Ansel, much like his young lover, wanted very much to respond to the returned question with a simple answer: meeting him. It seemed, unknowingly to one another, both Ansel and Lucio had attached a great amount of meaning to their first encounter. It had only been a few weeks and yet it felt like a lifetime ago that Lucio had sauntered up to Ansel before class, turning on his practiced charm and tempting the professor into the taboo. Although Ansel had wanted Lucio from the moment he first stepped into his classroom, it was then that Ansel had seen a piece of him that he not only wanted, but<i>needed</i>to keep. But Ansel couldn't say that at the risk of sounding cheesy, and he knew that Lucio wanted to hear things about his life that he didn't already know, so Ansel smiled and searched his memory for the second greatest moment of his life if only to satisfy his curious beloved.<br/><br/>"When I was twenty-one years old, I took a trip with my sister and some of our college friends to the Bahamas. It was a sort of celebration, a gift to some of us for almost having completed our bachelor's degrees. A little premature, but we all were completely fried from finals and needed a break. I was still huge into swimming at the time, and constantly pushing myself to test my lung capacity. There's a place in the Bahamas, it's called Dean's Blue Hole. It's the deepest blue hole in the world with an underwater entrance, supposedly around two hundred meters or so. You walk along an underwater cliff and then all of a sudden the floor drops out from beneath you and you're sucked down into this dark, foreboding abyss. I remember being completely intrigued by it, wanting to see how far I could go.<br/><br/>"So with nothing other than my wet suit and a pair of goggles, I walked along in the water, sinking deeper and deeper until I was face to face with this huge, black entrance into nothingness. There's something rather humbling about staring into an abyss that looks like it could completely devour you. There was a moment just before I dove that I decided that if I went down and didn't come back up, I would have been okay with it, because I had done something most people were far too scared to ever do. I had taken a chance to discover something unknowable, and that yearning for to find something that no one else in the world could possibly understand has continued to drive me, day after day after day."<br/><br/>He sighed gently, caressing Lucio's cheek as his memories of the darkness consumed him. "I know it may sound very strange to say that diving into nothingness is one of my most cherished memories. But it was the one moment in my life where I let go and gave myself over to something I couldn't explain away with pretty words. I didn't make it too far down the hole, maybe only a quarter of the way before I had to return to the surface, but I was so incredibly awed by the surreality of it. It was something I never forgot. I've tried to explain it to Johanna a million times but I don't think she ever really understood. To her, I was just trying to drown myself in a black hole for the fun of it."<br/><br/>The professor bit his lower lip and continued to stare longingly into Lucio's stormy eyes. "This goes without saying, but I'm glad your mother moved you here to America. She brought you to me." Another sweet kiss against his beau's lips. "How are you feeling, darling? Has the e started to tickle at your senses yet? Do you have another question for me?"