Kerry Says

She missed him.

It’s strange she knew since she was not even sure exactly who she was missing. He’d only been around a few hours, drunken ones at that. But she missed him just the same.

His arrival had produced a moment perhaps, provided an inlet in the river of everyday happenings. A place to pause before life swept her along in its inevitable way back to morning espressos and work-a-days and TV movies and after dinner drinks.

It wasn’t that time stood still or any other vomitous notion like it. It was, perhaps, that she had. She stood still.

She took two hours to have a look around a place she hadn’t been in quite some time.

It was a strange place full of unknown quantities and harmless subterfuges, double-edged comments and loaded gestures. Not a bad place really, but one she had always found to be foreign and disorienting.

To be honest most of the time it scared the hell out her, this place of instant intimacies and heavy lidded stares. In previous visits she had always been acutely aware that she couldn’t speak the language. She did not know their reindeer games. And, being that she hated losing, she opted never to play.

But that night, well, she’d felt lucky. The cynical might say she was just lonely. But whether she felt unbeatable or simply that she had nothing to lose, the outcome was the same. From the minute she saw him watching her, the game was on.

So unlike her to gaze at someone, inching them forward with an arch of her eyebrow...

So unusual to laugh easily with someone unknown...

To sit so close so soon.

But she did all these things until the taxi came to bring her home giddy from gin and good company.

And the next day she dressed herself and drank strong coffee and told tall tales about her exploits keeping one ear cocked slightly towards the living room phone.

And the next day she went back to work looking occasionally for an email she was fairly certain would not arrive.

And the next day she called her mother, knowing there was no need to keep the line free, then she poured herself a glass of wine and flicked on the television.

And the next day she told a friend she was up for a drink on the way home from the office.

And the next day she missed him.