The Scent of You (standard:romance, 532 words)
Author: DAVID TUMUSIIME	Added: Jan 07 2003	Views/Reads: 3498/1	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
About loving and losing and calculating whether it is worth it.

THE SCENT OF YOU. A SKETCH 

The illumination struck her so suddenly that she staggered back as if a
hand had violently pushed her and her heart jolted in its cavity 
rapidly from excitement that it hurt like the pain of a tooth 
extraction without anaesthesia. 

She could not fall in love because she was already in love! She was in
love with Simon! She was in love with Simon! All along and she had not 
known it! Simon couldn't possibly know it either. What a dilemma! What 
an embarrassing position to be in! And a threatening one too! 

Her happiness, so suddenly and exhilaratingly discovered, was over. 

Simon and she could not become lovers. Simon would not accept. Their
friends would not accept. Their parents would be horrified. Love is not 
blind. 

All along she had been unhappy, angry, bad-tempered. She knew she was
forcing people she cared about to withdraw from her, did not want that, 
was horrified by it, but could not stop herself from acting the way 
that pushed forced them from her. 

Try hard as she did, she had been helpless. 

Now that she had accepted the nature of her love for Simon, suddenly a
calm descended on her and she was, strange, happy again. Content. 
Enjoying life. 

The most difficult part was ahead, the pain, the anguish. And she was
not afraid. Looked forward to it rather greedily, anticipatoryily. 

Love really was a shield. 

When he was not aware and they were close to each other and maybe he was
talking, she would cautiously, thieflike delicately, lean towards him, 
and without his knowing, intoxicate herself with his hard, musky, male 
scent in long, slow breathing takes. 

These were perhaps the moments she loved him intensest. These moments
when the whole of him came from him to her. These moments when without 
his knowing, they became one. 

Often she thought of the future in these moments. She thought, horrible
thought, of the time when they might no longer be together. When they 
would no longer love each other. 

And when she thought of the times to come, she thought of what she would
remember of him, of these moments. She knew without a doubt what she 
would remember when he was gone and she remembered what she would 
remember. 

She would remember him in the darkening gloom of evening, by a shut
glass window, in her room, his black eyes unblinkingly staring out into 
the darkness outside, gleaming with the sharp silver glints of longing, 
his lips back in a smile. 

She would also remember waking. Waking to find him looking down at her,
her body, the blankets and bed sheets thrown back, looking with the 
kind of appreciation a connoisseur gives to his obsession. 

Simon left. 

Being alone was something new. She had been so long with him; she had
completely forgotten what it felt like to be alone. 

The simplest errands out of the house were frightening. There were many
things she had never done for herself, that he had done, taken care of. 
Lining up in a bank, paying an electricity bill, filling an application 
form. 

A tree blowing in a wind. 

THE END 


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