The temperature had dropped even more in the few hours since I had walked into the dive. The wind forced its way into my thin fall jacket. Only my hands in their driving gloves escaped the bite of the mad breeze forcing it way down the street. I heard the final chimes of the Lutheran church clock as it told of the passing of 11:00. The air had the crisp and crumbling smell of fall. In was clean and refreshing as it told of the frost it would carry through the night to the frail green leaves still clinging to hope of past memories of spring and summer. The lights wrapped around the tree next to the bench reflected on the glass panel door of the bar. The air in the dive looked thick with a grayish yellow cloud, reminding me of the raw feeling burning my throat, and the headache I would have in the morning from inhaling the secondhand smoke.

 

I watched the door from the corner of my eye. I didn’t want to appear eager or coy. I didn’t really know what to except or even what I was doing if truth be told. I was going to have coffee. At 11:00 at night. With a guy. Who I just met. I noticed the change in the shadows beyond the glass. He walked out of the door, compelling me to stand.

He stopped about 3 feet from me and looked around him and them over my head. He was close enough for me to realize just how tall he really was. Well over the height of my brother and my cousins. He had to be over 6’3” in is socking feet. The heels from the boots easily made him over 6’5”.  I had on flats that day, and was lucky if I was 5’3” with the shoes. As my eyes started the climb up his body, I noted the top if his hip bones where at the same height as my chest. At my eye level I could see the inverted v his ribcage created.  The top of my head was level with his armpit. My neck cracked as I twisted it to look up at his face. He started to look down at me, then he gives a half smile. “Damn… you’re real short…”

Having been the shortest person in my family all my life, and being surrounded by giants, both male and female, I was not really insulted be someone pointing out the obvious. I feint to be personally affronted… “What! I; short? No one told me I was short!”

“Not too short…”

“Maybe someone is too tall… like 6’5” or something…”

“Only 6’4”

“Only…”

He continued to look around. “Where are you parked?“

“End of the street by the old bowling alley”

“Where is that…?” I had forgotten he was not from around here. I pointed to the end of the block in the long direction. He moved his head to the side searching for a vehicle he never seen before. “My truck is right here.” Across the street is a lone teal Nissan with a tall suspension you see on construction puck ups. “I’ll drive.” 

I cautiously agreed, all the while running basic female survival scenarios in my head if needed as we walked across the street. Diner is close to my cousin’s house. My new cell phone is in my bag. The state patrol office is only a mile from the diner.  I know the back streets and shortcuts- he doesn’t.

He opens the door for me then closes it before jogging to his side. Truck starts and he pulls into traffic… “Where now?” I tell him to turn right at the corner.

Beyond me giving him directions and telling him when to turn, there is this all engulfing silence that is being over shadowed by the inner dialog of my mind. ‘Little girl you are out of your element… what does he want, and why do you care… you know he is not your type… I think… and you are seriously not his  - no doubt about that.  Oh for God sake it is just coffee, it’s not like your going on a date with him… not that you can recall a date… when was the last one? Over 17 months ago… What you really need is sleep. You have been working way too hard at a job you really hate… and now you are going to be drinking coffee at midnight – good luck sleeping after that… but why worry about sleep, your going to be keeping yourself up thinking about a pair of blue eyes and over analyzing anything you or he say or do… Just focus on something else already. You need some new goals and direction in your life. You need to finish your Architectural History degree so you can go for that PhD… you need to figure out how you are going to pay off your credit cards… don’t forget you need to give your rent check to the office in the morning or you will need to pay the late fee… and lets hope your paycheck gets into the bank before that check this month… And for all that is holy stop worrying already. What is the worse that can come from this any way… ?’

“On the curve?”

“That’s it”

We pull into the parking lot, and I hop out of the truck before he can get to my side to open the door. “You jumped?” He has this confused look on his face.

