Free Teach Me by R. A. Nelson Page B

of straw, a massive sedge pond across the way. A long bird with its legs hanging down flaps by and settles in the water. Everything, the world, is so large today.
    He slides in next to me. I’m so hungry for him, I can barely breathe.
    “It’ll be safe here,” he says, taking my hands. I can’t speak. “This is the worst and the best thing I could ever do,” he says. “I got home last night, told myself, You’re crazy. What the hell are you doing? But seeing you here, now—I missed you so much. It nearly drove me insane.”
    His arms.
    We kiss for hours or minutes, I’m not sure which. I’m completely smothered by my need for him. Have I ever been anywhere else but here in his arms? Is this our place? Our new home? In between kisses we watch lines on the pond, the bird, the sun pushing the sky around. But mostly we just look at each other. He’s framing my face with his big hands. I love the smell of his hair.
    I’ve never seen anyone more beautiful in my life.
    It’s real.
    He hasn’t gone, vanished, become something that only exists in this universe part of the time. For a very long time we don’t talk as much.
    We’re too busy creating joy.

nova apples
    More time.
    What happens to it?
    The hours and weeks run together into May like watercolors.
    I’m so hungry for his touch, I could hold him for days or years. We see the unseen side of every shopping mall, the backs of dozens of stores. His car has working air; mine has couches. The state park. Abandoned playgrounds. A particular church. But the place by the pond is best.
    Today we’re sitting there in tall grass on the edge of a sheltered meadow.
    Mr. Mann is sitting behind me, massaging my neck and shoulders with both hands, his legs beneath my legs. No one has ever done this for me before. Ever. It’s hard to keep still; I feel selfish. But he’s also making me feel so impossibly good, so loved.
    Let him.
    In the distance a coyote tracks its way through a deadfall on the edge of the wood. The falling sun is painting the new leaves gold. There is no place on earth but this, a sheltered meadow exactly equidistant between two industrial complexes. But only on Sunday afternoons. The rest of the time it’s a concrete plant.
    “The trucks and buildings are just the other side of those trees,” Mr. Mann says. “Oops, there goes one.”
    “A truck?”
    “Nope. I sometimes see tiny spots in front of my eyes. They call them vitreous floaters.”
    “Weird. Do they bother you?”
    “It’s no big deal.” He moves his hands down my back, around my sides, making me squirm. I am one gigantic nerve ending, raw, but not raw with pain, only pleasure. He goes on.
    “I remember the first day I ever saw them, the floaters—I was fourteen and terrified. We were camping, getting ready to go to Six Flags. Nobody would believe me that I was seeing spots. I thought I was dying. Or that maybe there was something in the pool water.”
    “What do they look like?”
    He thinks about it, squinting. “Tiny corkscrews and geometric patterns. But very indistinct. Diaphanous. I can see right through them most of the time.”
    “My, what a big vocabulary you have, Grandma.”
    “The better to eat—”
    “Uh uh uh.” I wag a finger over my head; he closes his teeth over it.
    “My ears ring all the time,” I say, touching his lips behind me when he lets my finger go. “It’s called tinnitus. It’s not bad. I only notice it when it’s super-quiet. A kid threw a bunch of cherry bombs in a campfire when I was lying beside it.”
    He’s nuzzling my neck now, moving along the hairline, lightly nibbling. “Lying?”
    “Okay, gutter mind.” I laugh. “It was a church picnic. There were a bunch of kids around. I was thirteen. The big drama of the evening was a girl who tried to run away from home with a Barbie suitcase full of five hundred pennies.”
    His hands move down and he hugs me around my middle, face against my cheek, his legs thrown out on either side of