Chapter 29

And then there was Cameron. If you say his name with just the right accent, it sound like the word for shrimp in spanish. I always felt weird eating the seafood soup people would make for us; I was consuming my zone leader. His last name is Dyal. So I felt even weirder using his soap-namesake. Let's not talk about that.

Cameron is calm. Calm in a way that I would normally find frustrating, but with him, it's different. He is the king of the understatement, the Tsar of self-sufficiency. He is who he is, and he makes no excuses for it. With Cameron, you don't have to know the long stories to understand why he acts the way he does. The rest of us live our lives, excusing ourselves based on what we consider negative and positive experiences. Letting situations act upon us, and not actually taking responsibility for the way we act. Not Cameron.

“How did you do it?”

“I decided before I even came here, that for 2 years, I wasn't going to let anything bother me. And it hasn't.”

With him, it happened innocent. As if it were new to both of us. With my family in San Francisco, he talked to me. He payed attention to me. We laughed, we touched, we played. When he came to utah? It was like a summer film. We drove up the road I had driven up with so many other men, laughing and joking. Four of us – Alfredo and his sister were there too. We swam in the lake, fighting the currents and waves as they tried to thrust us painfully on the rocks. To be honest, if I had resisted Cameron, or not allowed it to happen, I would have been resisting the current.

That day was magical. And I don't mean that in a cheesy romantic comedy kind of way. I mean the combination of light refracting through the water, and my pink hair, and watching as he admired me – it just reacted. The combination any career chemist is looking for – not explosive, but warm. Pulsing. That day he called me a mermaid. He made me a crown of seaweed and a bowstaff of driftwood. It was then I knew; at least for now, he's hooked. He sees me as regal, strong, and beautiful. The viking mermaid, he said.

I beat him at leg wrestling, That seems insignificant, but I promise that its not. I beat him at the stick wrestling as well. So that sunday, when I drove up to lehi, I knew that something was up. How can I pay you for that? He asked. We concluded that he would scratch my back. As the night progressed, I taught him my feelings on reciprocity. And it was during this vocabulary lesson that I discovered something. When I would run my fingernails down his arm, the closer I would get to his hand, the more his hand would reach in the direction of my own. Like magnets. Polarized nuggets that can't actually help the attraction to one another. When he held my hand, I got butterflies. The kind that I hadn't gotten.... well, since mike. Those americans – I'll tell you. They get you fast.

When we walked me to my car, there was something neverending, yet something final about it all. He opened my door. He was kind. In a way that I am not used to. Now let me tell you something about Cameron. He is INCREDIBLE. I've never experienced anything like it. I can't really even explain it. It's as if he had spent years studying my particular anatomy and desires, and had catered his own technique entirely to it. He knew what he wanted, like Pablo. HE went for it. He was gentle but firm. He could have forced me to stay, but he never would. He took charge, but let me have my way. Best of all? He BIT me. Not in a creepy vampire-fetish kind of way, but gently – extremely sensually. The chemistry was silent but present – heat.

It's gone slowly downhill sine then. If he really wanted it to happen, it would happen. But he is not pursuing anything. At least not in a way that I understand or respond to. Senescence. That is what it is. IT bloomed, it's changing, it will die. Just like everything else.

The world has a life cycle. I have a life cycle. My sexual exploits have a life cycle. There are the times when I am catnip to their feline senses of smell. Then there are the times when my catnip is as effective as if those felines suddenly transformed into canines.

I feel like I'm boring you, I say.

I'm just really tired, he mutters from over 3000 miles away. He's tired. I almost want to tell him I know what he means. Sometimes what you don't say become more significant than the things you do say.

Let's just put it this way; if he wanted to be, Cameron could be my perfect man. He is calm and happy. He makes me calm and happy. But I am not what he wants.

If you want me to stop feeling like this, I can, I told him. From 3,000 miles away. Emotion doesn't experience distance decay. When he was next to me, kissing me, smiling, I felt the same butterflies as when he would play his guitar for me from florida. He kissed me while she waited for him there. I became that girl.

I've just had a hard time with girls recently.

“I'm not girls!”, my heart screams. I'm girl.

I have a tendency to think I'm different. Special. Everyone's special, he says.

Which is a way to say that no one is.