*Scene not finished*
Despite the heat of the midday sun, Nate decided to work on weeding his garden. It could have waited a few more days-it wasn’t that bad=but he knew himself well enough to know when he needed an escape and to Nate, gardening was his escape. When he was tending to his vegetables, to his plants, he did not matter: they mattered. He could stop trying to take care of himself; he could stop all the whirling thoughts inside his head. All of his energies, thoughts, feelings…they turned away from himself to the things he was responsible for taking care of and helping to grow.
He grabbed a bottle of water and headed out to his shed, put on his gardening gloves and shirt, and headed out to begin weeding. Whenever he gardened, the world blurred away and nothing else existed.
The world did not blur away this time.
His thoughts and emotions still revolved around Alexis and Maddie. They were twin suns whose gravity was causing all his thoughts and feelings to spin around them. The more he thought about one the more he thought about the other. He found this insane…the two women had never met, yet they were linked forever in his mind. He couldn’t escape them, and neither could he escape his growing sense of guilt and confusion.
As he pulled and yanked on weeds that were threatening to destroy his vegetables, Nate thought.
He loved Alexis. He loved her strength and how she assumed he was strong as well. She was a woman who did what she believed had to be done, no matter the risks or consequences; a woman who applied her own logic and her own rules to the world. She did not hide her feelings, but instead voiced them loud and clear. He had loved her as long as he had known her; leaving their relationship had never entered his mind, even when she went to prison. Yet, Waiting was still hard. He and Alexis had known couples separated in this same way, and these couples had not made it. It was hard to love someone that you could not be with. Love was touches, smiles, being together. Yet he knew love was also dedication, and he was dedicated to Alexis, especially knowing that she was in prison because of him.
And then there was Maddie. The girl he never saw coming. The girl that was the last girl on earth that Nate would ever expect to be falling for. and as she took over his heart, his guilt and sense of betrayal grew.
At first, there was no guilt, no sense of betrayal. He and Alexis wrote regularly, in addition to his weekly visits, and in one of her letters she told him he could hook up with other girls. In typical Alexis fashion, she was blunt and said she knew that he had physical needs, that he was human and that she did not expect him to become a monk in her absence. The last line in that same letter read:
Share your body, but not your heart Nate.