“Had to, unless you carry a stepstool with you in the bed back there.” This causes a little smile. The lights from the parking lot cast shadows over his face, but you can still make out the life in his eyes. He turned towards the doors of the dinner and politely followed me into the place. We waited to be seated and then he asks the girl to bring a new pitcher of coffee, and some cups.  He looks at me, asks the word black, I tell him cream, then he asks for half and half - the real stuff, not the packaged little plastic containers. The light is just slightly better in here then it was in the bar.  I notice his hair is blonder then I had judged, and his shirt is more taupe then olive.

After he orders he folds his hand on the table to wait. For the first time all night, we are looking at each other face to face, and this scares me.  His eyes are hooded from the light being cast from the over head fixture haging above the table. I have no clue to what he is thinking. I will now have to have even more real conversation with this person. Although it is great to see his reactions better, he can now see mine as well.  I have figured out that he can bluff and be unreadable while I know my reactions are always written on my face, you just need to know what the reaction is and means.

He starts with an open question requiring a long answer…” Why did you go to school so far away?” The easy answer is scholarship, but that is not the whole truth, and this is a person I knew was looking for the pieces that didn’t add up.  He listens like an inspector, cataloging and time lining events. So I gave him as much as necessary to get the real story without really boring the guy to tears.  Some silly Cosmo like magazine once stating men liked to talk about themselves and they disliked women who talked too much I had read in College flashed through my mind.  Well I am one of the talkative chatty types by nature and genetics so I tried to stay on topic, which he was directing. When he did talk about himself it was about his basic childhood or construction.

I had yet to really understand why he didn’t want to be alone, and somewhere along the line I realized I wasn’t going to figure it out. He didn’t allow his wall to go down again; he didn’t let emotion color his words as he had when talking about the hunting dog. Instead I thought I would just live in the now.  I had move into the 5’0” end of the pool and if I stayed on my toes, I could still enjoy the water.  Yet even as I thought about that metaphor, I didn’t believe it.  I was looking for the sharks and the copperheads. My life didn’t function smooth enough for him to have an interest in me. I was a social outcast of my own making, and he was a flower bees flew for miles to find.

Around 1:00 the coffee was gone, and I was starting to yawn more. He reached for his wallet, pulled out a $10.00 and stood up. “It’s late. You need sleep, and I have to drive home at 6:00”. He reached for my jacket and helped me into it. Wordlessly we drove back to my car. I pointed out which one was mine and he pulled up to the door. I thanked him for the coffee and he asked me how far it was to my home. After deciding I could get home safely on my own, he said good night as I closed the door. I unlocked and got into my car, started the engine, and waved at him. He waved back, pull ahead of me and slowly moved down the street until he knew my car was up and running. At the light he went straight, and I watched his truck go down the road as I turned left.

How strange this whole night was. I had seen a man who had more emotion and life in him then I had ever met. He also showed the least amount of it.   I started wondering if my original instincts on the guy were off.  My strange sense of people had done me very well up until this point. I had been wrong only once in my original impression of a person. Could this be the second time?

When I went to bed, I just knew I was going to be up most of the night from the coffee and my habit of over thinking everything. I had a million thoughts racing through my brain. Most had to do with the currant project I was being torment by and my very bad finical situation. I also figured I was going to spending a lot of energy on trying to figure out why I had spent 4 hours taking to a guy I had just met and his very haunting eyes.

The next thing I remember was being awakened by my phone. It was the boss already yelling at me at 6:45 because of some problem on a job site I already knew was not my fault but I was going to be blamed. Somehow I had fallen right off to sleep, and I hadn’t thought or dreamt at all.

I have been helping my pal Cat move this past weekend. It was good for me to be busy. I had been doing alot of thinking lately about my life. Moving help me to avoid the activity.(along with delaying the hated task of the liiterboxes)

 

Today I went over to Cos's place to day (you can find her link to the left under Cosmic Konfussion) She has a very powerful entry.  I wanted to do something for here. She asks so little of us ( and me in general) I thought i would give her something i knew she would enjoy. So iIpolished the next of my E.M. tales.  I have been avoiding them to, but that is for the next entry...

