Chapter One
At First Glance
In the spring when the weather first turned warm, the women from the college nearby would appear dressed in thin, bright-colored tank tops and tight shorts. Alex had graduated long enough ago that the life-gap between him and these beauties had widened, eliminating the thought of a relationship. Still, those first sunny days brought nostalgia for more than pleasant weather.
His first day off during that early stretch of warmth, Alex decided to take a walk through campus. This had become a tradition. Timing his trip to catch the students between classes, he would meander from one popular sunbathing spot to the next. Finding a beauty lying out confidently in a bikini, soaking up the sun amid rejuvenated spring grass, as a warm breeze moved easily through stick-trees that proudly shook light green shoots, made the arrival of spring official. Alex never lewdly groped with his eyes. He kept his distance, looking over only when he could not. Even if he found a pair laid on their bellies with their legs parted and glistening wet with lotion, their faces angled together as they talked and giggled, Alex would only give them a couple appreciative glances and continue on.
His favorite thing was to pass a girl walking up the sidewalk the other way, legs exposed for the first time that season in short jeans shorts or a colorful skirt, a backpack strapped over a tight short-sleeved T-shirt, and flash her a shy glance, letting his gaze linger long enough for her to notice. Then he would stare down at his shoes. A blush would fill his face that he wouldn’t need to fake, and then her lighter blush would follow. Only her chin would not droop but lift up. She would smile, inspired by the compliment of his attention, and not look back at him. A moment like that, on the right day, felt a lot like love.
At the edge of campus, Alex stopped in a coffee shop. His interest in traipsing across campus admiring bikini-clad girls left him the instant he saw her and would never return. She appeared dimly at first, alone at a table in the center, and seemed to brighten as Alex’s eyes adjusted to the room filled with dark mahogany that absorbed and hid sun light that entered from rectangle windows near the elevated ceiling. Shelves of old books lined the walls, and a maze of wooden stairways led to tables tucked into nooks at raised levels leading to a loft that hummed with conversation and laughter and squeaked with sliding chairs. To Alex, the stepped arrangement of the room served to sharpen his focus on her. He noticed her feet first, tapping away under a table that came almost to her shoulders. Her leather sandals were nearly the color of her skin, only slightly darker, giving a smooth lightness to her toes, though she had a somewhat dark complexion—skin that seemed to have held its tan from the previous summer. Her legs disappeared in the table’s shadows. Her cool green eyes rose to the windows, and she nodded her head lightly to her private music. Then she squeezed down across the desk and the blue pen pinched between her fingers un-spooled into a notebook she guarded with her left arm.
As she lifted her pen from paper and peeked up again toward the window to refill her mind with phrasings, Alex could only wonder about, he knew he stood staring conspicuously, but he didn’t seem capable of moving farther into the room. He was unable to stop gazing at her, tracing the minute curves of her face.
She began writing again but stopped mid-word, it seemed, and didn’t lift her head again. Only the green eyes rolled up and captured him. He noticed a faint trace of irritation or anger, or something else, and then she did raise her head but fixed her gaze at him instead of musing up at the light in the window. If her eyes had captured him, her smile enslaved him; but, before he could return it, she had bent over her notebook again. Alex stumbled past to the counter. H
