King of the World || Completed

VII - Under

It doesn't take me long to realize that Gethsemane is not wearing pants. I can feel the bare heat of her knees against mine under the table in our booth. She's only wearing a checked men's dress shirt buttoned all the way to the top. She could be wearing shorts, but if I'm not imagining it, I can smell the raw sweat and depth of her, uncovered.

I look down into my coffee to hide my blush. It's pitch black and scalding, a twin to Gethsemane's cup. I ordered for myself, but just as I was about to choose a Caramel Macchiato, I felt her eyes on the back of my neck, not judging but wondering. She was trying to find me out. Everything I do seems to be cataloged in her brain.

How strange, in a world where no one cares about anyone, to have someone watch me so closely.

She's doing it again, now. Her green eyes are still as undisturbed wells, following my hands. I finally work up the courage to lift my eyes and look at her. "How are you?" I ask. My heart skips a beat as we stare at each other.

She displays her youth for just a moment while she considers -- her eyes relax and her lips pout, an eighteen-year-old soul rising to the surface. It's easy to forget how little she is, since I feel like such a child in her presence.

"I am," she says. "Aren't you?"

I want to say something dumb like, aren't I what? but I opt for a head nod instead. Yes, I am. I suppose so. She takes a gulp of coffee and I imitate her. My mother told me once that when you want someone to like you, you have to copy all of their postures and movements; everyone likes a mirror.

Maybe Gethsemane doesn't, though. She looks at me over the rim of her mug, so intensely that she's almost glaring. "You have a good face," she says suddenly.

"Oh." My cheeks flare red again. The heat of her is so near that I almost feel stifled by it. Her knees are still and warm as sleeping kittens, but I can hardly keep from bouncing mine. My body buzzes with agitation and my heart palpitates like a flicked butterfly. "Th-thank you."

She draws her eyebrows together and looks down. "Sorry," she mutters. "Was I not supposed to say that?"

I clasp my hands under the table. There's static electricity between the hair on her bare legs and my pants. I can feel the hairs gravitating toward me, a subtle but powerful pull. I could just bump into her, connect us . . . "No, no," I assure her. "No, that was very nice of you. It just . . . surprised me. People don't usually say that." My blush crawls down my neck and over my ears like an inextricable species of ivy.

"Sorry," she repeats. Her face is sad all of a sudden and my heart thrashes with guilt for having made her feel this way, She is beautiful in her melancholy, lips falling into deep corners in her frown, eyes covered over with thick awnings of confusion, eyebrows arched in distress. She tells me, "Sometimes I say things I'm not supposed to. It's because I have Asperger's Syndrome. That means that I'm a high functioning Autistic." These words come as stiffly and automatically as if they had been read out of a textbook. I wonder to myself how many times she has said them before.

Autistic. It isn't surprising -- the word had actually crossed my mind during our last text conversation (admittedly, more as an abstract adjective than a diagnosis). She is looking at me again, waiting for my judgment, my pity, my verdict on whether or not she is worth the rest of my time. Of course she is -- if anything, I love her more. I can't help thinking of the autistic kids in Teagan's playgroup; my favorite is an eight-year-old boy named Jacob. You can sit on the floor and talk to him for a whole hour, just listen to him talk and talk and talk, usually about outer space. He doesn't get up and wander off like the other kids.

It's in Gethsemane, too, that staying power. She is grounded and present, completely focused on the task at hand. She isn't deciding what she is going to say next, waiting for me to be done. She's not thinking about the past or the future, she's not wishing she was somewhere else. She is entirely here. If that's Aspergers, I don't know what makes it a "handicap".