Chapter 1

The moment when Peter finds that he may love Mrs. Marsh as well as an introduction to the novel's major characters.

Seymour Ryan was a southerner with the fingers of a world renown bass played, who found that he may have been talentless after the untimely break up between himself and his Swedish mistress of a full year, that he was quite sure was the love of his life. Seymour possessed a very handsome silhouette with the broad/slack shoulders of a Broadway star, which placed all of the women of our time at ease when I was able to suggest the very casual blind dates that he would have accompanied me on. But when she’d gone, he was convinced to have the urge to find another muse. A muse of which would have consumed his thoughts at any given moment when he was said to have thought about her. That would have made the blind dates and late nights on the strips a lot more desirable; if only he weren’t so picky with his women.

There were a number of spots that I called my preferences but he spoke against them. There was "Fire and Ice" off of LakeShore that sat on the edge of a beach, where some of the nights could have been spent watching the waters dance back and forth against the wooden posts that held onto the sign to showcase the building. Most nights were spent drinking tequila with the women of the shore and kicking back in the VIP lodge to the basement of the building which used round windows to show off their floral colored man made coral reef. Other than "Fire and Ice", I was also a fan of "Purple Rain", which had a little bit of flamboyant name, but there, there were the most beautiful women in the city, and the cheapest bottle of the best tasting sweet red wine was held. Purple Rain was the first place that he’d let me drag him in the night, because the women danced our bottles back to us in small black dresses.

Seymour was a looker none the less, and even in a broken heart, he still kept his eyes open for the tail that he could have been chasing, but he would never chase those legs and hold them down because they always had too big of mouths, or they ate too many starchy foods. Once he left a girl because her favorite color contrasted his too much, not to mention the nice face she held. She was a dime, and he passed her by like she’d spat on the floor that he walked on.

In the year of 59, he and I were graduating from Law School at Columbia University and I sat at the top of our class while he followed closely behind, somewhere between third and forth, as I remember. He’d missed out on an internship that would have been capable of shaking him up to second during our first year, where we were roommates.

There were a couple of things that I learned about good lawyers and all of those things were that they always won. I took that into consideration after sitting in on my father’s lecture on law my freshman year, as well as seeing Seymour not be number one as he'd wished. If you wanted the best then you needed to be the best and I never liked to be anything less than that because the way of the land could only be conquered one man at a time.

Because of my luck within my years in school, I was able to afford a studio apartment in Manhattan where I moved in with my Great Dane, Sparks, and out of my six bedroom shared town home on campus. We called it The Mansion. On the first floor, in the bedroom off of the hall to the kitchen, lived Nancy Farmer who majored in medicine and minored in Latin which would have brought her to a number of places outside of the states. Eventually, she decided to take her degree to war as an army corps nurse where she later married a Mr. Grommets, who owned a couple of successful firms, one of which would have later crashed late into the 60s after they had their second son, which gave them the idea of selling that firm before the crash to buy his older, four year old son a ranch for his own pony.

On the second floor, next door, to me lived Neman Park who was studying to become an archeologist where he would have later moved to Yorkshire at the aid of Maurice Beresford.

He would come to my room every morning, promptly around the time when I was tightening my tie, to complain about his professor, who’d had it out for him since he started taking his Botany class because of his fondness of a Mrs. Lane Anderson, who they shared a mutual interest in.

Reagan Carter, a black woman who shared the room with her white boyfriend Colton Haze, lived to the door left of his. We’d gotten a bunch of controversy about it, but she’d never done me any harm, and Nancy had found her to be an admirable confidant over the years. Colton Haze studied to become a neurologist while Reagan worked at a dry cleaner on campus in the back, folding clothes at the aid of an Oriental man and his wife. She’d forfeited her degree after an ordeal with a biased professor, who didn't grant her the opportunity to sit in on her lecture before her final exam.

The third and final floor held a study and the landlord’s master bedroom. The landlord was Landon Folk, whose father had monopolistic tendencies. He owned most means of transportation and horizontally, the gas companies that helped those transportation companies, and granted Landon with the lavish house that he pulled strings to purchase. Landon was going to college for no reason at hand. He majored in Fine Arts and excelled at piano and viola as well as the saxophone that he’d play for us after the long drunken nights out. But I’d grown from this group of people that I’d sat up late into the night to be the company of. I’d grown from The Mansion and Sparks had grown from being only a small pup, into a large horse by the time that I knew that we needed to fall off onto our own.

For the first month of living on our own, in the start of the summer, we’d only had one full king sized Mattress and a dark oak dresser to dress the apartment in because all of my furniture would have been imported from my cousin’s furniture shop in Canada within the next month. He’d misplaced my order and promised to have it all shipped in as soon as he could. But I was in no hurry, because the decor of my apartment mattered just as much as the shoes that I’d worn to breakfast with a Cynthia Marsh, who I’d met at Fire and Ice the evening before, all prior to me noticing her gaped teeth and the small fact that she was English with a splash of Taiwanese. I could have said that I was a little less than fond of her then, but after she’d gone, I’d found that I missed her slightly more than I probably should have. Because that morning she asserted herself all over the drab walls of my apartments and suggested that I draw back blue wallpaper to sit behind my oak dresser.

