dryad

Zac watched the sun set, a yellow-orange-red corpse that leaked lilac blood across the sky, clotting viscous violet in the east. He gulped and drew his knees to his chest as day and hope faded simultanously, siamese twins since birth, incapeable of surviving alone. Two beings tied to the same system, grotesque, morbid, and wonderous. He dug his bare toes into the sand, searching for any heat the sun had forgotten. A sensuously salty gust of wind blew a honey droplet of hair into his vision, but Zac was oblivious. It clung, shivery and sweet, to his bottom lip before gliding away once more. I watched, unable to crack the brittle moment of his beauty to give his shivering frame the woolen blanket draped over mine. I crept closer to him, ever wary of splinters on the weathered boardwalk. He was so amazingly grandly androgenously beautiful that even the sunset was lost to me. People called his brother feminine, but in reality he was just the pale, shrunken skeleton of an anorexic boy who forgot about girls, emotion, and life long ago. Zac was a sad, soft-eyed, mountain deva in the shell of a man. I crept down the wide wooden steps to the soft, white sand below. I was almost there when



"Fuck! Ow! Goddamn wood!"

Zac jumped a good three feet into the air before swinging his arms back to support himself. "Hello there. Trouble?"

"I got a splinter in my foot from that fucking-"

"Come here," sed Zac in his most laid back tone, brushing off his hands on his jeans before tucking his slightly-greasy tresses behind each ear. I shut my mouth and faked injury, flopping, hopping on one foot towards where my adored one sat. I eased down next to him on the sand, wrapping the blanket around shoulders and trying not to act like they were singley the most well-made shoulders ever put on a man.

He now sat indian-style, my right leg in his lap, and examined it in the light of the drowning sun. "I'll make it all better." he said, with a half-smile that really wasn't meant to be suggestive at all, I thought to myself. Still, a tiny electric wire had gone off all up and through my spine, and it was making sparks that would shame the noonday sun. His warm fingers were probing my cold foot, stroking away grains of sand like they were strands of hair in the face ofa beautiful flower of a girl. Like the kind of girl who has no split ends and never puts on wild eyeshadow or blue glitter toenail polish, like me. I wish I were like that, like the girls he was interested in. I'd seen him at parties, when Jess and I would go to dance and he and Ike would find beautiful girls to exchange 'beautiful music' with behind locked bathroom doors. He'd popped girls like you wouldn't believe.

I hardly felt the splinter come out until he gave me my foot back and said "Another successful operation by Dr. Zac Hanson." I grinned and layed my legs out in front of me, pulling the blanket close around me. I felt awkward around him, his hair whipping gently in the wind, his eyes probing the surroundings deeper than mine ever could, sinking with the sun. I tried to watch him from the corner of my eye, but I have no talent for that kind of thing.

"What?" he asked, turning his face sharply towards me. I just melted into his eyes, wondering if I could stay there forever, a dryad of a girl, colored that deeper than brown colour with a u.

"Uh nothing," I emitted more than spoke, turning my head all to sharply and giving myself away completely.

"What?" he repeated, softening his expression. I bit my lip. "Please say something. What's up?"

I wished I smoked and had a cigarette to grasp, and nonchalantly wave about, wisping smoke into the breeze. I wished I could be that smoke in the breeze, so I wouldn't have to look into his eyes again. I was very, very afraid of the way his eyes would look, if he ever look at me the way I had looked at him. I was positively terrified. If I saw his eyes all soft and firey, sweet like chocolate on the edge of your tongue, strong and stable like tree bark rubbed between your fingertips, I'd be gone. I'd be trapped a dryad forever, unable to leave my tree even if fire consumed me.

And in the fog and brambles and high of all this turmoil I made the single most impulsive, bold, insane, and explosive move of my 17 years. I ran amuck around the moment, apathetic of reprocussion. I lit a candle, there, before the ocean and the sun's funeral march. I scattered daisy chains through his sunny hair and shoulders and waist and hips. I...

...I kissed him.



Waves in slow motion. The blanket falls slowly. Girl presses her hand to his cheek and squeezes shut her eyes like she's in pain. Boy leans forward, eyes wide with shock, then smooth like the rose petals scattered through the scene. The sun melts onto the water; a pool of bronze trembles rythemicly.



I pulled back abruptly. Stray fingers curled towards my mouth, but I could not rationally find it. I had kissed him. I kissed those lips. The same lips that gave that grin, that half smile while telling dirty jokes, that occasionally told off Taylor and laughed at Ike, that pursed when listening, that curled magnificantly when I watched him sleeping through the cracked door, that parted thoughtlessly and askew when he drummed and gave no thought to his looks. Beauty.

I thought it was over then. The sunset, the ocean, his sadness, my dignity. Our friendship. The moment. And then he pulled out daisy chains, chains of his own, and wrapped me into a tangled cocoon. It was very simple: ever so gently, he tilted my chin with one hand and looked deep into my eyes. Our combined gaze was so intense that he didn't notice me mouth 'please.' I know how many dryads reside in this one boy's forest, unattended, vulnarable, and trapped. Please don't leave me here. Please, no.

And then he pressed his full mouth to mine and we were in circles and circles of daisy chains, dizzying. I wasn't sure if the dull, rythemic pounding was the surf, or his heart, or mine, but it sure as hell sounded like Zac on the skins, and the tom was his tongue's scrape agains mine. It wasn't long before we were sparring, two oceans colliding, tidal waves crish-crashing together before slip-sliding back, pleasure rippling down.