his eyes are sparkling liquid chocolate brown.
a cliché description
but
when he looks over at her and whispers something anti-institutional
her fingers want all of the
excited energy clenched into his profile and the softness
that comes when he speaks to her
alone, purely as academics, of course, and
as fellow students in a class they think is boring but
she has been so starved for human kindness that she takes eye
contact as love.
He is brilliant; if she could bottle up his intellect and take it as a
drug she would abandon her morals in a second, and let her
mind live off the glowing things inside him. She
needs that pulsing clever conversation that he
wears like a second skin and
she will settle for being friends but only a little
progress is being made.
Still–can she forget? the way he looked over at her when they went to the professor’s
upper-class over-carpeted house for social
pleasures and all the girls were laughing loudly and she
was wearing black, with her bangs fringing her face and eyes beautiful
and gothic in mascara: she looked
old-fashioned and something else, maybe, that made his eyes slide over to
hers or look over at her from his place in the talking crowd when
she stood there, awkward and silent. She is not
imagining it there was winter in that
autumn air and maybe something else.
but right now.
they are not even friends.
their semester class is almost over and she
is
curious
scared
desperate
and so young
so innocent. if only something could
happen just
once—
the last pavilion 