Joshua smiled shyly, the leathery creases in his face softening into tender curves and soft crevices, and waited for the next move to be made. The old man’s courtly manner, masculine and awkward, touched Kathy in ways that she was at a loss to even try to explain in the limited universe of spoken words.
Joshua, a casually graceful bear of man...tall and burly, hirsute and stoic...was comfortable with the years that he spent on Earth. Sixty-two summers ain’t that many, he would say with quiet conviction. Coyness not being a companion of his, he meant that totally without irony. He had made more than his share of mistakes…what man who was truly living could say that he had not?…but he learned from the ones he could and made his peace with the ones he could not and lived his life as the best man he could be.
Kathy, with her unruly auburn curls and her sober green eyes, the weight of her thirty-eight years having settled in full, unapologetic womanly curves on her sun-kissed frame, was enormously charmed and the gulf of years between her age and his faded into meaninglessness without her consciously realizing it. She had been a willing fool for love more than she cared to remember…old heartaches notwithstanding, she never stopped hoping to be that fool at least one more time.
Joshua touched Kathy’s face, with shy, devastating tenderness, and the moment…and their foolish, hopeful, brave hearts…took flight. The subsequent kiss…as humidly, magically passionate at it indeed was…merely reinforced what those hearts already knew.
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