This is for you Wen....

 

What do you say to a stranger (who is not really a stranger although you don’t really know them personally) that you meet in a bar who is not there to do the obvious flirting and hitting upon that is indicative to the natural environments of a bar? I was asking myself this question as I shoved my gloves into my coat pocket. I didn’t even know what I was really doing still here.  This was a foreign reaction to my standard responds.  My brain was rapidly flipping through its underwritten operating manual on men and was coming up blank.  The processors were working so hard, I was expecting circuit overload in my mind any moment.  The various inner personalities who advice and guide me started a heated debate as if they where discussing nuclear proliferation on the floor of the U.N. complete with flying shoes. I was walking onto fallen snow with no prints to help in judging the hidden obstacles under the flakes.

 

“Now what?” If I was staying I need the ground rules.

“Excuse me?”

I hung my coat back over the stool, paying more attentions to the task then it required.  This gave me a reason not to look at him as I spoke. I felt bolder in what I could say if I was not making eye contact.  I always jumped into conversations that made me feel less confident. It was more comfortable sounding like a fool and not knowing the right thing to say. I had learned living with regret over some wrong comment was much easier then trying to live with not saying a thing and the ‘what if’ that accompanied the feeling. I might be laughed at or ignored, but I would know. That was better then spending my life analyzing what could have been.

“Well… what do we do now?” Silence. “Do we talk? Do we just keep drinking? Or do you just keep watching TV while I sit by being ignored?” My fast pattern of speech was more excelled then normal. In some ways it made me sound mad or annoyed.

“Do you always speak your mind?”

“I’m not speaking my mind… I am asking a question.” I turn towards him. “I very seldom speak my mind; it tends to scare people when I do.”

He seemed to give me a half smile and a look of wary dread at the same time. He turned on the stool so his body faced me for the first time all night.  “Do you live here?”

His question surprised me; as if he found it amazing people lived in this city. “Yes, I live here. I even grew up here. In fact my whole family lives in the area except for my brother, he lives up north.”

“Your other siblings live around here?”

“I don’t have other siblings. I was not blessed in having 3 of each like you do.” He seemed annoyed I knew this fact. Not shocked or surprised just displeased that I pointed the fact out to him.

“So you have lived here all your life”, again a statement, not a question.

The assumption that dripped off that comment was more observation then criticism.  It was as if he was trying to test me. Why would he care where I had lived or not lived?

“My whole life: unless you count college.”

“You went to school?” Again, this was an observational question. This was not exactly light banter small talk we were having. This was more like a strand of extraction in a little room with a two way mirror. I was also questioning my action for staying.  Instinctively, I knew this was the right thing to do, but why did he need me to stay here? There was no doubt that this was a need. This was a man who did not want to be alone or with his family. Yet, why some woman he had met just a few hours ago? The intrigue to his obscured coveting of my presence was the anchor that held me there.

“I was at college for 5 years.”

“Where?” I gave him the town and the name of the college.

“An art school…” This statement thing was getting really old fast.

“Yes an art school.  I have a Bachelors degree in Architecture”. Hoping to wipe the aloof look of ‘I’m a good looking person and you are not’ off his face, I continued. “I also have minors in Illustration, Historic Preservation and Art History. I am also half way through a Masters in Architectural History”.  Depending on how I said this statement, I could use these two sentences to humble, impress, intimidate, annoy, or shock a person; sometimes all at once. It was all in the delivery. At this point in my life I used my education as a shield. It could defend me to those who doubted my abilities, and it hid me from the people who still thought I was this silly plain stupid girl they remembered from high school.

“Overachiever…”

“I was.”

