“Yeah, I guess,” he answers, smiling. “I’m just not used to it.”
“You like my cooking, though?”
“Yes,” he says, with enthusiasm. “This burrito is great. I knew I’d need some protein today. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I reply, feeling good about pleasing him.
Maybe I should treat the big military man like a big, semi-feral dog. Offer tasty treats, a warm, comfy place to sleep, and rub him on the belly and tell him he’s a good boy.
I hold in a spluttering laugh, and Dan smiles at me.
“It’s really nice to see you happy,” he says. I can tell by his pensive look that he wants to say more, but doesn’t know how.
“Happy might be pushing it, but I’m a lot more comfortable than yesterday,” I admit. “It was a lot of stress for me. I’m sorry I was a bit… tense.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “You had to leave a lot behind, and we really don’t know each other. I understand.”
We share a smile, and I let my eyes linger on his deep blue eyes, my gaze trailing down to his curved lips.
He’s so cute. He could have easily ended up in men’s underwear commercials if it hadn’t been for the military.
The image of Dan flexing in a hot set of tightly fitted trunks fills my mind in such detail that I have to look down at my plate and press my tongue to the roof of my mouth. I can feel my cheeks burning, and I pray that he hasn’t noticed.
It’s not like I’m a virgin. I’ve had encounters, but they were brief. None of the boys in town would ever start something serious with me, so I learned to just live without intimacy.
“So, you like plants?” Dan asks in a hopeful voice. Even though my cheeks are still warm, I look up into his eager face.
It’s, like, the lamest get-to-know-you question I’ve ever heard, but he’s trying.
“More than like,” I answer. “I can feel them. When I was younger, it was more of a general sense, but as my powers have grown, it’s like they actually talk to me.”
“Wow,” he says. “What do they say?”
I chuckle. “Well, it’s not like human speech. I don’t think I could translate exactly. But mostly, they tell me they want more sun, or shade, or water. On a really nice day, a field of grass will sing in happiness, kind of like ‘all is well, and everyone is happy.’”
“That sounds wonderful,” he says. “It must bring you so much peace.”
“It does,” I agree. “But it has its flip side. When land is cleared, everything screams. The plants, trees, and even the earth. It cries as it dies.”
“But people have to build houses,” he says. “What do you expect them to do?”
“Do they?” I snap, narrowing my eyes. “Do people really need to build houses? We rip the environment to shreds to suit our needs, without even a thought to what we destroy.”
“But what’s the solution?” he asks, looking genuinely confused. I sigh heavily.
He’s stumbled into one of my most passionate subjects, and now I can’t stop.
“It’s very easy to go through an area and look for nests and habitats before bulldozing it,” I say. “And it’s also not difficult to plan it carefully and go around the oldest, most established trees. Clearing a ten-acre area for one small dwelling is utterly unnecessary. Do you have any idea how the earth screams when an old tree is ripped up by the roots?”
“No,” he says, looking uncomfortable. “I never really thought about it.”
“And that’s exactly the problem,” I say. “Humans look at the land and say, ‘I want a building here, or a road.’ They strip everything—trees, plants, grass—all the birds that call the place their home, and a beautiful base ecosystem of insects—they tear it all apart to leave bare, dead dirt they can poison further by building on top of it and then draining chemicals into the soil.”
“You feel pretty strongly about this, huh?”
“I don’t think there’s anything else I really care about, actually. It’s one of the most frustrating things to me to hear people say, ‘Oh, humans are arrogant to think we can interfere with nature, so we have to just do nothing.’But we’ve already interfered,and we keep doing it, every day, just by existing. We can’t undo it now, but we can pay attention. We can care. Every single person on the face of the earth can do that.”
“Do what?” Dan asks, bewildered.
