EXCERPT FROM "Just So" a short story

It is so easy to be in true love.

Her face, her neck, her shoulders, her breast, her thighs and toes, presented with no hurries or expectations. And we made love, which is pretty much what we always did in the morning.
Just so.

She never figured that I'd agree, which is why she seemed so distant the days leading up to her revelation. She had a chance to work in Paris, to study her art there. I've never been there, though I'm not sure she realizes it. By virtue of my age, 37, and my own artistic career as a journalist and writer she thinks I've been so many places. The reality is, she has traveled to more interesting locations abroad than I. It's the U-S where I'm an exception; a fascinating homeland, but as a travel destination, one I've covered from coast to coast long ago.
Worldliness is little more than confidence in your own level of curiosity.

"I just don't want you to feel pressured, that's all. I was afraid you'd make an honorable but half-hearted offer. You know," she went on, in that deep, sinister male voice she liked to use when playfully attempting to scare the shit out of me during lovemaking. "'I can't stop you - and I won't - but you know my work's here.'"
She watched my reaction with definitive curiosity, as we watch a lover at sleep, searching out the scars and wrinkles. She usually only spoke in those tones when we'd already finished making love, come to think of it, since she knows it authentically creeps me out. Here, she anted it to relax the fear, I assume, if not in me, her own heart.
"I can't stop you," I agreed. "And I won't stop you." The pause here, for affect, startled her, left her heart skipping a beat I could tell. I smiled and reached out to hold her hand, seeking to reassure her in this moment.

"But if necessary, I will stalk you all the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower."
She laughed in relief, instantly, out loud and we talked about how to do it. I really could write anywhere now, something I wasn't established well enough to do ten years ago … (Perhaps I could have ten years ago, but I am convinced I would have never stood a chance to exist on the same spiritual plane as her ten years earlier, had she come along then.) and my daughter was grown and soon off to college. I spoke a little Italian, which I hoped could help me pick up French. And Anna's fling from college and her "French Art Friends" would usher me along. If I could get by in rural Louisiana, where Cajuns speak their own bizarre Pidgin Creole language, then I could get along in France with her.

It was only as she spoke of the opportunity for her that I wondered to myself how selfish I may be, wanting this young woman's growth to nourish me; would we ever have children? Could she love me forever? Gray hair, no problem, but vitality? The likes of which she'll find in her studies, her new home? Will she simply outgrow me, now that my experiential curve has become less significant, hers dramatic?
There was a point in my life when I would have lacked the courage to give this all I had. When I would have chose the immediate pain of losing her over the enormous heartache that could be waiting in a foreign land. But this very love has changed me, has allowed me to recognize the complete sensuality of the moment. I hesitated no more, frightened not again … I embraced her.