a chicken are you my brave little wolf dog, little Pea Pod.”

Did she just call me a chicken?  “I named her after this little portable computer called an IPod. Not whatever these pea pods are.  And, I’m not scared of swimming out there- I just find it disgusting.”