Tête-à-Tête

Writer's group exercise 08/03/2014.

I am lying in an empty bathtub blanketed in the shadow of a man standing at the opposite end in top coat and tails.  His pleated gabardine slacks not so much frayed but hacked at the knees, ragged, like he has wandered from the perimeter a bomb blast.
Bagdad Route Irish chic.

But a glance to his wild west handlebar, pomaded into precise fronds and the Kerouac quote just visible in the raised topography of his left foot tell me he’s too hipster to have attempted a tête-à-tête in the Persian sandbox. 

His expression is both intense and unreadable; therefore, unsettling. And he is staring at me with such force, I feel myself instinctively flatten my spine against the rigid L-curve of the tub, in a bid to put an extra centimeter between us.

I feel the chill of steel enamel through the thin membrane of my dress.  It travels like an up-flowing river to the top of my neck.  I shiver, over-sized earrings chiming like timpani’s against copper faucets that bookend my head.   

His body triggered into motion by the sound, he gracefully collapses to a low crouch, heels flat in the style of a Korean adjoshi.  And I wonder if I was wrong about him. 

Perhaps he is well travelled.  Seen things.  Things other than the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury or the Quinoa section at Whole Foods. 

He’s one of those people; those people that play with the fabric of your reality because they don’t obey the role you assigned them.

 “Ready?” he asks. 

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