For the sake of her personal confidence and satisfaction, she purposely considered herself a woman of class and consequence while she sat twiddling the black straw protruding beyond the lip of her water glass between her fingers.
Focus! she thought to herself and almost said it aloud. Maybe she did whisper it lightly, but no one could have heard. On what she must focus she couldn't have said specifically, only that she did not feel in control of the current and varied pathways her mind wandered along - five or six simultaneously and many of them contrary to her directed attempts at poise and appropriate demeanor, whatever that was.
She sat with her back to the wall at a table in the far corner of the restaurant, facing the door. She regularly questioned her decision to face the door because, while she would know when he entered and not be startled, and she ALWAYS preferred to have her back to the wall as if the world meant to stab her in it, she would also see the recognition register on his face as soon as his eyes met hers, and the anticipation of that moment made her feel a little sick in her stomach.
The thoughts that flitted through her mind were diverse and quick, hard to pin down. One was, "What if he insists on paying for my food?" and another was, "I wonder if I messed up my eyebrows when I rubbed my forehead a minute ago," and still another, "What if I don't look in person the way I look in pictures and he doesn't even recognize me at all?" She was thinking, "Do I need to buy eggs when I go to the grocery store later, or do I have enough left to last until next week?" when she looked up in time to see him push through the door and look straight toward her immediately upon entering.
Her breath caught in her throat and she caught his gaze, held it for a few seconds. Five actually. She counted - not because it mattered but because she often counted things for little reason at all. Five and she broke away and looked down at her napkin, reaching to wipe away invisible water from the tips of her fingers. When she forced herself to look up again, blushing and trying to pretend she wasn't, he had crossed half the distance to her table, and he was smiling. She took that as a good sign because it seemed a truly genuine smile, not the kind of smile you flash because you know you're supposed to smile, but the kind that comes out when you couldn't really hold it in if you wanted to! A wonderful kind of smile, even more genuine than in pictures she'd seen of him - because it's much easier to smile a real smile directed at a person than at a camera phone!
She wasn't sure if she should stand and shake his hand, sit and wait for him to join her... so she half-stood and extended her hand halfway across the table as he reached its corner. He took her hand in his, but rather than shake, he continued to hold it while he made his way around the small table to her side and enveloped her in a hug, forcing her to come to a full stand to prevent it from feeling awkward. This was not a side-hug like you give to the old men at church but a full-on hug like you give to your grandfather on Christmas, and she took this as a good sign as well. She added this to her collection of 'good signs' making the current count two and bad signs zero.
He remained silent as he took his seat across from her, letting go of her hand as he sat. She returned to her seat as well, and in the silence she thought, "He spoke not a word..." so that her mind began to fill lines of the old Clement Moore poem. "He spoke not a word but went straight to his work, filled all his stockings, and turned with a jerk..."
As soon as her brain reached the word stockings, a full flush crept up her neck, and she moved her gaze from his face to her glass, grabbing at her straw and twirling it around with her right thumb and index finger. Then he spoke, "It's good to see you. I've looked forward to this all day." He sounded as if he really meant it. She looked up and met his eyes... greener than in pictures, a shade of green she'd rarely seen in eyes. They seemed to change depending on the direction the light hit them in pictures, and she tilted her head and turned it to the side, keeping his gaze, looking for that color change. None of this was a conscious decision of course. She just did it, and then she felt silly for having done it when she realized. A blush joined her flush when he tilted his head to meet hers, and the increase in her reddening response to his presence reminded her of her original cause for changing color... stockings.
It was a topic they'd discussed before, and the thought made her feel exposed and excited all at once, though he couldn't have known why. She'd dressed for him. Stockings... as they'd discussed. Ones she purchased just for this occasion. They were black with elasticized lace at the tops, thigh-high and nearly opaque, and she wore them with a grey mini-skirt, a few inches above the knee, and boots with a considerable heel. She'd thought this out carefully, and she was thinking about it again now, how she'd planned every aspect of her wardrobe and accessories as if she were meeting him for an intimate tryst rather than an introductory luncheon.
The contrast of the nervousness in her belly to the intimacy of their correspondence prior to this meeting struck her, and she wondered if he felt the same, or even if she perhaps failed him somehow by not being as talkative in person as she was behind a keyboard. She marveled at the paradox - having dressed for him with such risque thoughts in mind but finding herself so rattled in person that she feared his reaction at noticing the heel of her boot or the fact that she was wearing a skirt. Had she tried too hard? Not enough? Did that even matter?
It wasn't worry so much as a fun kind of tingling in her stomach to accompany a cacophony of thoughts tumbling through her mind. An excitement that kept her on pins and needles. She found she liked it, all the while blushing, now more BECAUSE she liked it so much. She hoped in the dimmed restaurant lighting her couldn't detect how deeply reddened her cheeks had become. It felt as if it had spread even to her ears now, as the lobes seemed to burn against the metal of her earring hoops poking through them, a sensation that was entirely new to her, not the sort of thing you normally FEEL.
