Martin

Summer grasped Anne's collar and hissed in her ear, "The man behind us is staring at you."


Anne shrugged. Doubtless disgusting.

"No, he's truly adorable. Completely your type. Go to the bathroom and I'll start the conversation."

Anne rearranged the black curls over her shoulders in the luminescently complimenting light of the bathroom. After staring into Summer's complexly beautiful face all night, her own eyes seemed small and insignificant. And her little nose perfect for a patronizing finger tap. Wretch.

She craned around the jukebox. Tall and slender, there he was willowing over Summer. A black scarf was tightly wrapped around his neck, framing quite a boyish face, profusion of dirty blond hair, and strangely dark eyes that called to her mind Romeo's Ethiop ear.

The conversation happened in a dreamy haze of barroom bliss. The stool became a nest which she nestled into while looking up at a bright face. Anne was filled with an insatiable warmth of glass mug grasping and cool grays and greens and porcelain whites.

Martin's friends left. He asked her if she would mind if he stayed. He touched her apparently supplicating lower lip with his thumb.

Most moments he seemed more French than German. She found herself abstractedly wondering if she could ever love someone who wasn't defined by the English language? Through translation... she always felt that she must not be reading what was intended. Those couldn't have precisely been Dostoevsky's words. Was she reading Tolstoy for plot instead of nuance? She could not express herself or experience someone else as plot. No, no indeed.

Their arms intertwined as he walked her home. He embraced her and her tired neck collapsed for a kiss. His palm on her cheek and his fingers in her hair made her feel quite small.

"I want to show you where I lived when I studied in Paris."

She let him in.

"You really do have Goethe and Mann on the shelf over your bed. You are not what I expected to find tonight."

Anne surveyed her find. He sounded funny in the quiet.