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<br><br><center>*I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
till China and Africa meet 
and the river jumps over the mountain
and the salmon sing in the street.*
W. H. Auden</center>


<br><br>I went straight in order to get my life in order—stopped drinking so I could write, but something was missing. There was an abyss inside of me alcohol used to fill—but now there was nothing.

I was sitting with my laptop at a Tim Horton’s coffee shop trying to work on a story and at the same time ignore this beautiful girl sitting diagonally across from me nibbling at a cake donut and obviously bemused by me.

I tried to shut her out, but it’s like writing under a ceiling fan and seeing shadows out of the corner of your eye—it works on your subconscious and drives you nuts.

<br><br>I stop typing and stare at her. “What?”

She bursts out laughing. “Sorry,” she giggles, “but you look so serious.”

“I am serious. I’m a writer—I do this for a living.”

<br><br>“You remind me of Schroeder in the Peanuts cartoons—so intense, bent over a toy piano.”

“A Mac Air is not a toy piano,” I say haughtily.

“I suppose not, “ she smiles, “but you still looked adorable.”

<br><br>That stops me dead in my tracks. It’s not every day a beautiful woman tells me I’m adorable—even if she’s insulting me at the same time.

I flip the MacBook closed. “Why don’t you join me? I’m probably just as adorable up close.”

“Oh sure, Casanova—that sounds like a pick up line.”

<br><br>I expect her to go back to nibbling on her cake donut, but she surprises me by getting up and sitting down beside me at my table.

“Can I buy you a coffee?” I ask.

“Sure,” she smiles, “as long as you’re not a starving artist.”

“I’m published and have a literary agent,” I smugly inform her.

“Oh well, then you must be good,” she says smiling, but I detect a hint of sarcasm in her tone.

“I’ll have a medium double—double,” she advises me.

<br><br>*Hmm*, I muse, *that’s a lot of cream and sugar.*

Me? I’m a medium, double milk—preferably skim, but to each his own.

I bring back two coffees and she’s got my laptop open reading what I just wrote.

<br><br>“Hey, this isn’t half bad, Maine.”

*She knows my name. What the hell!*

“Did you look up my social security number too, and all my passwords?” I say hotly.

“Nope, but Maine Leatherby-Clayworth? What kind of a handle is that?”

“I don’t go by that hyphenated form—I prefer to be called Maine Clayworth.”

Her eyes sparkle, “And I prefer to be called Skye.”

I’m disarmed. What can I say?

<br><br>“Do you have a last name?”

“Yup—had a double barreled one like yours—but lost it—so uppity, pretentious and awkward.”

“Really? It was that bad?”

“Fortunately, mine wasn’t as bad as this guy I dated—imagine going through life saddled with the moniker, Long-Wiwi. It’d just be impossible!”

<br><br>I stare at her for a moment, and then it hits me—Long-Wiwi. It’d be great, but sounds ridiculous. Who would go through life like that?

I laugh like hell and she joins me. And then we both sit there in the coffee shop rocking back and forth on our stools—laughing so hard we’re crying. And when we finish, I lean over and kiss her.

<br><br>She pulls back immediately. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why not?”

“You crossed a line,” she says all proper, but when she said it, I slid down her accent into her family’s drawing room where we were all holding champagne flutes while chamber music played in the background.

<br><br>Well, that made me laugh again, and of course, it made her join in.

And so, we went on like that for some time, until finally she daubed her eyes with the back of her hand and said softly, “You still crossed a line—don’t do it again.” And I knew she meant it.

I fell in love with her then.

<br><br><center>© 2017, John J Geddes. All rights reserved</center>

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