She Won't Be Lonely Long

Soon they were at their desination. It was a mid-sized patch of baron-earth surrounded with dense evergreen, the flat tip of a rugged hill nearly two hundred feet off of the ground and surrounded with a chubby river and even more mountains. Its beauty was exquisite to the four of them.

Although Maral insisted the tents be put up before dark, Hannah had the primitive urge to wander off so dissapeared for the next few hours. When she came back, her arms were filled with perfectly cut bars of firewood and an axe encrusted with dirt and rust. Apparently she had found it at a nearby campsite that had long since been abandoned.

It would soon be dark so she started on putting up her tent, although she had done it hundreds of times before so it only took a couple of minutes. A fire was soon built and the booze was brought out. Sergio had found two substantially sized, uprooted tree-trunks to act as seats when tipped over around the pit. Naturally, Maral and Sergio occupied one while Xabi and Hannah occupied the other.

"Sergio," Maral spoke as if the muscles of her face were slowly shutting down. "I'm drunk."

Her hands massaged the area you could consider boarder-line thigh of her suitor, and he began giggling uncontrollably as her reach went for what was under her pants.

"Lets get you to bed."

The animal-like noises from the blue tent, Maral and Sergio's, only made conversation nearly impossible between the two stragglers outside. Hannah couldn't help but laugh hysterically although she was becoming a bit uncomfortable herself. She didn't need any help thinking dirty things when she was around Xabi. He was becoming bashful, trying his hardest not to listen although the nearby couple's rendezvous wasn't something kept quite.

"Hannah, would you like to go for a walk?"

She nodded quickly. This idea seemed well to her although when he spoke her name she had hoped to hear a proposal of a different sort. Her mind was filled with racey thoughts around him by that point.

Without a sound on their part, they left the camp-fire unnattended and ventured to the north, which was a graduall drop into flat land although that wasn't the route that Hannah wanted to take. She wanted to go down to the river, which was quite the fall.

"Are you... sure?" Xabi asked meagerly, leaning forward on the pads of his feet to evaluate their landing.

She nodded quickly, not seeing any fault in her plan. "Yeah, of course! I climbed down there earlier."

"You should not have done that alone; What if you had fallen?" he mumbled with frustration.

She simply smiled in response, knocked into silence at the point of her recklessness but also flattered that a man so well-balanced with all around perfection cared enough about her safety to lecture her.

As he awaited her response, he found that the darkness had hypnotized him for a split second. She was out of general sight now, and climbing down the cliff using its jagged edge and prevalent trees sprouting from the cracks in its wall. He gave one last sigh of defeat before joining her, although she had gotten a few yards of head-start.

"Its a great view down here." she spoke comically once she was on the ground and he was still climbing over her head. She was grinning wide and watching his agile frame struggle against the wall of stone.

He caught on to what she was hinting at and landed in front of her jubilantly. He didn't feel the need to carry on the joke, with another subject drilling at his mind.

"Hannah," he said thoughtfully while turning away from her to head for the river.

She didn't bother to follow, knowing he would only get another yard or two before reaching the water.

"Why are you so unsure?" he asked.

She didn't quite know what he had meant by that, but she knew that this conversation was about to get awkward.

"What are you talking about?" she sighed with frustration. In her mind this had been flawless. She was alone with the most brilliant man she had ever met in the most astounding place. That question only ruined it. She was unsure about tons of things, none of them good.

"I am sorry that you are being paired with somebody you do not want to be with," he spoke quietly, yet confidently as he struggled to get to the bottom of things. "But you seem to be so insecure. And you try so hard to... not connect."

She let him finish all that he needed to say, which took nearly a minute because his English sometimes got shaky. But she knew exactly what she would reply with.

"Xabi, it isn't that I don't want to be with you." she chuckled to herself, although the idea in her head wasn't so much humorous as sad. "It's that I can't be."

His brows wrinkled with confusion. "Do you have boyfriend?"

She smiled weakly and shook her head, bashfully staring to the ground. She dreaded explaining her complex thoughts to others; Most of the time it just didn't work.

"No, but if I did... he couldn't be like you."

That was an automatic kick in the teeth, Xabi assuming that she meant it was something about him that she didn't like. She couldn't have him thinking that for a minute, because her problems were quite contrare to that.

"You are just too perfect to be with a girl like me." she forced those words out of her mouth with force. She was very embarassed with herself now and hoped that would be the last of her end of that conversation, but it surely wasn't.

"Too perfect?"

"Yes, way to perfect. I mean, you are a professional footballer. You have more money than you can handle. You are..." she spared a quick glance in his direction but soon retreated to the feral ground again. "By far the most handsome man I have ever met. And to top it off you have this great personality!"

He whimpered. "Most people consider those qualities to be good..."

"I do too. But that doesn't matter. You're perfect, and I'm just some funny-looking American girl. "

He clenched his jaw and narrowed his eyes at her. "Pendejo!"

"I know." she squeaked, wishing that she was different in every way.

There was a long stretch of silence for them to think. She was staring at the ground still and the last time she checked, he was facing the river. But she was soon surprised to find that he was standing right in front of her.

"I don't know why you feel that way about yourself..." he said. "But I think you are beautiful."

And at that, he dissapeared to follow the long shore line, leaving her with butterflies of both flattery and angst to flutter in her stomach.