Scarred Roses

Chapter eleven: and then they went skinny-dipping

These past two weeks, I honestly think, have been the happiest two weeks I'd ever known. Every morning I'd wake up early to do my farm-duties, then at noon I'd make lunch for Audrey and I, followed by a healthy dosing of domestic duties; all of which made seeing Nick in my afternoons worth the work. He'd be waiting for me under the lilac tree, as always, where we would sit and talk about anything we could think of. I told him all about my little scheme to match-make my two, best friends and instead of advising me to mind my own business, he just laughed and came up with some clever ideas on how to fling them together. It was just one of the things we found we did quite well together; scheming for the good. Once Nick got on-board with an idea, he was an everlasting source of clever notions and plots. Hell, if we planned to rob a bank together, he'd be coming up with at least a dozen ideas on how I'd distract the bank clerks while he cracked the safe-locks.

But plotting romance wasn't the only thing we did together. On some afternoons we'd picnic on the baked treats I'd smuggle from the house, on some I'd bring a few zloty-coins with me so we could get some ice-cream from Mr. Portecelli's, and on others we'd just lie in the grass together, side-by-side, daydreaming about anything we wanted. There would be stolen kisses in between and long, warm embraces by the lakeside, but what we had together wasn't solely physical. Florence said to me once that getting into a relationship with somebody you considered a close friend was practically destroying any chances of friendship, should you decide to break up, but that wouldn't be completely true. Not for me and Nick. It wasn't that I kept him at arms length exactly; just danced around the temptation of things like touching and kissing, for the sake of our friendship. If I did that, we'd be safe from severing our initial bond-wouldn't we?

On one of those sweet afternoons I stood, looking out on the crystal-clear lake, with Nick's arms around me. We were watching the painted sky, streaked with yellow, amber and violet, and how its' reflection in the water made it look like molten gold. It really was something extraordinary! If I had one of those coloured cameras, I would've taken about a thousand pictures of it.

"I didn't know you could get coloured cameras." Nick retorted as I nattered on about them.

"You can-but they're very rare and not to mention expensive. And it only provides a certain set of colours so not everything shows up well in the finished product."

"So would it look like one of those painted advertisements; like the men who wear those sweaters in the American magazines?"

"Not quite-I suppose in a way it'd more look realistic than that. Still, it's never going to be a replica of what we see with our own eyes."

"No-I don't think anything could quite compare to that."

I felt his eyes on me as he said it; though I never turned around to check for certain. If I did, I would've caved into myself and sank deeper into his arms, where I could feel his warmth against my back and his breath on my neck. It was getting harder, I thought to myself as I kept my eyes on the lake. I just wanted to be held and kissed, but if I let that happen there wouldn't be much room for anything else! And there was so much more to be had too. More ice-cream from Mr. Portecelli, more walks through Liliowy, more tales of adventures and schemes of romance. More that needed to be done before this had to come to an end.

Still, I ought to consider myself lucky, in comparison to my sister. It wasn't that things were going bad between her and her beau-or good, for that matter. Things were, to put it simply, in a state of limbo. She brought up the idea of going to Warsaw with him, and yet she had no definite answer. According to her, he just said it was 'some idea' and told her he was going to seriously think about it. What was there to think about? If he loved my sister like he said he did, then shouldn't the answer be obvious? But according to her, love was never as clear-cut and easy as I saw it to be. Her and Thomas had a complicated kind-of love, she said, that needed to be worked at in order to function. Even then it seemed simpler than that; he could either tell her yes, or no. So why was he beating around the bush?