My life is a suck hole right now – Andrea is on the nose as far as that goes. Hers isn’t much better. She’s got a nose for the wrong kind of men and it’s landed her in a similar financial situation as myself.
“Well, maybe the move is good for you right now.” Andrea hops down from her seat on the table and digs for her phone in the back pocket of her perfectly fitted jeans.
“Yeah, except I have exactly seventy-two dollars in my checking account and that is not enough for an apartment. I’ll have to find a crumby motel for a month until I get some paychecks saved, but then I still owe the back rent on the other place, and if I don’t pay that then I lose everything. Mom’s furniture, her jewelry, our photo albums. Everything.” I close my eyes and try to breathe.
The bell rings on the front door of the store, notifying us a new customer is in the shop, and someone is supposed to greet everyone that comes in. It’s not my turn though, so I pivot on my heel and step forward to pull a long sheet of brown Kraft paper off the giant roll and wrap up the framed picture; it’s a smiling family, wearing jeans and matching white button-down oxfords, all sitting far too randomly in a park somewhere.
Andrea shuffles off the other station and I try to stave off the weight of everything that is spinning around in my head. When she sneaks back up behind me it makes me jump a foot off the ground.
“You’re up. He’s back,” she whispers, japing a finger out toward the framing counter, and I screw up my face as I look at her, but she’s just snickering.
“It’s not my turn, I —” A sudden hot flash takes over as I look out to see the customer striding through the clean white walls and dark oak floor of the gallery. I’m too young for hot flashes, but it’s an affliction I’ve developed over the last couple months. They are directly related to one person. The one I’m looking at right now.
I look out toward the front counter and my breath catches in my throat, my stomach doing an Olympic gymnastics routine.
“When are you two just going to get to it?” Andrea gives me a wicked smile and picks up my calculator and pen, handing them to me.
“He’s not interested in me like that.” The hot flash has my palms sweating, and red blotches form on my neck and chest.
“
The hell he isn’t.”
“He’s just polite. It’s just business.”
“What about the wine he brings you? That doesn’t look like business. And the way he looks at you. He spends two hours here talking to you every time he comes in.” She sighs dramatically as she looks out to see the man she’s nicknamed “Hulkerson” closing in on the long, custom-framing design counter toward the back of the store. “You’ve talked to him more in the time he’s been coming here than you’ve talked to me in two years. He probably knows more about you than anyone. I listen when I go out there.”
“Yes, like I said, he’s polite and I am polite back.”
“I don’t see him being ‘polite’ with any of the other staff here.” She makes little air quotes as she says it. “And if you’re not here when he comes in, he leaves. I mean, you’re good at your job, but you’re not that good. We’re not talking brain surgery here. Besides, when I eavesdrop on your little polite business conversations, y’all ain’t talking no business.” She snaps her head back and forth as she says it. “I heard you telling him the names of your stuffed animals, for crissake. And he was listening.”
“Shut up, it’s not like that. He asks me a lot of questions and I just answer. He’s nice, Andrea.” I glare at her and my mouth is watering. “And, he says he likes what I pick out for the posters. He’s just getting things done for the Wine Distributorship he owns, passing time. Once the building is done and decorated, he won’t be back. He just wants everything to be consistent. Since I started with him, he just wants the same person. That’s it.”
I stifle my groan because she’s right. At least about part of it.
From the first time I waited on him, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I’ll never tell anyone how I laid in bed that first night after he’d come in the store and imagined him sitting there next to me. Then as time went on it was more. Me wishing he would hold me in his lap. Read to me. Help me pick out my clothes. Even brush my hair and give me a bath. It still shocks me. The fantasies I have about this stranger who would want nothing to do with me in that way.
But that’s not even the worst of it. I think about all of him. I wonder how he would feel as he pushed inside me. How he would look without his clothes. If all his dark facial hair is balanced out by more in other places. I’ve never fantasized about anyone before him. I’ve tried to masturbate when I think of him, but I can never quite get there.
With all the strange thoughts I’ve had about him, I’ve decided there must be something wrong with me. That part of me must be broken. I’m a deviant.
No, no one would understand the things that go through my mind, and I’ll never tell.
Andrea turns toward me, lowering her voice. “Well, whatever. You can tell yourself all sorts of stories, but I know if it was me I’d be climbing that like a tree and swinging from every branch. That guy is a beast. And I bet he’s got beast mode down low too. Have you Googled him?”
“No!” I snap at her. She knows better. The calculator and pen shake in my hand as I step toward the door out to the gallery floor.
“You’re a technophobe. It’s not natural at your age. Your phone is from the seventeenth century. I would be embarrassed to pull that thing out in public.” Andrea mocks me by flipping open an invisible phone, bobbing her perfectly arched eyebrows.
I laugh and shake my head, shouldering open the door. “Shut up.”
He’s at the counter. I snap my eyes his way and he’s looking back at me with those eyes.
Those eyes that remind me of black coffee. Sometime I think I even see steam rising off of them, they draw me in, make me warm and giddy. Just like a good Starbucks. Gah, I’m a mess.
Magnus Leonard.
He sets down a stack of posters on the long design counter out front and my menopause symptoms kick in again when he looks back to the door where I’m standing. “Technology is the root of all evil, Andrea. I’ve never ‘Googled’ someone in my life and I’m not starting now. And don’t you dare, either.” I point at her with a scowl. Part of the problem is even if I did have a computer, and internet and all those first world things, my spelling is so crazy even Google would scratch its head. Not to meantion it would take me so long to figure out what I was reading in the search results, it’s just not worth it.