A Night to Remember

Part III

After the dinner, the talking, and the laughter, Seymour and Audrey made the slow trek back home to Skid Row. Even if this was the worst part of the city, they could not think of anything but what a great time they had on their date and laughed all the way home.

"-And then, when you spilled that sauce on your tie!" Audrey joked, remembering the dinner. "Oh Seymour, it was so funny."

"Yeah, that was pretty funny huh?" he asked, and then laughed himself. And they both laughed very loudly together until they were close to their homes.

Audrey got a depressed look in her eyes when they had reached the outside of her apartment. "I guess I'd better get going. I've had such a good time though, Seymour. I don't want to go back to before again."

"Maybe you won't have to just yet," Seymour said quietly, staring down at his shoes.

"What d'ya mean, Seymour?" she asked, looking into his eyes.

He paused, nervous about something, and then answered with a gentle kiss on the lips. Audrey was at first caught off-guard, but gave in after realizing what he was doing.

Well, why not? she thought, returning the favor by wrapping her arms around him and covering his lips with sticky lipstick as she kissed him. And for a while, they stood like that, embracing and holding each other as their lips met and came apart a few glorious times. Neither wanted ever to break away from their warm lovers' clinch, but finally they separated when the real world came back to them. Audrey stepped up the stairs to the door with Seymour watching her with wide, longing eyes.

"Bye-bye Seymour," Audrey whispered as she closed the door to her apartment complex, leaving him behind on the street. She stepped lightly into her own room to watch Seymour walk back towards the shop across the way, smiling in remembrance of that evening and thinking of what maybe or maybe not would come to be between them in the future. She could hear the wedding bells, see the child that looked like her and him, and imagine their little home together, as she had often fantasized about. That would be happiness. That would be her dream that she could only wish for tonight as her Seymour left her alone again.

If you were on Skid Row that night, you would have seen the silhouette of a girl in an apartment window gazing outside for a long time at a little flower shop down the street. You might also have heard the steady, slow snoring of the Audrey II, or seen a light bulb flickering in the back of that little shop where Seymour lay restless through its window, and unless you had known this story probably would have dismissed these things as nothing and moved on to go wherever you needed to go. You would never have known that the girl in the window and the boy in the flower shop were thinking the same thought as the rest of Skid Row fell asleep.

Tomorrow.

The End