A Beautiful Night

Katie was having a bad day. Yes, some distant part of her was excited about her date tonight, but the rest of her was consumed with the mundane monstrosity that was her life. Annoyed, she glared at her hateful manager, who had spent the day griping at her about nearly every aspect of her job, driving Katie closer and closer to the ever present edge.

Idly, she returned her glance to her computer screen and decided to check her e-mail. With any luck, she’d actually have a message to distract her. She was mildly surprised to see a message from Brian, the boy she was going out with that night. They had met each other online and had been talking on the phone for a few days, but had never actually met each other in person yet, and they both were excited about that eventuality.

She read the e-mail and couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across her face. Brian had confessed to visiting the bank where she worked the day before, just to see what she looked like because he couldn’t wait until Friday. She wasn’t mad, as perhaps she ought to have been, but instead started to think about the day before. She remembered seeing him in here, he had even asked her a question, but she hadn’t been sure it was really him, so she hadn’t said anything about it. She had told herself she was being paranoid since there was no reason for him to be in her bank – he didn’t even live in the area. Yet despite all of that, she now knew it was true – she had already met her mystery man.

Katie vaguely wondered what the other customers thought of her when she helped them while wearing a huge smile on her face, she was usually so reserved at work. She breezed through the last hour before she could leave and then went on to the next unpleasant task of the day – trying to get the money that her ex owed her from a few weeks ago. She wasn’t even going to ask about the $1500 he owed her from when they were living together and she supported them both by tapping into her credit cards. She was too tired and depressed to worry about that today.

She drove down to the store where he worked and wandered the aisles for a few minutes trying to find him. She didn’t see him out on the floor.

“Great,” she thought, “now I’ve got to try and fish him out of the back room.” She went to the back of the store and asked one of the other employees if Bill wa sin the back.

“Bill! Someone to see you!”

He finally emerged from the back and didn’t look any too happy to see his ex standing there looking at him pointedly.

“I don’t have it,” he said, not even having the good grace to seem apologetic.

“What’s your excuse this time?”

“They didn’t pay me yet.”

“You told me I could pick it up from you today – you’ve got to stop doing this to me. When will I be able to pick it up from you?”

“When I get paid later.”

“Look, I can’t come back here later to pick it up, I’ve got plans. I’m not gonna be able to see you again until at least Sunday…”

“So?”

“So, are you still gonna have it on Sunday, or are you going to spend it on me again?”

“I dunno,” he shrugged.

“Wrong answer. That’s when you’re supposed to say ‘Don’t worry, I’ll have it for you,’ not ‘I don’t know.’”

“Fine, come pick it up on Sunday!”

“Fine!”

He turned on his heel and returned to his work, while Katie stormed out of the store, almost knocking a display over as she went. It was time for her next stop.

The next problem of the day to solve had to do with her car insurance. Her insurance company had cancelled her coverage a month and a half before for no reason at all and she had unfortunately had to drive around without it for all of that time. She finally got together enough money to pay for the down payment for a new policy and so she had to go sign all of the paperwork and give them the check today. After getting lost trying to find the insurance office and signing her name about fifteen times, she finally had the problem settled and was able to head for home to start getting ready for her date.

Katie had been trying to keep busy lately, and she had met many new people over the last few months, but for some reason she was more excited about meeting Brian than she had been about the others. Somehow over the course of a few e-mails and phone calls, she already felt close to him. Some of the things they had talked about were not topics she usually discussed with people she didn’t know well, and yet she hadn’t even felt uneasy or embarrassed as she usually would. It was a strange feeling to her. She had trouble trusting people and very rarely felt that she could trust someone as soon as she met them. It made her wonder about some things – why would she feel that way about someone she had never met?

Katie finally made it home and got ready to go out that night. She took some time to read over the e-mails Brian had sent her over the past week and found herself smiling and her good mood and enthusiasm returning. When Brian finally came online to tell her he was ready to leave work and he’d be there to pick her up in about an hour, she was ecstatic. She stayed online talking to a friend until about five or ten minutes before Brian was supposed to pick her up, then she headed upstairs to wait for him.

After waiting in the living room upstairs for about fifteen minutes, Katie decided to make it a little easier for Brian to find her house, so she went outside and sat on her car. She watched the road in the direction he would be coming from for about twenty minutes before she was distracted by the family across the street. As she watched them pile out of their house and into their van, Katie suddenly noticed a black jeep pull a u-turn a little way down the road and realized that, in the one minute she stopped watching the road, Brian had finally arrived. She climbed off of her car and into his and they drove to TGI Friday’s talking about her depressing day.

By the time they arrived at the restaurant, Katie was no longer upset about her day, Brian had a way of calming her down and making her see that things weren’t really as bad as they sometimes seemed to her. They got a table right away and spent a pleasant meal chatting about this and that, mostly making fun of the teenagers hanging out in front of the mall on Friday night, with their Mohawks and lewd piercings.

After dinner, they hurried to the movie theater across town, arriving just in time to catch their movie. The movie they saw was supposedly one of the scariest ever made, and it was scary, except that it was marred by the other audience members’ conversations. During the first half of the movie, Katie was having trouble getting comfortable in her seat; she kept shifting back and forth. Brian, despite a few pointed reprimands intended to quiet the other moviegoers, seemed fairly content with the movie. As the story progressed, however, it got scarier, and Katie was tensing and jumping in her seat, wishing she had something to grab onto. She hoped that Brian might catch her hand at some point, but then she realized that, after their conversations, he would probably refrain from making the first move in a romantic direction, leaving it up to her to make sure things went at her own pace. So after about half an hour of debate, Katie finally got up the courage to reach for Brian’s hand. The look on his face when his hand grasped hers laid all of her fears over whether or not he wanted things to go in that direction to rest.

