I didn’t realize how much of my life and my personality had gone the way of the dinosaurs until that day in March. I’d always been the ‘don’t take no for an answer’ kind of guy. Hell, I’d met Elle during a party in Manhattan and when she’d first turned me down (at the tender age of 20) I’d taken her by the hand, pulled her out onto a dance floor and began to step on her toes until she agreed to go on a date with me.
Needless to say, she eventually fell for me, I become a much better dancer and we started IBR together just before she developed cancer. She used to say I was a ball buster back then and I’d have to agree. But, her death had nearly ruined me in every aspect of my life except for business. Undeniably, my attitude had mellowed with age but I’d also lost a lot of the spark that made me who I really am.
So, when I happened to walk by a woman whose perfume caught my attention and I followed behind her like some kind of stalker, I couldn’t have been any more surprised at myself if I had woke up that morning and decided to give myself an impromptu sex change operation with a dull butter knife. Nevertheless, that’s what I did – I followed her from store to store until she finally went into a place to have her nails done. After she disappeared behind the door to the nail shop, I realized something about myself – I hadn’t gone up to her because I was scared to ask her out.
How could I, the man who’d once laughed in the face of a guy wanting to mug me, be afraid of this woman? But, that's where I was.
I took a break from life after that and stayed at my apartment with Arm and Hammer (my dogs), only going out when they needed to be walked, for nearly three weeks.
Then, the day I’d ventured out once again, who did I happen to see as I sat drinking a cup of black coffee… the same wonderfully perfumed lady – with beautifully manicured hands.
I don’t even like black coffee and the only reason I’d been drinking it that day was because they’d ran out of French vanilla creamer. I swear, even though I’ve never been superstitious, from that day forward I drank the same type and size of coffee and sat in the same seat (sometimes waiting an hour until someone moved out of 'my chair') just hoping to see her walk back in. Each time she did I tried to screw up the courage to talk to her but I couldn’t. I’d lost my mojo.
All of that changed on the fourth of March.
We were sitting in ‘our’ coffee shop – the smooth, rich scent of roasted beans coupled with a delightfully light fragrance of vanilla and warm hazelnut wafting through the air – when she looked up from the book she was reading. There was no reason for her to look at me and I’m quite certain she wasn’t looking for me but she did look in my direction. A sound over my shoulder had caught her attention and she gave a short, sideways glance in my direction. The look was only for a fraction of a second. No more than a heartbeat. But, when her brown eyes met mine, I felt a warmth explode in my chest – like the warmth you feel when you drink a hot beverage after coming inside from breathing frigid air.
Her glance was so quick it had caught me completely off-guard. Frankly, I was more than a bit embarrassed that she had seen me staring at her. Still, I tried to smile at her.
Too late.
She’d already gone back to her book. Whatever or whomever she was reading about was decidedly more interesting than me.
More in line with my ‘old self’ I didn’t slump lower in my chair in despair. Not that day. I clearly remember thinking, She didn’t acknowledge you because she had no reason to.
The internal struggle as to what I should do next was intense.
Had I been James Bond I would have simply picked up my coffee, made my way to her table and, with a smoothness that would make Don Quixote’s Lothario pale by comparison, I’d have said, “Pardon me, if you wouldn’t mind I’d like to sit here and look at you forever.”
But, I wasn’t a fictional international spy whose writers could concoct any number of reasons a woman as beautiful as she was would respond positively to me – regardless of how lame I sounded.
No. I was Joe Reality. And reality had taught me that women as beautiful as her aren’t attracted to men who look like me – unless they know how many zeros my bank account has. I know I’m a bit on the short side for a guy and while I have a decent physique I’m nowhere close to being a bodybuilder. In other words, I’m not anyone special.
Still, that day something was different. Maybe it was the coffee. Maybe it was that I remembered Elle hadn’t been attracted to me at first either. Or it might have been the fact that I’d seen her at the same coffee shop a total of seventeen times in the past four weeks and I wanted to know her by something other than ‘Skinny Salted Carmel Mocha.’ Then again it might have been… well, who knows what it was. It didn’t really matter because I decided, rather abruptly, to do something about my situation.
Picking
