Stewart and Jean

by J. Boyett

  Charles shrugged in vague, unwilling agreement. “You feel like getting a coffee or something?” he asked.

  She grimaced. “Ah, then I’d never get to sleep. You know?”

  “So maybe a beer?”

  “I better not. That margarita knocked me out.”

  “Okay. Well. It was good seeing you!”

  “You, too!”

  “Let’s do this again soon.”

  “Totally.”

  He went to hug her. She let him. But when he put his face near hers she drew it back. In a mildly apologetic tone she said, “Hey, what if we didn’t kiss this time?”

  She said, “Or we could just kiss on the cheeks. How’s that? We’ll kiss on the cheeks, like friends.” And she kissed him on his cheek, then drew her head back to check his reaction.

  “Oh well, it’s non-optimal, but hey,” he said, and pretended to laugh.

  Marissa pretended to believe he was really laughing, and to laugh along with him. He let her go.

  He watched her walk away, feeling dense, sad, and sodden. Felt so bad he laughed at himself, silently. Made himself turn away, start walking towards the subway station. He wished he’d gotten the chance to fuck that hot skinny angular redhead with the big wild eyes. It wasn’t simply horniness, or the male desire to add another notch to his belt, though partly it was that. Mainly, it was that, if they’d fucked, that would have been a real, memorable experience they would definitely have shared. It would have sealed in those hours they’d spent together, and insured their continued existence. Now, they were likely to just forget each other. If he bumped into her at a party in seven years or whatever, there would be no proof they’d ever really known each other at all.

  As the years passed, Jean and Stewart would see each other occasionally, by chance, in passing, on the street, at a movie. Sometimes they would say hello, sometimes they’d each pretend not to have seen the other and would keep walking, not out of hard feelings but simply because they were both in a hurry. Once they bumped into each other back in Arkansas, when they were both there for a visit. But that was years into the future.

  The first time they saw each other again, after the thing at Jean’s place in Stroudsburg, was at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Jean’s year-long Pennsylvania adventure had ended and she’d recently moved back to New York. That year of spending nearly a third of her waking life commuting had felt almost like a monastic withdrawal, and it was disorienting to be back in the city full-time. She had decided to start keeping a journal. She’d bought a nice one, with faux-leather binding and faux-handmade paper, and now she was sitting at one of the tables at the Hungarian, coffee in hand, looking at her crisp blank new journal and ready to get started. Some guy who was returning to his table, having gone to the front to get a refill, did a double-take as he was walking by and stopped. Jean looked up. It was Stewart.

  She didn’t invite him to sit down, but he stood next to her table and they chatted for a few minutes.

  She asked if he was still at Temple. “Oh, no,” he said. The place had been nice, but he’d managed to piss Dan off often enough that he’d decided he should go ahead and quit before he got fired. Right now he was working at Barnes and Noble, which sucked because it was barely enough to pay his rent (he’d moved into a place with some people, he had his own room now). He’d put in to become a guard at the Metropolitan Museum. He figured that would be an okay life, standing around looking at the art. And it had health insurance and was union. Meanwhile he was toying with the idea of trying to become a receptionist at a yoga studio. He thought maybe he’d like to try yoga, and figured this would be a way to get free lessons.

  Jean was still at the same company. But their office had moved downtown. That was why she hadn’t been to Temple in a while. Now she sometimes spent her lunch hour browsing in a different bookstore, the smaller McNally-Jackson. But that was less convenient to her new workplace than Temple had been, so she didn’t go to bookstores as often anymore.

  Before Stewart went back to his own table, Jean burst into laughter. Smiling, a little tightly, Stewart watched her laugh. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I was just remembering our date, and how it blew my mind when I found out you were from Arkansas,” she said. “I mean, it just blew my fucking mind.”

  They each worked at their own table—Jean wrote in her journal; she didn’t know what Stewart was writing. His table was in the back, and hers was near the front, facing away from him. When she got up to leave she glanced his way. He was hunched over, writing something, working intensely. She thought about going back to say goodbye to him, but they’d already said whatever they were going to say, so she just left.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  J. Boyett is a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and founder of Saltimbanque Books, and can be reached at jboyettjboyett@gmail.com.

  For more information check out jboyett.net.

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