They held hands for a while and, on one particularly scary part, Katie put her head down on his shoulder, trying to move closer so she would feel safe. When another scary part came and she snuggled even closer to him, he put his arm around her so she could cuddle against his chest. Their other hands were still clasped and Brian was softly stroking her arm. Throughout the rest of the movie, he gradually moved his hand so that he was stroking her hair, then the side of her face. His soft touches felt so nice, made her feel special and cared about and, well, loved. Obviously it was far too soon to think about such things, but regardless, that’s how she felt at the moment. She thought to herself that maybe it was a shadow of what was to come, and, however premature, she was comforted by that thought.

When the movie was over, they held hands as they walked out of the theater. In the car, they decided to go play a few games of pool, as neither was ready for the night to end yet. They spent the drive to the pool hall holding hands and talking about the movie. They both agreed that it was a good move, that a few parts were cheesy, but for the most part it was scary, and that it would have been much better if the idiots in the theater had known how to be quiet.

Their first game of pool Katie decided to consider their warm-up game, since she played absolutely horribly. Brian beat her easily, and she was discouraged – she had been hoping to at least play decently tonight, so she had a chance. The next game, though, was better. Katie had warmed up a bit and was shooting a little better than before. It was a tied game at the end, both of them shooting for the eight ball, when Brian finally sunk it – in the wrong pocket. The score was now tied, one to one. By this time, Katie was getting kind of overheated in her turtleneck sweater, so Brian bought her a bottle of water and she stripped down to the skimpy tank top she had on underneath. (He would never admit it, but Katie saw him watching her now and again and could have sworn that he actually missed a few shots from looking at her instead of the ball.) The third game Katie managed to win on her own steam – she cleared the table and sunk the eight ball, a feat that she didn’t accomplish very often. On the fourth and last game, it was again down to just the eight ball between them, but on her shot, Katie scratched, sinking the cue ball instead and losing the game. She was happy that they were at least tied and she had not lost by a lot, as she had been expecting. (Of course, Brian later told her that he had not been playing as well as he could have – he had been deliberately missing shots so that she could keep up with him….) She thanked him for a good game and reached up to give him a hug before they left.

They went back out to the car and spent awhile talking. Still neither of them wanted to go home, but they were running out of ideas of different things they could do. After sitting for about half an hour, Brian drove them to park by a beach he knew of nearby. They sat looking out at the waves on the beach and the stars above the water, talking to each other and holding hands. Eventually, Katie moved over as close to him as she could get and he once again put his arm around her, holding her close. They must have sat that way for an hour, sometimes talking, more often simply enjoying each other’s company. Every once in awhile, Katie would shift her position, making herself more comfortable (she was half-lying on top of the console in the center of the car, and it was understandably not particularly comfortable.), each time succeeding in bringing herself more snugly against Brian’s side. She was pleasantly surprised by how well they fit together. Despite the console between them, they were closer together and more comfortable than she had even been able to get with her ex, with whom she had thought everything was perfect. This was the first time she had felt that she fit better with anyone other than her ex. In fact, that was the reason she had not really been daring for the past few months – in her mind, she compared who she was with to her ex and they always seemed to come up lacking. This was frustrating for her, but tonight, for the first time, she didn’t have to worry about that.

Occasionally, Katie would look up at Brian from where she nestled against him, and he would look back down at her, and the tension in the car was thick. It was obvious that he wanted to kiss her, but she was afraid. It had happened to her before that everything about how she related to another person was perfect, until they kissed. The other boys that she had kissed recently were either not good kissers, or else she had different standards than most people. She hadn’t yet been able to find someone who kissed her the way she wanted to be kissed, and so she was afraid to ruin the companionship they had discovered throughout the night because of a simple kiss. Yet at the same time, there was nothing she wanted more at that moment than for him to kiss her.

He was stroking the side of her face gently and it was getting late – they both knew that they couldn’t stay much longer. Katie had work in the morning and Brian had a class, so they had to head home soon. Brian’s fingers on her chin became more firm, turning her face up to his again. Their lips were an inch apart, and they stayed suspended in that moment for what seemed like minutes.

“I should get up so we can go,” she whispered softly.

“Yeah, you probably should,” he whispered back.

“Do you want me to get up?”

“Not really,” he admitted in a whisper so soft it melted her heart. That was all it took. Her fear forgotten, Katie moved that last inch and they were kissing each other. It was a kiss so soft and sweet and yet with such underlying passion that it took her breath away. It was rare that she experienced a kiss that moved her so much as this one, and certainly never on a first kiss. They were always awkward and uncomfortable – you had to get used to the other’s kissing style, and worry about taking things too far… This, though, was perfect. They kissed as if they did it every day, with no hesitation, no fear, no embarrassment. Katie’s arm wound around his neck, pulling him to her. She was leaning back, him supporting her on his arm, as minutes went by. When she finally pulled away with a gasp, she buried her face in his neck and was amazed by what had just happened.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I wasn’t planning that…”

“It’s ok, I’m definitely not complaining,” he replied with a small laugh.

They hugged for a minute more and then she reluctantly moved away so they could begin the drive back home. They held hands as they drove, Katie sometimes putting her head down on his arm in an attempt to be closer to him again. When they got back to her house, she thanked Brian for a wonderful night and gave him a quick kiss and a hug. She kissed the side of his neck and made him promise to call her soon, then said goodnight and went inside. She fell asleep thinking about the night she had had and imagining the others that were to come as they explored these newfound feelings they had discovered, and Brian followed her into her dreams.