Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [132]
But maybe it was because for the first time in my life, I realized, I had been pursuing something that made me happy and living. Doing things. Facing consequences.
I let my mind wander back through the day’s events, and it all came around to Ms. Nuckeby. She had thrilled every inch of me, and motivated me, even when things went wrong. I had never really been motivated before, in my young life, and it had all been exciting. Exhilarating.
Fun.
And in the midst of it all, I had learned that she was—truly—only interested in me, for me. While that may have left her tastes in question, it was nonetheless true. She was even willing to live with me and be poor. My fears really were all that had held me back, and she hadn’t become disheartened until I couldn’t find my way clear to either live off of her, or run around without pants.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I looked at the chocolates in my hand. And now I was going back upstairs to Mindie?
I needed a shrink!
I looked around at Sandy, and she smiled again. She was a lovely person, and while I wasn’t interested in her, or her daughter, she seemed willing to accept me because she felt I might be good to Sophie. Might not Wisper’s parents be the same? And if not, wouldn’t it be worth learning how to feel good without clothes to have someone as magnificent, and caring, and beautiful as Wisper? I’d done it to annoy Mindie. Why not to show appreciation for Wisper?
My thoughts seized. What was to learn? I had already felt good without wearing clothes.
First, in the restaurant parking lot, the sensations were sensual and pleasant. Then on the beach with Wisper—that was, of course, beyond all description. Her appreciation of my nudity was—well, there were no words—and it was again only my ridiculous fears that had interfered. Even before I’d come to this place, while still at home, I preferred to swim in the nude rather than in a suit, and here, ‘this is the one place no on cares if you’re naked’. If I had said it once, I’d said it a hundred times since arriving, and never once processed the words myself.
No one cared.
No one but Wisper.
Morgan had a point. I liked the way it felt. Enjoyed the sensations. Why couldn’t I manage it for as glorious a prize as her?
Because I liked the way it felt.
Like being chased with rocks and sticks, my life had been spent running and hiding from feelings of all kinds. If one never reached, one never missed, and thereby never suffered the pain of missing. Better to slog through life in an endlessly dull, unchallenged state than to fly, get too close to the sun, and suffer the fate of Icarus. No matter that you might get an island named after you.
And yet, even at that, I was constantly failing. In the eyes of a family who didn’t understand me, of a friend who wanted me to come back to our adolescence and be who I no longer was, of a fiancée who only wanted me for…
For what?
Why did Mindie want me if she didn’t really ‘want’ me? And why was I willing—even now—to live a life of endless rejection with her rather than acceptance with someone as intelligent, and discerning, and incredible as Wisper?
Especially when Wisper hadn’t rejected me. I had rejected her.
Because she felt too good, and I didn’t think I deserved her. Couldn’t come to terms with the fact that she wanted me, and knew she would eventually leave me so that—again, like Icarus—I’d end my days floating on an empty ocean of pain, surrounded by a gooey puddle of waxy feathers and pointless aspirations. A dull, unappreciated existence was far less frightening than losing something I might be emotionally unequipped to survive losing. Even now, the pain of missing Wisper was almost debilitating. Imagine if I had actually fallen in love with her.
Imagine? Did I really need to imagine?