It looked as though it was just another one of the many necessary, but forgettable, business trips Charles had to endure as part of his position at an energy equipment engineering company.
This time, it was a 3-day energy symposium to be based at a large hotel in downtown Chicago. Charles had grown up years ago in the Windy City, although living now on the West Coast, but he remembered well the ordeal that flying into O'Hare during changeable weather afternoons in late Fall could be. He wasn't disappointed…his 767 flight from Seattle had to hold for traffic delays, then hold for gusty winds, landing almost an hour and a half late under a brooding gray sky. A long limo ride downtown in rush hour traffic at last delivered him to the hotel.
Tired and irritated, he checked in, went up to his suite and decided he'd take a long hot shower and unwind from his travels. The lights of North Michigan Avenue and the nearby Hancock Building were twinkling outside his room window as he dressed in slacks and a turtleneck and decided a drink in the dark old walnut-paneled hotel bar would be a very good thing to improve his perspective on the world.
As soon as he was seated in the soft leather chair of the bar near the fireplace, he saw her, instantly.
She was also seated alone in a leather chair about 20 feet away. Her presence and demeanor clearly stated a powerful business elegance, and that "look" that people who travel extensively for business seem to get, impossible to define but totally recognizable to another road warrior. Wearing a tailored gray wool business skirt, a navy blue silk blouse, and expensive flats, she was looking into the fireplace while sipping her glass of wine. This was not a hotel bar pickup sort of woman. She was a phenomenon…her hair, her eyes, the shape of her legs. Charles sipped his wine and sighed, but he also found himself glancing at her frequently and he thought, surreptitiously. She seemed lost in her own thoughts with the fireplace and took no notice of him at all. Or so he thought.
After a long travel day Charles decided he'd better get some dinner despite still running on West Coast time…it was two hours later here and he had a 7:30 am sign-in for the energy symposium the following morning…the start of a long day of panel discussions, presentations, yada yada yada. So he wandered into the most upscale of the hotel's restaurants, told the maitre'd he was dining alone, and was seated off at one of the tables in the back corner that are usually the fate of lone diners in a hotel restaurant. As he finished his crabmeat cocktail appetizer, he noticed the maitre'd seating a woman alone at the next ‘dinner for one' table over from his. It was her again.
Charles didn't know that the woman, whose name he would later learn was Margaret, had in fact been very aware of Charles's scrutiny in the bar, and had slipped the maitre'd a "little something" to be seated for dinner near him. She wasn't at all sure why, as the last thing she EVER did on these damn business trips that filled her year was to latch onto ‘encounters of chance' with anyone. That just wasn't her style. So why, she wondered to herself as she placed her dinner order with the waiter, did she find herself now seated next to this strange man on purpose, glancing at him over the leather-clad menu.
It had to happen sooner or later… Charles and Margaret, exactly at the same moment, glanced up from their dinners and made eye contact. It was very brief, but one of those locking of eyes things that seem to convey in a second or two many things that are powerful, and promising, and as old as time. They both quickly glanced back at their dinners, but they were affected and changed by just that quick communication of their eyes. They both had held the glance a little too long to be just casually taking note of their surroundings.