Love Her Weirdly

He was not the kind of guy that would gaze at her lovingly while she sat on the couch working on her lesson plans.  She didn’t get that, but he knew that he showed his love in other ways.  He loved, more than anything else, her feet.  They seemed to so completely encapsulate the woman she was: strong and sure, but flawed.  He loved to touch those clammy feet, to feel their cool wetness and smell them on his finger tips to know she was alive.  

She had three planters warts on the bottom of her right foot.  He would graze his finger tips along their ridges.  It gave him a tactile sense of her.  Like he could know her complicated inner workings just by touching those warts.  When he’d get home, late, from his shift at the bar, the first thing he’d do is touch those feet while she slept.  So odd, he thought, that no matter the temperature, no matter what she was doing, those feet were always simultaneously cold and sweaty.  

It was hard for him to identify what is was about her, and her feet, that he loved.  She came across as so ordinary, pretty, but ordinary.  He now knew how strange and weird she really was, so shamelessly weird that it sometimes made him uncomfortable.  But he felt that he had somehow uncovered this weirdness, that it was something she did not allow everyone to know and love about her.  And, by showing his love for her through her feet, he hoped he could love her as weirdly as she deserved.