It was game day in the college town. The streets were full of young people donned in red and white and black. The bars, the shops, the restaurants, even the café were decorated in the university's special brand of scarlet. There was a bite in the air and a buzz on the streets as people filed in from the surrounding towns and the opposing team's town. Game day was a cacophony of life that the sidewalks could barely contain.
A young woman in a red hat and a lovely red wool trench coat breezed in the café doors. Her eyes were lined with paper-thin blue circles from lack of sleep and sparkled with mischief. She stopped at the counter to order a cup of the darkest roast and moved to a booth in front of the big window. She placed the mug of coffee gingerly on the table. She removed the trench to reveal a creamy ivory dress that betrayed the golden sun-soaked skin as if having recently been anywhere but the college town. She shrugged her hair free of her hat and placed the hat on the trench. She scooted in the booth as elegantly as possible and took a keen note of where everything was in the café, of everyone coming in and going out. She brushed her fingers through her glossy black waves while her eyes shifted their focus to the people lining the streets and walking past.
A clock on the café wall saw five minutes go by before it saw her show any other sign of interest.
She could see him as soon as he rounded the corner on the opposite side of the square. Most people would attribute it to the awkward walk that he had grown to constrain over the years. His right foot was clubbed and he walked with a simple hardwood cane to balance himself. His own masquerade in this town had him in cuffed, dark denim blue jeans, a red striped sweater and a ski cap. He wore it well with his broad shoulders and slim waist. Really though, she saw straight through to his brilliant blue eyes the moment they flashed into view.
The young man barely paused before his eyes caught the café sign and his eyes met hers. He pushed up the bridge of his glasses with his forefinger to hide a smile of recognition, relief and of the remotest amount of hope.
He made his way to the café counter and ordered tea. He pulled off his cap as he walked with his cup and put them to the table and looked with hard eyes at the young woman and placed his free hand to her cheek.
The years in their eyes spoke volumes. They had been the oldest and dearest friends, having been neighbors as children on the base their fathers were stationed to. They spent hours pouring over military tomes and atlases and encyclopedias and talked often about history and travel and how the world might treat them with warm arms in the years to come. From early on she had seen past his deformity and he had seen that her sense of adventure would lead her away. And it had. The first time it was because Uncle Sam had seen fit to call her father to another country altogether, still, she kept moving.
The two kept in touch through letters. Often while they were still considered children he would send her those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books and pages copied from encyclopedias that he thought she might find interesting. He would write her long tomes of his stationary, civilian life and of his dreams to take to the road as soon as he could, to see the ocean, to sit anonymously at a greasy spoon in the middle of nowhere, to get lost in great cities. She would send him pictures of the wonders of the world and then she would send him her personal journals which revealed her darkest desires to not just see many of the things she was seeing, but an inner desire to have them, or return them to the people they belonged to.
As teenagers, they had repressed, in equal measures, their greatest desire—being to be with one another. Their letters remained cordial, but there was something desperate and coded deep in her journals that he was sure he understood even though he could barely comprehend the thought. The older the kids around him got, the more cruel they became and the more his desire to run away became—the greater his desire to hide. His letters were peppered with references of their next farewell and caused her great anguish while she misunderstood him to be angst-ridden, bitter and perhaps suicidal. She was still young and hadn't the means to visit him and instead wrote him, reprimanding him, and for a while, their letters stopped.
The young man sat and the two of them waited for the barista to come by with the kettle of hot water and a creamer full of milk before they spoke a word. In unison, they thanked the woman and their voices caught. They laughed nervously and put on guarded smiles.
The young man wrestled nervously with his hands while waiting for the water to steep. After no short moment of this, the young woman put her hands on his to stop him. They did not leave his. He laughed again and sighed. The tension between them was so nervous the rest of the café's patrons almost paused like life had hit the button on a very large remote control. He picked up one of her hands and brought it to his lips and spoke directly into her knuckles, "I suppose I sound foolish to say it, but I can't believe you came."
She wasn't affronted. She did flush, but her hands remained in his and she moved her knuckles to brush the soft skin of the apples of his cheeks. "I didn't know if I could. I almost couldn't." Her honesty brought a gloss of tears to her eyes, betraying that she was honestly scared, although she was internally at war about if it was from what had kept her from seeing him so soon or from the instant small intimacies she had never really allowed herself with anyone else.
In the years they had stopped writing, their parents took their torch, sending senior pictures and Christmas mailers and graduation pictures and keeping each other abreast of their childrens' goings-on.
The young man stayed local and studied anthropology and sociology hoping someday to study the forming cultures of small U.S. towns having anything that was considered to be "The World's Largest" anything. The young girl moved on to be accepted into West Point and studied everything she could until they forced her into the military life, where she was immediately accepted into an internship with the CIA before she could complete any time active.
It was she who reached out first. She understood that she would have to because he was always going to be in the same place and would never find her. She sent him a post card from the International Spy Museum with two words, "I'm sorry."
Immediately he wrote her parents, including his phone number to pass along. Their first conversations were short and forced and apologetic to the point where he would begin to write down what he would talk to her about. Their conversations began to, although still short, flourish. Soon, they began to express interest in meeting up after so many years apart—to make sure they hadn't imagined one another.
However, it was neigh impossible for her. Before the age of twenty three, she had been arrested and imprisoned or nearly arrested and escaped over half a dozen times by more than one government. Then the better she got at what she did, the more careful she had to be about when and where she could go. She would never tell him what she was doing; she would simply apologize with as slight an explanation as she could manage and put off their reunion.
Meanwhile, he would hesitate traveling, hoping that he would be able to persuade her to join him. After so many failed attempts to see one another, he began to lose his resignation that she was again part of his life. Their phone conversations became curt and injurious and prone to end on an estranged note.
It happened that she was able to gain passage back into the U.S. for a brief time and the first stop she made was to him, completely unannounced. Forgetting herself, she walked in to an empty apartment where she was resigned to stay until he came home. She made herself at home for a week before he walked in with a bag in hand. When he saw her, he was very frank with her that he was so hurt that she hadn't called and angry at having gone to the west coast without her. In a blind panic, she yelled at him for not understanding everything she'd been going through and for not having been home and stormed off without her things and didn't return.
