And now she waits in the quiet of the room. How was she to know that only a few short years past, she would run into Him in a casual chatroom. And within those few intervening years they would fall in love and make a life together. At first he did not seem to be part of the conversation. Yet she noticed certain traits and patterns that he had. How he hovered at the margins of the conversation and only occasionally tossed in the odd pithy comment or double entendre. Some went unnoticed. Others were so damn funny, or at least they were to her. And yet he was not the same as other men. He did not move into the conversation hard and try to dominate it. Nor did he try to suggest getting to know her better with silly one- liners or even smooth ones for that matter.
At first she took as much notice of him as any other man. Hell, there were enough men around who could give her all the attention she needed. Besides, she enjoyed the conversation with her girlfriends. Sometimes, they were the highlight of her day. She came to find herself looking forward to breaking up her day by popping into the chat room and finding the regular crowd of friends. She loved being a mother, a wife and her own woman. Yet something was missing. And a little distraction was harmless was it not?
But through the weeks she came to enjoy and look forward to another presence within the room. He wasn't obvious. Oh, his timing of showing up there was predictable enough. In fact, it made it easy for her to arrange her time to be there also. And she started to play with him a bit. She responded to his humour; played off his double entendres. And frankly, enjoyed imagining what he was like. Was it an exercise in fantasy she thought? Lord knows how some of the online personas turned out to be completely different when you met the person behind them.
And somewhere along the way, she found herself drawn and challenged. From what she had talked to with her girlfriends, she found that he had not tried to pickup any of them in private messaging. This intrigued her. What was his pattern and motive? Did he simply like to chat with others within the chatroom or was his motivations deeper than that? So, against her own shy nature, she started to lay out subtle comments and innuendos to see if she would respond. She told herself she was simply being playful. But to her surprise, he responded to her hidden innuendos with grey and complex answers full of hidden meanings. Did this mean he wasn't interested? This she could handle. After all, she really wasn't looking for a iaison. Or was she? So time after time she laid out the bait; and found her own self at the end of the hook. Her emotions bounced between frustration and intrigue.
Yet in that too and fro something happened. She found herself learning from him. He offered her glimpses of him one day only to show her something else completely different the very next. Here was a man who could talk philosophically in one breath and be totally primal in the next in his conversation. Yet he did it a abstract way. Sometimes she found she had no idea of where he was going with what he said until hours after reading it, if at all. She felt as if she were a moon being drawn into a tighter and tighter orbit to a planet.
Then one day, something unexpected happened. She propositioned him in a offhand manner and to her surprise he accepted. Now she was caught in the trap of her own making. Or was it? Either she said yes, and that was something that she had convinced herself that she had not been looking for, or she pushed down her anxiety and said yes to him. And she made a decision that seemed as natural as breathing. She wanted to meet him. If anything, just to see who and what he was. And if anything came of it, fine. If not, she lost nothing. And in that moment, the first step on the path was set. Little did she realize it would turn out to be a path that would change her life completely.
So only after a few weeks of banter, he suggested that they meet someplace entertaining and neutral. And after some to and froing, it turned out to be a small jazz club fairly close to her house. It took some doing, but she was able to make excuses at home that she was out with girlfriends. She didn't know what exactly to wear, what was proper or what she would be comfortable in. It had been so long since she had been out on a proper date per say. In the end, she decided that casual was best but with a bit of something lacey and slinky underneath. When she arrived, he was already there sitting at a table in the club near the corner.
He didn't spot her at first; he seemed entranced by the Blues that was being played by the local cover band. She used the opportunity to take a close look at him before he noticed her. Lord knows that she could have turned away at that moment and he wouldn't have even noticed. But, she stayed. Why she really didn't know. He was really quite average looks-wise for a man his age: fairly short, brown hair and eyes, bearded, casually dressed also and with a certain presence about him. Some would call him dark and intense, however, the one word that came to her mind in that moment was *confidant*.
So she moved up behind him, weaving through the tables. What she really wanted to see was whether he would recognize her from the one photo he had seen. Of course, surprising him would be entertaining also. But just as she was about to come up behind him, she saw him smile softly in profile and heard his low voice for the first time. Without turning his head, he simply said hello to her by name and asked her to sit down as he pulled the chair out beside him.
