Simple Pleasures

We talked more into the night before he leaned back to just look at me with this gaze that said I was all that existed in his eyes. I would have shifted unsettled beneath such scrutiny by anyone else. He asked one question that gave me pause to think for a moment, not because I had to come up with an answer but simply because he had asked it. Tell him of one simple pleasure in my life, one small thing that brought me joy. With him there was just this comfort, an ease to weave the imagery for him of a place I love to go, one know one else knows about. I told him that here among the wagons though, I just like watching the fires. That was how we first met. He had asked me if they spoke to me and now he was telling me that he had wanted to know what they said to me in the worst way. What captured my attention so fully and that maybe if he knew he could do the same. Didn't he see? He had ... in that one moment that he had first asked me. No one else had ever wanted to know something so deeply personal or profound before. I had wanted to turn and ask him the same .. to know if they spoke to him and if so what? He made me smile when he told me the fires had said ... "Fool, just talk to her". For me they had whispered, "Take me to him", and I had when I found a stone that held them.

When we are at the fires now, I don't speak to him as much. There are tempests that swirl that don't need much encouragement to become storms. He had noticed but said they could not govern our lives. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to agree but I knew I couldn't, not completely. He was not just a man, an Or or even an Orlu. He was the Ubar .. their Ubar and sometimes their needs were real. When we begin talking, it is as if there is nothing else that exists, well to me anyway and it could not be that way all the time. Would he know and remember ... for me, that even when I don't say much to him among others that there was still so much on the inside that held hundreds of questions, that had a hundred things to say and wanted to hear just as much?

While we talked more I checked the lump on the back of his head. Did it still hurt? He was pleased Grandmother hadn't been more angry than she was that day or I'd be standing beside his pyre. That scared me thinking of being without him. It made me angry just thinking of such a thing. I sat back like a mother vulo puffing her chest ready to raise talons and expand her wings for combat. I let him have every bit of those thoughts full force. "Do not build a pyre for yourself before your time. I will seek the wind and come for you, Ayguili of the Tuchuks." I heard his answer as a promise, as a fact, and as a soothing for all my fears. "I don't plan to"

He looked at me with a look I had never seen on anyone before. A bit amused, a bit confused. A bit content and a bit of pain. Add another bit curious and two bits something entirely different. He leaned in to kiss my temple and stood abruptly. "I must go", he said, "before I forget a promise to myself."

That night I didn't want to watch him go. I sat there staring at the fire, smiling, knowing that all of a sudden, I could add volumes to that list of simple pleasures, the ones that bring me joy and this was just the beginning.