Leo

I met him along the way. We fell in love quickly. I never would’ve guessed it. His ivory, empress green and charcoal eyes became the crazy place where my brown eyes searched for where I was supposed to be. I soon realized it was with him.

I stayed the whole night and the entire next day at a house he was living in near the foothills of North Carolina. The town was old and traditioned, along with the house. It was the kind of place where the dust you see on everything looks as though it’s never moved, not in a thousand years, even the dust on the people. The dust in their eyes tells stories you can not hear.

The fields were decorated mostly by old tractors with red wooden wheels, cracked spokes. Wheelbarrows and big round tanks were scattered across the backyard behind the old house. The water came from a well you could see and touch and it felt old-fashioned in a good way. Leo handed me a glass of cold water from the tap. “That’s the fruit of my labor, right there.” He’d drilled the well behind the house, made the water drinkable. It tasted pure and natural and sweet as I looked at his perfect lips and drank from the cup. I felt I should’ve been drinking from a tin cup instead, and imagined I was.

He left for work with a simple kiss and goodbye and I was alone in my mystery and curiosity. I craved to know more and to understand this life I’d never been a part of. This life he’d lived for so long.

I walked across the street to a field in the morning after he was gone and I had showered. There were two men working on a machine of some sort in a very synchronized way. I watched for several minutes, maybe a half an hour, as they moved back and forth with a saw or a drill or a hammer, together, they fixed it and when it turned on and they began riding it and swinging their arms, my face lifted and I wished I had helped. I felt so empty and I walked back to the house for some food.

He’d missed me during the day and came back to visit, although he still had some work to do. He came to me dirty and tired, in a navy blue shirt and pants. The caked mud, rust and other working man’s stains rained over him like the ink on my hands and I laughed gently, charmed.

He led me to where he worked and it made me feel like a young girl. He lifted things from truck to truck and I sat aboard one of them while it was loaded. I wondered quietly the names of the things he carried around all day, the tools he used, the methods with which he fixed things. Large round metal fixtures and small shacks littered a sandy, dusty area and I sat lady-like in a pink shirt on the bed of a truck in the shade.

I must’ve looked bored but I wasn’t. I felt so inexperienced but I liked the feeling because of how it made him a man, I reveled in it and thought for a long time about the fact that I didn’t know about all this but one day maybe I would because I knew him. I thought I should’ve felt uncomfortable here until his rusted hand landed salty on my thigh and he said “Let’s go baby. We’ll take a quick ride.”

In the truck I’d looked for something to fiddle with, a way to keep my hands active while his drove us. I found a set of keys and held them between my fingers, feeling their carvings, spinning the ring around my index finger like I owned something that they would unlock. He parked the truck abruptly and left it running while he jumped out to talk to someone in a small tin building near the railroad tracks. Dust flew into a cloud around the truck as he got out, I reached for him so he would stand there for a moment. I wanted to see the dust settle on his skin, the top of his cheeks, his clothes. He smiled and kissed me, dust particles entered my nostrils and I breathed in slowly. This place smelled so fresh and untainted.

He disappeared into the place. I looked at my hands and they were covered in a tarnished brown from the dirty keys. I loved it and smiled as I sat alone in the truck, waiting for him.

Leaving was always the hard part with him. Getting there, although we were miles apart, always seemed easy to me, fast because I was ready---excited. But leaving seemed to take hours. We watched the hands on the clock turn closer to the hour, sad because it hurt to spend time that way. At least we were together, we thought, but still sad. We saved every second we had together, saved it like pennies in a jar. It was then I realized what was really meant by saving time.

I kept it hidden away in a place where I knew everything about him, a place where we existed alone. In places like unmade beds, long stretches of highway, small restaurant booths.

I keep it hidden in words like these. Our time.

The exciting part was knowing the exact hour we would see each other again—the night before under rustled sheets in anticipation and almost madness. The smile heard through the phone—I can see his lips part and spread—“I’ll be there by 8.” Eight would stay in my head while I walked through my messy day, eight was always there waiting—nothing could change it, eight would come.

Then when it comes its better than I ever thought, no matter how many times I imagined it in my head, no matter how much I could picture him and what he would do and say, it was fresh every time, a brand new time to save with him.