Nainie crossed his hands in his lap and leaned forward, watching the young woman from his vantage hidden among the draping branches of the willow. Sea green leaves caressed his bare arms and tickled his back where his looping ebony hair did not hang. The thick mass waved in the light breeze, forcing him to brush aside strands that fell in his amber eyes and shrouded his view. He dropped his hand and squinted at her pale brilliance.

The woman wore white, a swathe of pale cotton fabric that hugged her curves and covered her so much that it offered her modesty. Nainie spied on her every morning. He ran from his village in the willow woods and climbed the same tree, his bare feet gripping the gnarled trunk and his fingers lodging in each available crevice until he reached this same lookout. I wish I knew her name, he mused, a smile lifting the corners of his mouth.

She knelt beside the river, her eyes downcast and her honey-colored hair drifting just as unruly in the breeze as his. The woman pulled the leather strap from her shoulder and dipped her head beneath it in order to retrieve the clay jug balanced on her back. The ripples across the river moved toward her.

Nainie puckered his lips in a wind whisper when the side of her fabric wrap fell off her left shoulder, revealing more of her fair skin and the top of her small, round breast. She dipped the jug into the water and waited. The water filled too fast. She pulled it free, wiping the lip with delicate fingers. The woman adjusted her clothing, hiding her body, and he pouted at the loss of such a tempting view. Beyond the white plastered wall, her clan called to her in feminine voices and Nainie sighed, disappointed. She would go, as she always did and he’d not see her until the following morning.

He swung his bare feet in mid-air, waiting for her to hurry along the stone-lined path. Her clan is strange, he decided. People should live in the open, not behind rocks.

When she disappeared beyond the high berry bushes, he slid forward and dropped to the ground, landing with ease on the thick blanket of leaves covering the willow wood floor. The tassels on the edges of his loincloth tickled his legs. He glanced over his shoulder. The stone path the woman took wound away from the river’s edge, and he could see the smooth prints her sandaled feet left behind. “Strange,” he whispered. “If I separated my skin from the earth, how would I know what lay beneath me?”

Nainie shrugged and ran his hand through his curly hair. “Tomorrow, he said to the breeze.