Leopold: The lost count.
“ Give me your hand” she had said it as she fell fully into the moment. A surrender that she beckoned him to join. But his hand was rough and old and wizened- a too dead corpse. He knew that, as he pushed it further within the soft lapel of his robe. Shame coursed through him in little tributaries, that soon merged into a gushing river that threatened to hurtle all things over. “ Fool” he thought to him self; an agonising chasm now writing it's self heavily upon his face.
In these his best things, on this his best day; he had convinced himself that he could pass, and that somehow he would at least be comparable with the rest . So he had risked it, and for a moment he had hoped; mostly because She had been so pretty in her asking, and in the way her eyes had threatened kindness, with a softness like the downy hair upon her face. For months he had imagined all the the warm hours of sun it must have taken, to turn those hairs to white. But then the moment had come when they had left the main body of the group, filing down to a matched pace of impending intimacy. And so his mind had leapt to other things, like too hot beaches, and the handsome men of value that had so adored her that summer. And then like icarus he had fallen; and all at once he was a dreaming fool who was deformed again. So he said it “ NO”, this time with an ice that was served full- frozen, even as her face and trust still stood wide open; as his eyes kept pace with the ground, and the smooth stones and the speckled gravel of the path. The twist in his hand a constant ache, reminding him that in things of the heart, he should proceed with caution. MB
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