Awkward

She stopped just outside the doorway to take a cautious sip of her steaming coffee, her other hand cupped below the tilt to cradle the leftovers. Her eyes darted around the shop patio as she swallowed just in time to meet his as he stared. He noticed a flush wash across his face, and was ashamed in the still-amused fashion. She wiped her chin and smiled, though her eyes were quick to run in an opposite direction, any direction they could find, and slightly downcast.

Reaching for the phone in his pocket, he pretended to have been going for it in the first place, and hoped she would buy it, if she cared at all. Without looking at him again, she darted towards a stool a few tables down with her back turned and took out her own phone. He hadn’t been able to tell if she had ever turned a shade her two, as her hair fell gently across her right cheek when she had turned- though her eyes were just watered enough that he could have almost seen himself in them.

    

Immediately, he thought back to her slightly down-tilt face at the moment she had smiled at him, gently curved and shining like Montezuma’s gold. He thought again of her bright, slightly wetted eyes with a touch of a modest wild in them, and how he knew with a certainty she was everything he could wake up to for a long time, and maybe even take home to his mother. Comfortable in the belief he was safe to observe once more, he lit a cigar, and adjusted the volume of his music. A flamenco number called ‘Golden Waves’ was playing gently as he began to admire her once more, such as his vantage would allow.

Her hair flowed down to the small of her back smooth and lightly, as if satin curtains in a light summer breeze, unimpeded by her brown, turtle-necked, business-casual sweater. The sweater caressed her curves as far as the view was unobstructed just confidently enough to tell a man two things; She was the sort of woman who simply enjoyed life, while also having set and kept up with her own regulations on matters of self-beauty, and that she might have been sent by the gods to torment him.

It was somewhere between this assessment and his last, too �"cold-to-enjoy sip of coffee- that he decided he had better head off and begin his day.  He would never say anything to her, and he knew it. He might as well not linger on the subject. He put his phone in his coat pocket, collected his tablet and his empty cup, and stood, only to collide into the woman he had been studying, nearly spilling some of hers all over her front side.  

“Jesus, I’m sorry. Did I spill anything on you?”

“No”, she said. “It’s ok. I wasn’t looking either.”

“Good. Listen, I’m sorry about staring earlier…”

“Oh, haha. It’s ok. I was too; before you noticed.”

“Really?” He felt butterflies in his stomach- a tinge of hope at long last and the lack of any clue about how to proceed.

“Yes, Sir. You looked lonely and handsome. But hey, I have to run, take my number down and text me.” She took his hand and began to write on it.

“…I’m meeting my brother for the first time in about an hour… or else I’d have you buy me another cup.”

     He felt a sudden tinge of panic, and retracted his hand in utter shock.

“Wait, your name isn’t Meagan is it?”

     He could see realization, terror, and humiliation sweep across her face as it no doubt was his as well.

“Yes, yes it is.”

     He looked down at the numbers she had written.

“…I’m Jake.”