“But not anymore?” Finally, an answer that was not a statement. As I celebrated my victory in getting him to start a real conversation, my internal happy dance stopped.  He was asking me a question I really didn’t have an answer to; in truth I did have an answer, but I didn’t want to tell him, or anyone for that matter, what was so wrong in my life at this point of my existence.

“Not right now.” I said that phrase with what I hope was finality to the topic.

Instead he looked at me. I could see the rapid thoughts flying across his face. He was again trying to figure me out.

“Where did your brother go to school?”

“He didn’t. He is a welder and industrial painter. He lives close to you.” He appeared annoyed again that I knew something of his life. I started talking about my brother more then I thought I was able to do. I named the town he lived in, and talked about his job more. “He also hunts and fishes. It’s easier for him to live in the north woods so he can keep his dogs.” I started adding more information then necessary to distract him from me knowing something about his life. I couldn’t understand why I knowing what city he lived in, his job, or his basic family life as it related to Jay would bother him, but it did.

“You brother has dogs?” Unexpected transition but ok… he appeared interested in something I said for the first time all night.

“Blue ticks and red wellers that…”

“Blue ticks? Really? And he hunts with them? What are they trained to track?” Most times when I mention my brother raises hunting dogs I get this blank look of what is that, or this stare of animal rights induced disgust that is triggered by the fact he hunts from the casual activist or the pure PETA level hatred of what hunting dog breeding involves. Having found a way to except (although not really approve) of what my brother did for fun and some extra profit, I found myself in the beginning stages of a topic of hunting dogs.

“Raccoons mostly, and bear.”

“Really: he tracks bear?” Finding myself in the ridiculously obscured conversation of a topic I could really care less about related to a sibling I was just getting beyond the point of despising left me searching my vast and very accurate memory banks about any and every thing my brother ever said about his dogs, guns and hunting habits.

“Black bears.”

“And he hunts them?”

“Not directly, he belongs to a club that sort of does a group hunt during the season. He isn’t high enough on the list yet to get a state tag, but a few in the club are. He helps tree them.”

“With blue ticks?”

“No, the red wellers – blue ticks are too small”

“So he trains the dogs just for the season?

“He competes in contests during the off-season, and he also trees rogue beer for the DNR for relocation.”

“Rogue bear?”

“The bears that get too close to the camp sites or the small towns. My brother and his friends track and tree them, and then the DNR either shots them with a tranquiller or a real gun, depending on how dangerous the bear is.”

“And the blue ticks?”

“Coon dogs.”  Great, now I have to start talking about coon dogs… I have got to find a way to change the subject here… I could care less about some annoying hounds and little furry rodents in masks who raid trash cans at 2:00 A.M.  I want to find out why I am staying here with this guy who really doesn’t care about me in general but somehow needs me to stay here.

“I had a coon dog once… ” not another similarity to my brother… this is really destroying my image of who you could or might be…”

“It was a blue tick. I only got to keep him for a few weeks.” This was then followed by a long highly detailed recollection of Enigma’s childhood surrounding the memory of finding a lost blue tick near his family’s cabin in the California Mountains. This tale went on for a good five minutes.  From parts of Jay’s past I had heard or already figured out, added to comments the Cay had told me, I was able to learn more about Enigma then he would want me to know from this tale. I knew from his descriptions and tone of voice his feelings about his late mother, and his father. I knew how he felt about each of his siblings as he talked about them. I felt how deeply he mourned the lost of his new best friend when the hunter answered the ad his father placed in the paper. I felt the love and commitment he expressed for the cabin and the forest of his childhood. The thing I found so amazing was the emotions he had: joy, pain, love, fear, loss, long withheld resentment, confusion, and unexplained acceptance; never once showed on his face. If you had turned off the sound and flipped on the transcript of a television while watching this, you would have thought this story a quaint tale of growing up as a boy.  I started trying to look into his eyes. His eyes would tell me even more if he would just look at me instead of in that angled hooded look you have when you are recalling something from the past. I waited patiently for him to look at me, but as he ended his tale, be looked at his drink, then finished it.  Moment lost.

