Blair and I were braced against a treetrunk, halfway between the understory
and the canopy, and Blair was helping me through a sense-expansion exercise
he'd worked out. He had good reasons for it, too--I had a much larger
visual range from up here, where things were relatively unobstructed, and
there weren't as many echoes or smells to distract me.

He leaned against me, and I felt the blood moving through him, the
slickness of his sweat, the faint graze of his hair against my skin. He
smelled of earth and salt and musk, and he was hard and unyielding under
his clothes.

He turned, the strong lines of his body showing beneath his shirt, the
powerful curve of his neck rising, wet with perspiration, to meet the
subtly harder curve of his skull. "Now," he whispered, "there, look there,
and then see it with touch. Stretch out with touch..."

I closed my eyes and obeyed.

Later, as we lay naked and entangled in our hut, I found myself thinking
that he had changed so much in the seven years I had known him.

The first day I met him, I felt his body against mine. He weighed less
then, and was softer: not a weak man, or overweight, but solid and strong
without having an athelete's body. He spoke constantly, and his hair was
everywhere, and he was color and movement--a hurricane I had to adjust to,
a necessary evil.

I remember watching him shimmy up a tree in that red shirt and ragged
jeans, his mid-range hiking boots pressing against the bark. And then I
thought that just yesterday, I watched him scale a vertical trunk in a camo
tank top and khakis, strong tan arms quivering with effort, bare feet
gripping and relaxing.

He twisted against me as I lay awake thinking, and I looked down and saw
hard muscle outlined against the skin, where once there had been smooth
flatness; I saw the extra weight that he carried now--none of it excess--I
saw the harder line of his jaw and the crows-feet beginning at his eyes.

I saw the paint on his arm, the markings that he wore every day among the
Chopec, smeared from the grip of my hand on him as I held him down earlier,
held him down and felt him around and under me, his body a gift, a fucking
gift I wasn't worthy of; moving against me, rising to his knees and taking
me deeper into him. I wasn't strong enough to hold him long, and there was
no way I could deny him when he moved like that.

Shivering in remembered pleasure, I fell asleep.

When I woke the next morning, I was alone.

I headed out to the bathing spot on the river, downstream from where we got
our drinking water. I found Blair there, standing in the river, and he
shook his head and water sprayed into the air as the short curls extended
and then sprang back. His hair is no longer than mine, now, though he
hasn't started losing it.

He climbed out, the glide of his muscles caught in the reflection of light
from his skin, and began to dress. I watched: bare feet, one broken
toenail, digging into soft river mud; dark green pants, tank top which did
little to hide the fact that the academic had died and been replaced by
this warrior. He ran his hand through his hair--one of those large square
hands that had comforted children and driven trucks and had once smelled of
helicopter fuel and that had carried guns and killed men and fought, fought
hard, to win a place at my side.

The change in him was deep and profound and I wondered if one day he would
hate me for it.

And then he turned, and looked at me, and I knew he knew what I had been
thinking.

"I told you before," he said. "I chose this freely. This is who I am." He
walked towards me, not the friendly casual stroll of the student I had once
known, but the smooth lethal walk of a predator. He laid his palm on my
chest, and met my eyes, challenging me to deny him.

"Chief?"

"Jim," he answered. "This is me breathing."

---

The End