I was in a hurry to make it to the breakfast at my favorite breakfast spot so she suggested that I throw on any ole dress shoes so that she would have been able to accompany me before her evening class. So, then, during breakfast, my shoes mattered just as much as the furniture that she didn’t mind me not having. She twirled her wooden stirrer through her coffee slowly and ran her bare foot over my calf muscle while I sliced into a short stack of blueberry pancakes. She told me that she was going on a diet so that she would have been able to keep her spot in the Vogue look back for the coming winter that was rushing back on us. She would have been leaving after one last semester in the states. She was a year behind me and would have been returning to Oxford in the spring, if not sooner.

“Slacks,” she said behind her cup. “Slacks on women.”

“Are you sure that you don’t want a pancake?”

“I am absolutely sure. Pete, do you know how many time I cut my legs when I shave? Stockings catch onto the hairs too,” she said. I shrugged. “All women in pants,” she added just before taking a sip of her coffee. “Not as cross dressers, but as women.” I poured more maple syrup over the stack and she watched it ooze over slowly. “Perhaps just a bite... Then a walk to work it off.” I swung a fork full of pancakes toward her. “Perhaps two, very small, baby bites.”

Cynthia Marsh did not have a bad figure that she needed to keep. I would have spent great money for it, and at the time, spending money on women would have been more of charity work.

I swung the white, gold trimmed plate over to her and she smiled up at me through that small gap and when I'd seen it in the morning I thought that I'd never grown to like that gap, but I found myself not minding it all as much as I previously did. She sliced into the buttered pancakes and her knife helped a perfect square of pancakes onto her fork which helped that same blueberry pancake into her mouth and something strange was happening inside of me while she ate because I couldn't help but find her movements flawless. Cynthia Marsh did not need a tug at any of her flaws because what she didn't have was what she made sure to make up for in bed.

I remembered her tugging at the buds of her n*****s in bed the night before while I rushed to pull off my pants, and never once had I thought of the past as I had there when she'd only passively mentioned her figure. I watched her dig into the remainder of the pancakes and she talked about something other than what I was hearing her say. At the time I couldn't hear her say a word. I only saw the words form on her perfect lips. I ran my hand up to rub my eye lids and my gaze lifted from her lips to her eyes which bobbed back and forth between me and the pancakes that she enjoyed more than I had. She finished and pulled her glass of water up to sip a little bit of it and a light chaff came from her that made me smile.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked lightly. Then she looked at the empty plate and her cheeks flooded with the pink just before I let out a light cackle into my hand. But I didn't think that she was disgusting, or even sloppy. I didn't think that she was any more than cute. I could have been found to have been laughing because the way that she'd allowed herself to break her own inconsistent rules... it was admirable and attractive.

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"The Fright Night!" screamed a young boy at the foot of a stack of news papers. He tightened the brown cap on his head and found my side so that I was able to screw the cap onto his head tighter so that he could let out a playful scream. "Get your bery own copy of today's news and read about the monster of the streets!" Cynthia danced past the child and I. I handed him a dollar in return for the paper that I tucked underneath my arm.

"I think that I'll be wearing slacks to showcase the winter season." She grabbed hold of the paper and pulled it from underneath my arm. "After the graduation of New York University, the bodies of three college graduates were found in central park and reported to have been attacked by an animal in the dead of the night. Lacerations were found on the victims along with bite marks. The city advises that all of it's inhabitants keep an eye out for the beast, and in the event tat the beast is spotted, the authorities are to be notified to ensure the public safety of our city." She folded the paper in half and handed it back to me. "There's a monster roaming the streets, Peter. You have to protect me!" I grabbed her arm and pulled her back against me so that I could gargle at the crook of her neck. She let out a scream and her fingers pounced at my face and she could have pierced my ear with her scream. "You and I may not ever find a place to part our ways." She turned and looked back at me. Her royal eyes scanned over me and she grabbed the tips of my fingers into the palms of her hands. "We must do it here."

"Here?" I asked her. She looked up at the building signs that speckled themselves around us and I followed her eyes allowing mine to bumble around us until they landed back on her. Hers landed back on me after mine tacked themselves onto her lips, giving my eyes time to slowly channel up to her eyes. "Not here." There had to have been another way of doing things, and as fast as I could, I tried to think back to how relationships use to be before girls hadn't caught themselves becoming permanent. The time back in grammar school when I loved a Miss Mary Lawson who, by then, in that moment of me staring into Cynthia Marsh's eyes, may have been well into a marriage, where the feelings wouldn't have been mutual; with at least one child and a pregnancy. 

I wanted to go back to the time when I would not have been so afraid of falling in love, but I couldn't because that time was far too hazy for me to remember. Her head tilted to the side allowing one of her long black curls to spindle down her shoulder and I looked down at the shoes that she'd chosen because she could have mattered just as much as her choice in shoes. As well as her choice in detail. I let go of her hands and she spun away from me swiftly and I turned to head back where we'd come, taking two steps back and one more forward. That step forward would have been me looking back to see her eyes searching back for mine.

I didn't yet know that I was in love with Cynthia Marsh, and I didn't know until I was well into bed that evening so early, and I'd allowed myself to ignore an invitation to Seymour's favorite peep show, Owner's Alias.

Author's Note

So far, I would like to know what you think so far of this chapter? I don't know whether or not it was a good start but I do know that this would be a nice foundation for a love story lol.