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Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn’t in vain, he was able to justify his presence.
They barely knew each other really. For God’s sake, it had been a struggle to remember her name. Still, he was well aware that the way he viewed his involvement with a woman sometimes did not match how she was seeing it.
Yet in truth she had succumbed to Todd the moment he introduced himself at a mutual friend’s cocktail party one week earlier, scanning her body in a microsecond with admiration while she lost her bearings in the confident intensity of his gaze.
On occasion he would think back to the fiercest passion it had been his pleasure to experience and reflect on what might have been. He would look upon the woman who occupied the opposite half of his bed and feel his life had not quite lived up to the promise of another day. These moments would be mercifully brief, or so was the hope.
His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him through quite a few bedroom doors.
Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives. If a convincing image of happiness was presented to those looking in from the outside, success was claimed. But some opted for chaos at the expense of the facade of tranquility.
No reasonable excuse or explanation occurred to her for declining his invitation. Her body craved to be explored by his touch. She longed to discover the places that would make him arch with pleasure, moan with delirium, hum her name in delight. Yet something made her suppress these urges, told her she must wait, that it was too soon. And although the source of these warnings was vague, she opted to obey them over desires that were far better understood.
And on some
night in the probably not too distant future, nature
would lead them to whichever of their bedrooms
was closest at that moment. In this man’s arms,
stretched out on either his bed sheets or her own,
she would eliminate the final traces of Todd from
her everyday consciousness. James would serve as
diversion for a week, a month, however long she
decided. It was almost as if she had willed him into
existence, into standing before her at the precise
moment she was willing to accommodate him,
arriving not a minute too early or too late.
Once you break someone’s
heart, you are forever its master. Calling him
would be like voluntarily returning to servitude
after freedom had been granted. She would not
empower him to hurt her again. He didn’t deserve
acknowledgment after shattering dreams she once
thought were jointly held, only to learn that they
were hers exclusively.
A few more minutes of stalling would not break her. She had the strength to stand there and love him right up to the moment he would possibly reveal that this was no longer in her best interest. He did not expect histrionics if his revelation was disappointing. She would not give him the satisfaction, would be stoic until showing him the door. Whatever happened once he was on the other side would be privileged information.
CDs were on their way to becoming historical the same as cassette tapes and eight tracks and records before them. Yet history had its place in a rapidly modernizing world. It reminded you of values to retain even while old fashioned commodities were discarded. Some things always were and always would be basically the same – like love for example.
Was she happy? She thought – yes, reasonably so. Then again, what was happiness but the vast terrain between ecstasy and agony? Was this too small an ambition?
Neither of them would grow distant nor feel regretful. There would be no uncomfortable silences. They would sit across the table from one another and converse naturally, at ease in each other’s company, letting their moment of tenderness linger. And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.
Beyond that the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day’s newspaper.
She was ravishing. This was plain to see as she
lay on his bed, but her beauty had not bewitched
him at first sight. He was preoccupied with trying
to find his bearings in a new environment, haunted
by the one hastily left behind.
Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved.
What he did recognize was that a night of carnal merriment was his for the asking. The only requirement was to listen with minimal interruption as she spoke of herself. He tolerated her loquaciousness not because he was waiting out the stream of words until they led to her bedroom, but because he knew most people believed the minutiae of their lives to be far more interesting than it actually was, and on occasion he was willing to indulge them. After all, as a writer he was perpetually on the lookout for a new story.
Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror. Still, the only alternative to maintaining pursuit was surrender. She was no quitter, not even of her vices.
If Audrey sensed what he was contemplating, her silence did not let on. He turned from the window and found her looking at him with a flawless poker face. It may have been attentiveness and curiosity to hear what he would say next, or perhaps she was expecting from him what women throughout the ages, often against their better judgment, had expected of men.
His days had the grace of a butterfly in flight. Did a butterfly consider itself to be blessed? Was it ever wistful? If not for its earliest days as a caterpillar then perhaps for the time in between when cocooned from peril, when all was comfort and peace and security?
Part of him hated the thought of it, another part was selfishly grateful that her ordeal had drawn them closer.
No matter what percentage fact and what percentage fiction his characters were comprised of, they all shared a crucial quality. They acted as he willed them to. They each fell into the arms of the lover he selected for them. If only he could compel the real life woman he had chosen into his arms.
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