Tra and la!

I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this. I am embarassed at how happy I am, like some Technicolor comic of a teenage girl talking on the phone with my hair in a ponytail, the bubble above my head saying: I met a boy!

But I did. This is technical, empirical truth. I met a boy, a great gorgeous dude, a funny, cool-ass guy. Let me set the scene, because it deserves setting for posterity (no, please, I'm not that far gone, posterity! feh). But still. It's not New Year's but still very much the new year. It's winter: early dark, freezing cold.

"Please don't eat anything in that area," he says. It is him (bum bum BUMMM!), but I don't yet know it's him (bum-bum-bummm). I know it's a guy who will talk to me, he wears his cockiness like an ironic T-shirt, but it fits him better. He is th kind of guy who carries himself like he gets laid a lot, a guy who likes women, a guy who would actually fuck me properly. I would like to be fucked properly!

"Seriously," Number 12 continues. (Ha!) "Back away from the tray. James has up to three other food items in his refrigerator. I could make you an olive with mustard. Just one olive, though."

Just one olive, though. It is a line that is only a little funny, but it already has the feel of an inside joke, one that will get funnier with nostalgic repetition. I think: A year from now, we will be walking along the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset and one of us will whisper, "Just one olive, though," and we'll start to laugh. (Then I catch myself. Awful, If he knew I was doing a year from now already, he'd run and I'd be obliged to cheer him on.)

His name is Nick. I love it. It makes him seem nice, and regular, which he is.

He makes a series of awful puns. I catch three-fourths of his movie references. Two-thirds, maybe. (Note to self: Rent The Sure Thing.) He has claimed me, placed a flag in me: I was here first, she's mine, mine. It feels nice, after my recent series of nervous, respectful post-feminist men, to be a territory. He doesn't ask what I do for a living, which is fine, which is a change. (I'm a writer, did I mention?)

It is one A.M. when we hit one of New York's unexplained deadlocks twelve blocks from my apartment, so we slide out of the taxi into the cold, into the great What Next? and Nick starts walking me home, his hand on the small of my back, our faces stunned by the chill. As we turn the corner, the local bakery is getting its powdered sugar delivered, funneled into the cellar by the barrelful as if it were cement, and we can see nothing but the shadows of the deliverymen in the white, sweet cloud. The street is billowing, and Nick pulls me close and smiles that smile again, and he takes a single lock of my hair between two fingers and runs them all the way to the end, tugging twice, like he's ringing a bell. His eyelashes are trimmed with powder, and before he leans in, he brushes the sugar from my lips so he can taste me.