Wandering aimlessly

“One more drink. Please! I think the guy I’m talking to is gonna ask for my number. ” Said her friend just five minutes before. With two aching feet and one faltering back, reluctantly she yielded to her friends demand, something she knew her friend would do for her, ordering a white wine spritzer, knowing she had already reached her liquor max, and she turned around to give the budding couple space when blue eyes locked on her from across the crowded dance floor like an experienced target bomber on a battleship. The music pumped a sultry rhythm through the overgrown speakers and traveled deep into her groin, faster than a vultures impulse and there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that she had just been unexpectedly bitten by a thing called love. What was she going to do about it, considering blue eyes was starting to move, and not towards her, away from her, which she found odd, because she was sure she read his eyes right, in the same we she reads and rereads A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns.

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the sea gang dry.

Never a shrinking violet, yet never a woman to initiate a pursuit, she went straight into the crowd and the dancers parted like a red sea, as if they were divinely ordered, seeming to pave the way in the name of love, and as she approached him he seemed startled as if she was dropped from the sky, not as a cold foreign metal object dropped from a spacecraft, but rather a precious gem, a stray diamond that broke free from a lost meteor, landing on him like the birth of a newborn baby. Again their eyes locked and she said the first thing that came to her mind in a naturally seductive tone.

“Are you wandering aimlessly?”

And he replied as spontaneously,

“Not any longer.”

The music disconnected, but in reality it did not. Everything around them stopped, except for their intense immediate connection.

By the end of the night he told her his reason for walking away, not towards her, with the vulnerability of an old friend, “I thought you were a mirage or a hallucination because I saw some type of aura around you after we locked eyes. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but it’s the truth, and quite frankly, it scared the crap out of me so I wanted to circle the room first, to catch my nerve, and make sure you were real, but it seems you beat me to the finish line, and I’m glad you did.”

They exchanged numbers and he called her the next morning before his coffee at 7 am; she expected the phone to ring and they talked so long they were both late for work on the first morning of the rest of their lives together.

Twenty- five years and a whole lot of shared coffee later, they say good night to each other every night as they did on that first starry night, comfortably tucked in, as husband and wife, a love story built on first sight.