“Let’s
go home, “ he said.
“I’m
not ready,” she said.
“I
see that.” He sighed—physically, not audibly. His shoulders slumped, mouth
tightened, eyes glazed, muscles in his face clenched just enough to hollow the
skin below those high cheekbones. She almost touched his face in apology, put
her hand on the high, hard bone of his left cheek, to say not too much longer. Let me stay just a few more minutes.
Which
would have been a lie, so she didn’t do it. She wanted an hour or hours,
not minutes. She wasn’t ready to go, not even close. Which he probably knew. She met his eyes briefly—blue as the sky is blue and so clear.
Open. Vulnerable. He was a big man, Stopped
measuring at six feet five, he said. Felt
like a freak, so I didn’t want to know. Big, broad frame, no fat, nothing extra.
What you see is what you get, he’d
said that first day over coffee in the shop with the chairs and tables too small
for him. He looked out of place, uncomfortable but there to meet her. She was
exactly in place. She knew how well her body suited the chair and table, knew
what happened to her blouse when she leaned towards him, how bright her smile,
how lovely her voice. She knew, and he saw and stayed in that
awkward chair with his back to the door where the wind rushed in every time it
opened. It lifted his hair, and she knew he was cold. She didn’t feel it. His
big body shielded her from the cold.
She
remembered all that in the flash of his tightened cheek and was sorry, but she
couldn’t go. The music had started again. Somebody would ask her to dance—it
always happened—her glass of wine, her third glass, was half full. He only
drank one—one of my rules, he said,
which were numerous.
“Let’s
go home,” he said just as she rose to dance. Jerome Somebody. Not much to look at, but he could
dance. And that’s what she wanted just now, dancing, dancing, dancing.
"Why
so sad, Sweetheart?” Jerome’s wide hand on her waist held her to him.
She
blinked and smiled, the smile that always worked. “I’m not sad when I’m
dancing,” she said and wished it were still true.
© 2012
Kathleen Coskran
© 2012 Kathleen Coskran
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