Chapter 1: Cute but Just a Tad Too Thin

I was between the lab and work (guess who is a grad student) with about forty-five minutes more than I would need to get from one to the other. Naturally, this meant that I would go to enjoy a double latte at my regular coffee stop and ‘enjoy’ the latest piece of earth shattering science from -Geochemica, -Cosmochemica-: a speedball of sorts (simulate, coffee; depressant “Recent advances in the use of extra-terrestrial barium isotope signatures in paleobathic reconstruction: The Rhaetian-Norian transition in Ruritania”). Fortunately for that remnant to my sanity, Liz was working, Liz being a sweet co-ed with long auburn hair and a button nose over whom I wanted to make an ass of myself.

Fortunately for Liz, I had given up making an ass of myself for lent.

Double fortunately for Liz, the weather tempted me out to the patio.

After I had gotten my coffee and used the rest room mirror to get my tie done up for work, I chose a sunny spot at the far corner of the deck, sat at an umbrella-less mesh-top patio table and started to enmesh myself in the tangle of jargon I had brought to read. I like to read at this shop versus the library because there are just enough distractions to keep me from going stir crazy, but it doesn’t have the commotion of the places around campus. It takes about a five-minute drive to the stripmall that gives it the business needed to stay around (but not enough to attract the evil Starbuck’s). The view is, thus, limited to the storefronts, the parking lot they surround, and a bank across the way. Oh, yes and the occasional babe.

Speaking of which...

The woman stepped from a white car, which she had parked so the first view I had of her would be her legs, encased in hose/stockings, and a pair of simple, black, short-heeled pumps. I watched, I admit, even though they lacked the full sweeping arch I most adore in a woman’s calf. Why? because there was just something that caused that little bad part of me to say, “Tayka look at dem gams, Mr. Gamera.” I have given up at trying to guess or figure out or brood about the aesthetics of girl watching; I have learned to just enjoy the feelings that an attractive woman inspires.

And she did inspire such feelings.

Her dark gray skirt fell to a reasonable spot, just below her knee by maybe a centimeter, tailored to be not loose, yet following the shape of her body without clinging to it.

This gave a just tempting hint at the shape of her butt, which I guessed to be slim, yet still high and curved. I wished for a moment that she had worn shorts or a pair of tight jeans.

Definitely tight jeans, I thought, as she smoothed her skirt a tad. She was built to wear tight jeans. (Yes, guys are pigs, but you seem to like us anyway, ladies. Don’t ask me why.)

She turning away from her smoothing just as the former thought went through my head, and as the gods of perversity would have it, she looked right at me. I don’t mean that she looked in my direction, but that she looked right at me.

We made eye contact at a distance of two healthy non-asian built car lengths.

There is a feeling that at least I get as I pass a cop on the interstate; my heart will speed up and I quickly look down at the speedometer though I have my cruise control set to the limit. That feeling that the state trooper somehow knows what I want to do and as if somehow I have been caught.

I was caught.

Big time.

And she knew I knew.

She smiled a smile that a screenwriter would have called ‘knowing’ with just a tad of bemusement. I think. I don’t know for sure because I quickly averted my eyes and went back to my reading, in the moral equivalent to the causal walk of a thief as he saunters away from a burglary. I resisted the urge to whistle.

That would have made it too damned obvious.

Not that it wasn’t already.

I glanced up by moving only my eyes to take just a peek.

She was not watching me (sound of held breath being released), but instead she had closed her car’s door and began to strut to the bank (sound of additional held breath being released). Her skirt swished back and forth in that way a tight skirt just won’t even try to mimic, amplifying the rolling gait of her retreating behind.

I looked at my watch to see that I had just spent twenty minutes to have only succeeded in embarrassing myself and to read “Sedimentologists have long looked for evidence of the depositional depth of sedimentary rocks lacking either fossils of organisms that provide adequate paleoecologic information of depth or fossils entirely. Additionally, even when the proper organisms are preserved, taphnomic conditions may not...” about five times. And I had not drank enough latte to ensure that I would need to grab a to go cup for the drive to work.