​"So what are you drinking?" he asked. "Wait, let me guess. A merlot. From northern California. Small private vineyard only."
"Well done," she said. "Not tonight. Just the house merlot."
"Very pedestrian of you."
"I'm like to keep in touch with the common man. Or woman."
"You don't seem very common," he said. "I'm guessing you went to a highly competitive university, studied hard, worked your way up the corporate ladder to a well-paid managerial position."
"And you?'
"No, no, no," he said, shaking his head. "You've got to tell me if I'm on the right track."
She sat up straight and took a sip from the wine glass before her. Then she turned slightly towards him. "Some of that is right. "I graduated from Bryn Mawr. Got a job at a non-profit out of college, until a met a very handsome man.
"Handsome?"
"Bit of a soundrel."
"A scoundrel?"
"I managed to tame him though."
"Did he mind that?"
"You'd have to ask him," she said.
"Sounds like a worthy adversary," he said.
"Men," she said, shaking her head, "and competition."
"We're not all always competitive."
​"Really?"
"But I'm guessing when the two of you first met, you didn't just throw yourself at him. No doubt you played it aloof--at least in the beginning--to see if he was worthy of your interest. Didn't always return his call right away. Had your roommate tell him you were out, even when you were staying in for the night wearing Bryn Mawr sweats. Maybe even," he said, with a little sarcastic fanfare, "kept a guy on the side initially just in case this handsome scoundrel didn't pan out."

"Do you mind?" he said, nodding to the open chair beside her.
"No," she said.
He sat, comfortably. Confidently. "You're quite beautiful," he said.
Her eyes scanned the room. "There are a number of pretty women here."
"I hadn't noticed."
She demurred. "Good answer."
He gestured. "I try."
"But maybe you're not as observant as you think."
He smiled. "I recognize uncommon beauty."
"Perhaps."
Then he grinned, slyly. "Or maybe this side of the bar is just better lit."
"Lighted," she said.
He shook his head. "Lighted... Being a bit persnickety?"
"Nice ten-dollar word," she said.
"Yours was an eight-dollar."
"And perhaps I am."
"But you'll forgive my faux pas?"
"I suppose," she said.
"I don't often make mistakes," he said, then before she could respond, added, "Grammatical mistakes."
"I'm a stickler," she said. "But since you seem to be contrite, I'll forgive your mistake."
"Contrite," he said. "Ah, yes, I'm contrite."

Gilbert sat at the edge of his bed. It was 7:34 in the morning. Kimberly had not yet passed his house. That was a curious thing. He didn't remember that happening over the past year. All through the fall. And winter. Spring, and now the beginning of summer. She always walked to the high school from the same directions, following the same path, and every morning he stood by his window to catch a glimpse of her. That's all he needed really. Just a glimpse. He'd wait in his room, shading himself in the shadows, or peeking from behind his open closet door, just enough so his slight line of the front walkway was framed by the edge of his window. But this morning he wouldn't get a glimpse.

His mother had already called for him to come down into the kitchen for breakfast. His father would undoubtedly be shouting up the stairs in a minute or two. And if he'd wait any longer he surely risk being late for the first bell. But he didn't feel like moving. The bright sunny morning was suddenly in a kind of disarray and something deep inside him, oddly, gave him the sense that something very wrong was going on. Or had gone on. And that part of him made him hesitant to throw on some jeans and a T-shirt and hustle down to the kitchen.

​I didn't take a shower this morning.

I know, what an odd way to open up a ten-minute writing session. But it's more than just the idea that I'm feeling a little sticky at the moment. And a little itchy. Which, when you think about it, is really a first world problem. I doubt I smell. But then again, as they say, if you do smell you're usually the last person to know. But I'm going to assume that with the, literally, tens of thousands of showers I've taken over the course of my lifetime that my body is so used to be clean all the time that even when I decide not to take a shower for one morning it can magically reset to a previously-showered state.

The reason, however, that I bring this up at all is not to give you great insight into my hygenic habits, but to note the (very) mild thrill that I get out of not showering is that it's one of the few times when I, as an adult, get to do something out-of-the-ordinary. I've been conditioned--again, a first world problem--to get up every day, pee in a clean bathroom all my own, brush my teeth with some space-age toothpaste, and take a shower in water that is always hot--or mildly warm, as I like it. Then I get dressed, choosing from a variety of clothes, that are also very clean and drive to work in a car that, while not extravagent, is serviceable, perhaps to some, even enviable.

Life is mundane, structured, and risk-less. Not always. Just 99.9% of the time. So my big escape from the chains of modernity in 2019 America is to forgo a shower for one morning and pretend to live like my Stone Age ancestors.

Of course, maybe I am a little ripe right now.

I could use a little Irish Spring.

​He noticed her. How could he not? Her wispy blonde hair blew off and around her shoulders in the light breeze that brushed along the busy inlet in the warm afternoon. The golden sparkle of the blue-green water matched the sun's glint off of her hair. She was tan, but not obsessively so, and the way she held the mug in two hands as if she were sitting outside an Aspen coffee shop in November, instead of early May in Sounders Beach, was so damn cute. He couldn't keep his eyes off her. As much as he tried to concentrate on anything else--the menu, the adorable little girl at the table next to him waving her hands at a butterfly, a motor boat idling nearby--he kept glancing back at the woman. Then away. Then back at her, once again.

Christ, what's the matter with you? he thought. She's going to think you're some kind of stalker, just another wannabe monied guy in town to scam chicks out of their alimony, and their panties. But that wasn't it for him. He saw something in her face. Something the wire-rimmed Janis Joplin sunglasses couldn't hide. A pain. She had been there. The kind of place where adults find themselves, even when they've tried a lifetime to avoid. That cavernous pit of hurt that takes what seems like forever to climb out of after someone you've given every bit of your heart and soul and body and mind and breath to has tossed it away so haphazardly and callously that you question every relationship, no matter how shallow or deep, brief or long-running, transient or significant, for the rest of your life.