Seduction

Stewart's assignment: Seduction in less than a thousand words. How about in less than three hundred?



Second Date

We walk up a short rise, aspens at the crest, a few boulders. A wildlife preserve she says. A favorite place. Even in November.

She steps ahead of me, her full long peasant skirt luffing in the wind. She knows the trail and reaches back to haul me up. From there and along the ridge crest we hold hands.
Last Thursday night we saw a film, foreign and with subtitles. She said she liked it. Hard to tell. We kissed at her door. She said next time we’d go to a place of hers. There would be a next time? We kissed again, briefly, smiling.

We walk for forty minutes seeing only one other person.

“This is one of your favorite things?” I ask.

“It is,” she says.

Through a ravine. Autumn colors are long gone but there is a certain beauty here. On a flat black rock we sit and talk and muse and are, for a time, quiet. It’s a good quiet with no straining need to fill the silence.

“A bit further,” she says.

We enter and exit an acre of woods and find a stand of aspens, growing but bent into half-hoops from root to ground; a little wooded cavern. We bend to enter and sit beneath sparse cover as the wind shifts. Thirty minutes later a light snow starts. The flakes feel fresh and good on my naked back.