When they stopped, Aria stuck her fingers deep into the cold air hovering inches above the flowing water, deep into the mellow of the earth’s own breath. The green of better days was brighter than the green that flavored the landscape. The sun’s hands ran over everything, the wet wings of a moth as they opened and closed, the crown of oak leaves and the water that was older than the flow of human blood.
They quickly and silently confirmed their mutual comfort level with nudity. They washed their clothes with a mint green bar of pumice lava soap that Luke carried with him in a ziplock bag. Almost no discourse floated between them. Aria mimicked Luke, draping her clean clothes over the branches of one of the nearby oak trees. The heat of the sun censored the chill of the air.
Aria sat on a rocky outcropping near the stream, waiting for her clothes to dry. She watched Luke run the bar of soap across the scope of his body forcibly. The water below him was tainted with a streak of powdery white from the soap. He used his hands to cup the water and saturate himself. Aria felt warmed by the primal image of him. Luke was a traveler. His body and dreadlocks had been chiseled by the necessity of migration. In many ways, when he was naked, he looked how she imagined a primitive man might have looked thousands of years ago. She smiled, picturing him hunting through the woodland with a loincloth and a spear.
When Luke came to sit down next to her, the river spray still shedding from his skin sparkled against the right side of her body and caused her to flinch. They sat in the awkward but pleasurable silence of unresolved sexual tension until Aria couldn’t sustain it any longer. “So what’s your story?” she asked. Though she was convinced she could most likely write the story of his life without him even telling her, the fact that they were sitting there naked had softened her judgmental attitude.
“What do you mean – like, what was my childhood like, or …?” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Well, yeah. I mean, people don’t just end up out here for nothing,” Aria replied.
Luke paused for a moment, looking down at his feet. “Well, I was born out here in LA. My dad was a surfer. He met my mom on a scuba-diving trip. He was the instructor. According to him, she was the one that came after him. Who knows.” He paused as if trying to sort through something in his mind and picked up where he left off. “According to my dad, my mom didn’t even want us. But he wouldn’t marry her unless she agreed to have kids. She told him that if they got a divorce, he was the one taking the kids. But that wasn’t at all how it turned out. My dad said that on the delivery table, my mom grabbed me and said ‘mine.’ And then she wouldn’t let him touch me until she was ready to let go of me. After they got married, my mom wanted to move away from here. So they took us to Park City, Utah. I would have been a surfer too, but I learned to ski instead. But that’s where everything went to shit.”
Again, Luke paused as if trying to untangle a knot in his head. It was clear that whatever had happened had cast him into a state of confusion.
“Did you have any brothers or sisters?” Aria asked.
“Yes. I had a younger brother. His name was Alex. He died. He ran his bike into the back of a parked van and died,” Luke replied. He fell silent again.
“Did your parents get divorced?” Aria asked, trying to help him start back up with his story.
“Yes. My dad started drinking. They hired us au pairs and pretty soon, my mom started making all the money. She didn’t respect him anymore. She fought him for custody of us, which made him drink even harder. And then it was kind of like we were dropped into thin air. My mom got married like five or six times, each time to a richer and richer man, and my dad developed this habit of driving drunk. He ended up in jail.
“When I was eleven and my brother was ten, my mom was off on safari and my dad put us both in the car when he was drunk. Thank God he was arrested. But we sat there at the police office for hours while they tried to find someone to come pick us up. Finally a family friend came and got us.
“Needless to say, my brother started having drug problems and so my mom sent him away to a boys’ camp in Sedona. When he came back, he was different. And one day, he just decided to ram his bike into the back of a van.”
Luke stopped as if that was the end of his story but Aria wanted to know it all now.
“How did you end up out here, though?” she asked.
Luke started speaking again, but this time, he told his story as if recounting it were a chore. “Well, I could never do anything right by my mother. And yet, I was her favorite. So it was really confusing … I fucking hate my mother. Um, I went to college for a little bit, but I didn’t know what I was interested in, so I just signed up for a bunch of music
