A Fresh Start And A Different Perspective

"And I guess that's about it," Lucas says as we make our way into the kitchen and he finishes showing me around, "I won't go so far as to call it a grand tour since I think that might make it sound a little disingenuous, but it's a tour nonetheless."

He smiles at me broadly, waiting for me to catch onto and play with his joke and I find that I do, "I don't know... seems grand to me but maybe that's just the small town in me talking. Still I want to let you know that I do appreciate this a lot. You didn't have to let some stranger stay with you. It's really... kind of you."

He leans against the counter and waves his hand dismissively like it's no big deal. Kicking open the fridge with the toe of his boot he pulls out a beer and cracks it with a shrug.

"I want to help, sincerely," he says, "Look I mean Emily I don't know you really at all, haven't seen you in years or anything like that, but you wanted to get out of that town I feel that maybe I should help with that. I know first-hand what it can be like, how difficult it can be to make a go of things in the world coming from a background like that. Anything I can do to help someone out and keep them from making the same mistakes I did, well I'm here for that."

"Mistakes?" I laughed, "You've got a fantastic house and pictures on the wall from a life lived across the world. Whatever mistakes you might have made they don't seem to have had much of an impact."

I chuckle but he doesn't. He just kind of grins slyly, almost wistfully, with this far off look in his eyes before he snaps back to me.

"Everyone makes mistakes," he says, "The key is to not let them compound because if they do they drag you down. If you make a mistake one day, don't make it the next. When you do it starts you on the road to a mistake becoming a habit, and that's harder to break than you could ever imagine."

Something about his words linger in me and it hovers in the air between us as well. It is a silence of contemplation, of a man who looks his age and a woman whose body disguises her true history. It is the significance of truth, for one instant before it snaps and breaks and we move past it without addressing it.

"But that's too much old man talk for a young'un like you," he says, "You've got your whole damn life ahead of you and you can and will and should make some mistakes. I just want to help someone avoid falling into the same traps that I did, but you'll have traps all your own to fall in.

"Have fun. Laugh and live. Love hard and drink life in. That's the best advice I can give, not that you're likely looking for any."

He takes a pull on his beer and I see his grin around it. I shrug, shuffle my weight from side to side.

"I think some advice could be helpful," I tell him, "And appreciated. Like you said I've got time enough for all the mistakes I'm going to make on my own, no sense adding avoidable ones on top of it. So what advice could you give me then? One thing I should absolutely avoid, or absolutely make sure that I do, I suppose."

Lucas contemplated for a minute, slowly swallowing the swig of beer he had in his mouth. He rubbed the stubble on his chin and he looked at me and he raised an eyebrow as his eyes rolled up and down me.

And he looked at me. He really looked at me. He saw me in that moment, in a way that all the others had seen me before. He looked at me as a man looks at a woman, and I knew without him having to even speak what he was thinking.

It was the way that he looked at me, like I was a woman and like he was a man. Staring at me and contemplating what the nature of our relationship just might be.

I didn’t really know what my answer would be there. The day had been so confusing and I’d been so caught up with things that were happening. I’d only managed to react, never to act.

But it felt like Lucas was giving me an option here, like he was giving me a choice.

The only problem was I had no idea what to do.

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