There are a few suits here and I pull my hat a little lower in case they’ve come from the conference. I take a seat in the darker corner at the end of the bar. The piano player is fully in his groove. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard live music this good.
It’s then that I notice a flash of golden red behind the bar.
The bartender is mixing drinks. She’s surprisingly young, with long, wavy, outrageously light-catching reddish blond hair.
She serves two of the suits further down the bar and they say something to her, shoving crumpled dollar bills at her with leering grins. The music is too loud for me to hear their comments, but it’s obvious they’re drunk and obnoxious. Which causes a deep and unfamiliar flare of warmth in my chest that’s hard to identify.
Rage.
It’s a brimming, jagged kind of rage I’ve never felt before.
The girl pockets the money. From her body language it’s easy to see that the men’s comments are nothing new to her. She barely lifts her chin, gives them a polite but sassy, staged reply and moves on to the next customer.
She’s being run off her feet and every single man in this bar is ogling her from afar.
As I watch her, a million reactions sizzle, like a lightning strike in slow motion is channeling directly from that golden light she’s emitting into every cell in my body, electrifying me. She’s impossibly gorgeous. Her face is stunning and absurdly mesmerizing. She’s exotic-looking, like she might be part gypsy, or the Spanish branch of the Creole line is slightly more pronounced. She’s cute and sexy as all fuck but completely unaware of it.
She’s wearing tight-fitting black pants, worn black sneakers and a tight little black t-shirt with a pinkHotel Thibodeauxlogo on it, which is a pink drawing of the front of the hotel.
There’s the slightest gap between her shirt and the waistband of her pants, offering a minuscule and wildly tempting glimpse of the pale, smooth skin of her stomach. I have the most feral urge to both pull her shirt down, so no one else can see that insanely alluring offering—and totasteit. To run my tongue over every inch of her, with a hunger that’s exponentially maddening. I’ve never craved a single thing in my life as much as I crave this.
Mine.
It’s the word that’s reverberating through me with an absolute insistence I’ve never experienced before.
There she is.
I don’t know what the fuck’s going on but I’m already addicted to the fuckingdrawof her. The vision of her is blinding me and stunning me. She’s slim but curvy with long legs. Her dazzling hair hangs almost to her waist and catches all the light in the low-lit room, somehow amplifying it. Even inthis old, character-infused bar on a dark January night, she’s radiating pure, uncut sunshine.
Fuck, she’s beautiful.
She’s the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen.
I want her.
The thought fire-brands itself with scalding certainty onto my soul and I am no longer the same person.
7
As I watch her,I make a point of remembering the sequence of each discovered detail of her as I see her for the first time. I’m a precise person. I think in numbers and probabilities and it’s more or less the only thing I’ve ever been good at. But the sequence dissolves even as it’s happening. I am so fully in this moment, I already know the memory of it will feel hazy at the edges and as blinding as a supernova. Because all the details of her are as spellbinding as each other.
She is an absolute knock-out.
And as I fall deeper into my fascination of this stranger whose name I don’t even know yet, two distinct trains of thought are warring with each other inside my head. The first one—and I can recognize it fully because it’s been so glaringly absent for so long—is happiness. I can’t actually remembereverfeeling “happy” about anything. Satisfied by a good decision, sure. Glad to hear from one of my brothers, of course. Thankfulthat the stock market is rallying, obviously. But none of those things bring mehappiness.
This is different.
My loneliness fades out. I suddenly no longer feel broken or disillusioned or mildly depressed from that age-old knowledge that I’m destined to end up alone.
I’ve found her.
I’ve found the girl I fuckingwant. The one I never believed existed.
She exists.
SHE FUCKING EXISTS.
She’s here and she’s real and she’s the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen.
