How I Adore You by Mark Pritchard

Author:Mark Pritchard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: How_I_Adore_You
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2001-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

How I Adore You

To favor me,

You revealed the secret mystery of the self,

And by your words,

My delusion is dispelled.

-BHAGAVAD-GITA 11:1

The bar, in a gentrifying district of artists and cafés, was full of people on a Thursday night. I was there alone; I was going to bars alone, hoping to leave with someone, but everyone else came and went in couples or larger groups. I sat at the bar, wondering if my being alone was going to be a problem for the woman I wanted to meet. I didn’t know who she was, but when she showed up, I didn’t want to seem like some psycho loner. Solitary, okay; a little aloof, perhaps. But not crazy.

I had been alone for a few years. I could afford to be alone a little longer.

I sat there for an hour when I saw her, sitting with a group of two other women and a man. She was so striking. She was more than just eye-catching—almost monumental—but in the way a marble statue is, one and a half times larger than life, expanded slightly because it stands on a pedestal ten feet high. And yet she was not especially big, although her features were. Her face was like an icon: Looming out of the dark of the bar, it compelled devotion.

She also seemed to have a lazy quality, a reluctance to move too fast or smear her makeup, but her whole being breathed life and warmth and big-boned sexiness—to wit, a broad. She was still. Look at a cloud unmoving at 25,000 feet; look back, it has changed from a flophouse to a palace.

I spied on her in the bar mirror while she talked to her friends. Then they all left, and I went home, cursing myself for not having had the courage to make a move.

The next night I went back again, and she was there in the same spot, talking to someone else. Again I watched her covertly. When she noticed me watching her, I could see her recognize me from the night before—her gaze held mine for a few seconds, and she smiled when she looked back at her companions, this time two men. Then she looked in the mirror at me again.

She went to the bathroom and I followed, washing my hands as she did her business in the stall. When she came out, I turned and she met my eyes. It was one of those moments where it seems like it takes someone ten minutes to walk across a space of two and a half feet, our eyes locked the whole time. I didn’t get out of her way and let her have the sink, and she didn’t go around me, either. When she finally got to me, I put my hands lightly on her hips.

I expected her to look down submissively, then up at me again. It’s what girls do when they want to be kissed. Instead, she looked at me directly. And then she kissed me. A light kiss that got heavier—not too intense, but a real kiss and then some.

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