Mountain Jeff, part two.
Jeff looked nervous. “This is a very nice restaurant,” rumbled María, rubbing Jeff’s shoulders. “I feel like a hill again.”
“Primary-succession ecosystems only,” whispered Jeff, grateful for the compliment.
They sat at the dinner table, staring at their menus, finding what he or she had already decided to order, and putting the menu back down.
Jeff went to say something. He put his mountain hands on those of María, who pulled hers back. Jeff blushed and pulled his as well.
“Look, this is moving a little too cretaceous-tertiarily for me.” María said, as if she had been rehearsing those words all night and suddenly, like a flank eruption, could no longer hold it, as if that was how she felt all along. “I think we should just be friends.”
“But we are already friends,” Jeff said, quietly.
“What’s the level below friends?”
“Rangemates?”
“We’ll be rangemates,” María said in an as cheerful and comfortable tone as a mountain that was neither cheerful nor comfortable could be. She reached for her glass, drank, and shot another smile with the sincerity of an ostensibly slow-moving magma flow.
Jeff could only stare at her. The mountain elephants on Jeff’s south face, who had watched with the interest generations of mountain elephants could muster over centuries and centuries, whinnied softly, embarrassed. María stared at her hands and stood up and left.
Mountain elephant said, “You moved too fast.”
“Mountain elephant, what knows you in the ways of mountain love?” Jeff said, avalanches gently rolled down his slope, stopping a comfortable distance away from harming anyone.