As if realizing he had been talking about himself, he started asking me about my job. He seemed more interested in what I did then polite conversation would require, as if he wished to keep me on a subject that would not include him.  He then branched into how I knew his brother.  I told the story, followed by some tales about my attempt at showing his niece how to draw.

“You can draw?”

Didn’t I tell you I went to an art school? “Ever since I was a child.”

“That’s right. You have a minor in Illustration” Gee he was paying attention. “Tell me more about this art lesson.” Commanded from Pharaoh himself in the best Yul Bremmer voice I ever heard. So let it be written…

I continued with the stories about his nieces and some of the things they said or did. Very quickly it got to be about 11:00. Suddenly out of no where I get this question. “Is there somewhere around this town where we can go and have a cup of coffee?” He looked earnest, as if my answer was the most important thing in the world at that very moment. A no could have shattered him, and a yes could have condemned him. I didn’t know which one to say so I stalled…

“Um, depends on the time…” I gaze at the gaudy gold statute holding a clock over the bar between her bare chest and arm. “Most places around here close after 10:00 – there’s the truck stop off the highway that’s always open…, and the dinner by the mall…”

“What’s the name of the dinner?” I gave it to him and he said that will work, as if I had agreed to go with him. He turned to the bartender, handed him the remaining bills on the bar, then got up from the stool and walk to the restroom, stopping along the way to pick up a jacket from the hooks by the jukebox. “I’ll meet you at the door…”

So far this had been one of the strangest 90 minutes of my life. The surrealness of the night defied explanation.  It wasn’t that the night was extraordinary – it was more to the point that it was different. My reactions where out of character. Me being in a dive at midnight was not normal.  A conversation with a complete stranger of the male variety was unheard of in my life.  I was even being ordered around, and surprisingly I was actually going to follow them.

I once again hopped off of my stool and put on my coat. I could smell the stall smoke that had lodged itself in the fabric of the collar. Then I hunted for my keys and put on my gloves.  I picked up the pizza box and headed for the door.  As I got to the entrance of the dive, my inner penguin did come to life. Enigma had said to wait by the door. He didn’t say on which side.  Knowing he expected me to be at the entrance in the warm bar waiting for him, with a rueful grin I saw reflected in the glass as I  pushed the door open. I stepped outside into the bitter wind and sat down on the bench across from the entrance, knowing he would find me.

My dive of choice in 1996 was a bar older then my parents and as greasy as a can of half opened oil. The sign out front was (and still is last I knew) the faded advertisement type for a beer that was last brewed in the Nixon era.  The bar stools where retro back when ‘I like Ike’ meant something. When you left, you had this craving for antibacterial soup and a wet wipe. There is only one reason a relatively sane and cautious person decides to risk crossing the threshold into the seedy underbelly of barflies and the cusp of humanity, dives make the best food; at least the best of some kind of food. In my world, this was the paramount pizza place in town.  The demand for ‘Dive’s Pizza’ (not its real name of course) had grown faster then the bar business regulars had died off. They moved the whole pizza operation in the adjacent building in the late 1980’s, under the watchful eyes of city inspects. The owner’s daughter wanted to open a family room in the next storefront.  The chauvinistic boss was on the short list for the remodel. 

I walked in to the dive about 40 minutes late.  Computer or plotter problems had prevented me from getting out of the dungeon on time. My hands where freezing from the cold wind that had come early to the land of cheeseheads as I walked down the street from my distant parking space. I ran into Jay as I come into the place and he gave me a huge hug. I was getting use to the hugging thing he and Cay seem determine to execute.  I was raised in a family where hugging was rarely done.  If my mother was hugging me, it was because I had done something really, really good, or something had happened that was really, really bad.  Jay started trying to out yell the speaker that was hung over our heads blaring out some inane rock anthem two decades out of fashion. Jay was shaped like a six foot bear that lifted weights. His shoulders where huge, his chest was a barrel and then it all tapered down to a small waist and no butt.  When he walked, it was a swagger that was cartoonish yet natural for his size and personality.  With dark brown hair and light blue eyes, he was loud, and happy, and always animated.  When he spoke to anyone, it was like he was speaking just to you, catering his language just to make you feel appreciated and important. Being only 5’-2ish” myself, he tended to stand in a manner that didn’t feel as if he was dominating me.

