Him!

The dreaded evening came and with much inner quaking, the shy girl entered The Room, behind her friend. She timidly looked to her left, where several guys were already seated and almost gasped. There he sat, in the back, looking mildly interested in the hum of voices around him but not quite joining in – wavy, brown hair falling almost to his shoulders, his startling blue eyes standing out in stark contrast to his ruddy cheeks, made more crimson by the icy bite in the winter night air outside. He evidently had not been there long. Who is this guy? To her amazement, her friend led her right up to him and introduced him as her boyfriend. Disappointment deflated her rising excitement as surely as a slow leak in a balloon. “Oh…this is the boyfriend’, she thought to herself wryly. She sized him up, having already dismissed him as a competitor for her only friend’s favor. Again, her fear rose within her of being abandoned to the wolves while her friend cosied up in a corner with the boyfriend. Sighing, she resigned herself to her fate, resolving to be firmer in resisting her friend’s pleas in the future.

“What a terrible flirt!”, the young girl fumed inwardly. “How can she do this to him?!” Her friend had proven true to her word and refrained from sitting ensconced in a corner with her boyfriend, but instead flitted from guy to guy, clearly enjoying being one of only two ladies in the entire meeting. “Humph! She doesn’t need any moral support at all! She clearly would have done quite nicely on her own without me or her boyfriend!” Eventually, he came up to her and struck up a conversation. She could hardly believe her good luck. Being outsiders and clearly not interested in the topic of the meeting, they wound up in a corner, intent on much more interesting conversation. The girl could not remember having enjoyed herself this much in a very long time. She was amazed that her friend did not seem to mind, or even notice that she had done the very thing she had warned her friend against doing to her. Could her friend not see her clear interest in the boyfriend? As the young girl and her new friend reluctantly parted, she found herself wishing this companionable, handsome young man did not belong to another, let alone her only real girlfriend. She wondered if she would see him again.