Disclaimer: Not mine.
My school calls Matrin Luther King Jr. Day "reading day." When asked why, I told my friends, "It's because there's only three black kids in my school, and this is the Deep South." How sad. Racist pricks.
There's a Charade plug hidden away in here.
She was pretty. He had noticed this the second time they'd met.
He sat glumly in a coffee shop, having woken up at noon that day, nursing a headache he wasn't sure how he got.
Work wasn't a very appealing idea.
"Fancy meeting you here," she whispered. He didn't know how she knew, or how she'd found him.
"Not something I think about very often, I'll admit." She smiled at him, straight white teeth flashing for a second against her dark skin.
"You seem tense."
"I feel horrible." She offered him a cigarette. He gladly took it, noting in the process that she did not smoke with a filter.
"It's like drinking coffee through a veil," she told him when he pointed this out. He admitted that it wasn't very pleasant.
He told her he didn't know how he'd gotten so drunk. She replied that many people don't.
"Do you always have a comeback?" he asked her. She smiled again. Her eyes were a deep brown, and they sparkled whenever she was happy. He wouldn't find that out until later; but they were sparkling now.
"It's a habit." He told her it was a good one; she should keep it.
She told him his sense of humor was horrible, he should lose it.
He didn't say anything; he didn't have to. She laughed and pulled on his arm.
"Come on," she said. "Let's go for a walk."
They sat by the fountain in silence, pondering the looming buildings around them.
"Do you suppose one day they'll build one so high that we won't even notice how high it really is?"
"How's that?"
"That one day there will be so many of these huge things that we won't even see them anymore."
"I guess." She caught him staring. "But then, I also guess that by that point, no one really works in those buildings. They'll all be run by machines."
"Huh."
"Hey Ann?" She looked up. "Nothing. I just wanted to see if you'd respond." Andrea raised her eyebrows.
"Why wouldn't I?"
She really was very pretty. He could fall for pretty.
Review and I might put a shameless reference to a movie/book/person of your choice in the next one.