Over the volume of a bad guitar solo, I figured out Jay had already started eating the pizza.  He said something about his brother being at the jukebox and then directed me to the corner of the 60 foot bar close to the air vents. Until recently I had avoided bars in general.  With a bad allergy to nicotine (the kind where you pass out or start chocking), smoky enclosed room didn’t rank high on my list of places to visit. In my attempts to lead a normal life I had started venturing out to a few places on off or slow hours, looking for the good spots in the room.  Jay, knowing my habits of avoiding trips to emergency rooms, had staked out an area I could hang out in for awhile. As he patted my shoulder and headed off in the direction of the restroom, I started making the hike to the end of the bar, cautiously eyeing the spindles of cigarette smoke so to best avoid walking through them.

Instinctively turning to the area of the jukebox as I banked the first corner of the room, I spotted a guy of bear like proportions and just as tall as Jay leaning over the curved glass. He was wearing standard jeans and sloppy flannel typical of Jay’s wardrobe.  The jeans where splattered with a chalky mixer that could have been tile grout. I had never met or even seen pictures of any of Jay’s brothers.  I knew he had one older in California, one younger living in north cheeseheads land, and the baby of the family who was wandering between his three sister’s houses on the west coast. I figured this was the tile layer who lived up north. I see the flash of a pass conversation with Cay, telling me he had followed Jay out here and worked for the same company that Jay had been forced out of, but had recently become an independent tile layer functioning as a sub for various contractors through out the state. Cay had told me he was one of the best at a specific tile laying technique. Re-cataloging the image in my mind, I continued through the maze of tables and people huddling around the various bar stools. 

At one point I was stopped by one of my late grandfather’s cronies.  He was holding my hand, asking about my grandmother.  He was already heading into a drunken state he would not remember in the morning when he started calling me by my aunt’s name. (We look freakishly alike, although she is 10 inches taller and 13 years older then me.) Trying gallantly to remove my itching hand from his dried, callused and smoke stained fingers, I saw Jay pass me heading towards the corner.  Once I promised to tell my grandmother the crony was asking about her, I head down the aisle that had momentary cleared.  Walking closer to the end of the bar, I caught this guy looking at me as he was slumped on his stool to better strain his neck to watch the television. Jay started talking to me over the heads of the people passing next to him before I even got to the stool. The T.V. guy, a tall looking dark blond, was half eyeing me up and down while still watching whatever news streamer was on; not in a sexual interest manner but more like he was judging me: sizing me up to figure out who or what I was. Before I got a chance to give him a ‘are you finished’ look in return, I was once again in a bear hug. As Jay was setting me back down on the ground, some how my coat and handbag where going with him and he hung them off the stool next to the empty one in front of me. Still laughing at me and joking over my untimeliness, he asks what I want to drink. 

“Bourbon or what ever pitcher is handy.”

