She padded over to the small bathroom at the rear of the store and toweled off her neck one more time. This summer heat was brutal and with the air conditioning on the fritz, she was finding it impossible to stay dry.
"I freaking hate this humidity," she muttered to herself while nervously tidying up the shelves in front of her. She peered closer into the mirror for what felt like the fifteenth time that hour and sighed deeply. All the work she'd put into applying her makeup just so and then blow-drying her hair was for nothing.
Pulling her hair back into a casual twist, she clipped it high enough off the nape that she no longer felt the wet strands on her neck. A facecloth removed what was left of the mascara running under her eyes but nothing was going to change the slightly feverish tint to her skin. She nervously ran a tongue over her lips and could taste the salty sweat.
"Oh, just swell." She told her reflection. "Why couldn't this be happening in the dead of winter instead?"
Impatiently flicking off the light, she re-entered the main space of her small store. She'd spent the day cleaning up even though she knew he wouldn't be paying attention to any of it. Fidgeting was more like it though, moving one item here and then uselessly back again.
She repeated in her head more than once, "This is demented. Demented, demented, demented."
Melanie had been talking to herself in this vein off and on for the past week, with the tension ratcheting up a few notches the closer she got to this date. By the time this morning had arrived, the tension in her body was near overwhelming. Her mind couldn't focus on anything but the clock mounted high on the wall. She knew she'd spoken earlier to clients as they came in, but damn if she could remember a thing that was said or bought.
All that mattered right now was that Robin would come through her front door... so soon. Here, in her place, after all this time he would be standing just a foot or two from her. A few tantalizing moments and then? He'd be gone again.
"ARGH!" She cried up to the ceiling in frustration. "I am FUCKING losing it!"
When she was being honest with herself, she could quietly admit that she'd lost it on his account decades before. It was hard to believe that those heady days of university, music, parties and few responsibilities were almost 20 years gone now. Harder still to reconcile that wild adventurous child with the woman she was now: settled, active in the community, and a mother.
A wife. Married.
He too was married, with a gorgeous little boy whose grinning face often showed up on his Facebook wall. Oh yes, they'd reconnected online a few years ago in the way that old acquaintances do -- it turned out he was a friend of a friend and so what could one do but accept the request?
What made it stranger still was when his wife Jennifer "friended" her as well, adding a surreal element to it all. She had met her back when he and Jen had already been dating for a while. They were all part of a group loosely connected in some ways through classes, running in to one another at parties and bars. But with Melanie and Robin's shared history, she couldn't help but be aware of his girlfriend at the time.
For whatever reason, it must have made some sort of sense to Jennifer to virtually hook up again and they'd all stayed in touch in that casual way of 'like'ing one anothers shared links and bon mots.