He nods his head to someone behind me in the direction of the bar. Probably one of the bar boys. After a little chit chat on what took me so long, a friend of Jay’s come up behind him and suddenly the two are shaking hands and talking like long lost friends instead of people who had gone bar hoping the weekend before. Jay motions for me to sit down at the stool and eat some pizza as he heads over to the friends table to say hello to the man’s wife. Half pushing myself while jumping up onto the stool then reaching for a square of pizza, I turn to my left looking to see the progress of my beer or bourbon.  The voyeuristic blond started speaking. “The mug to your right is yours.” A very female shiver shot down my spine… deep voice, not overly low in tambour, but smooth with a smoky undertone. I have a thing for voices. I can ‘feel’ voices. Certain tones and pitches cause different feelings. This one was a new sensation. Slightly annoyed at being forced to feel his voice when I rather ignore him (and still on edge from having been judged and believed to be found lacking), I didn’t want to talk to this guy so I nodded, not sure what to say anyway. I started to reach for the beer that magically appeared and my thinking autopilot began analyzing it… a lone strange beer… looks fresh- still has a ‘just poured’ head to it… but you didn’t see who poured it… but I really need that beer – pizza is burning my mouth… screw it, Jay is here, so I’m safe if it’s spiked… could this guy have spiked my beer… in a full bar with everyone looking?  Mind made up, I took a long draft.  It was Leinenkugel’s Honeyweis. Yummy; I can deal with this.

Eating my second square of pizza, I watched the tall bear like guy from the jukebox start to walk to my end of the room. Hearing a voice from behind the bar, I turn in time to see a skinny grandson of the owner (not even old enough to drink) arrives with a tall glass of something on the rocks with lime. As it lands on the bar right in front of me, and I am reaching over to my handbag ready to ask how much, the blond pulls a 5 from the stack of lose bills in front of him. Before I can say a word, the boy grabs the bill off the bar where it landed, and the deep voice is telling him to keep the change.

I can't believe this guy just paid for my drink! This situation is new (and odd) to me for a few reason. First; a man - beyond close friends, my father, or my boyfriends (all 2 of them up to this point) - has never just bought me a drink. Second, I’m pretty sure this guy has no interest in me that would warrant him buying me a drink. Third, he didn’t even ask, or even say ‘I got this’, not one word to even recognize me. And fourth, He hasn’t even looked me in the eye yet. I am waiting for… anything; - nothing - just keeps looking at the television over the bar and drinking something out of his mug of beer.

I’m getting into full penguin mode ready to bluntly intrude into this guy’s space to ask WTF when Jay comes back and starts talking to me while trying to steel the pizza out of my hand. Jukebox man is almost in front of us. Relieved that I can now focus on Jay and his brother, I am pleasantly surprised when Cay arrives and starts giving first Jay, then me a hug. (What is it with these people and hugging?) She works her way around me, handing Jay her coat, and then she sits down on the stool next to me that Jay has quickly cleared of my coat an bag. Jay is standing between us chatting away.  Cay turns to the bar boy who just magically appeared again and ordered a brandy old fashion. By now Jukebox man is standing behind Jay looking at Cay and I. Cay turns to me and with a smile saids, “I see you met Enigma.” 

“Enigma (that’s the jukebox bear’s name… he kind of looks like an Enigma… I think…)? Oh, you mean Jay’s brother.  He pointed him out to me but we haven’t been introduced yet.”  As I was finishing that sentence, I hear a deep smoky chuckle from under the guys breath directly behind me…  and I knew, just from the amused sound and the shiver down my spine, who and whom he was. (What are you up to now God…? Is this your way of reminding me not to skip out of mass like I did last weekend when I sleep in on purpose? Couldn’t you have just had me say an extra rosary at confession or something…? No… I'm doom to die of embarrassment.) I turned on my stool, looking at my shoes (need to get dad to polish them this weekend): expecting a devilish self-serving, yet charming grin similar to my brothers when he knows he has got me in a trap of my own making.  I look up, and up, and up some more - into the deepest, endless recesses of this mans soul - ringed in an indescribable shade of ice blue so hot it tells you how bad the burn is going to be if you start messing with the fire - all while it warms your entire being. As the crinkles of a sad smile forms around his eyes fanned by stray stands of dark blond hair, yet with an amused grin on his lips (how does one look sad and happy at the same time I trying to figure out as he was forming words to pin me to the ground), I feel the little nerving ending on my spine before I hear the voice, “We met. You would be… ”

 

“<Lilac>… my name is <Lilac>…”