Love Is:…

She is wearing my T shirt – the plain pale purple one that she said screams “I’m sweet and innocent” but, as I watch her weave her way through the tables on her way to the bar, there is nothing innocent about the way the supple cotton conforms to her body, following each dip and curve of her torso. Her hair is still wet from the shower and loose about her shoulders, and where it spills across her back it turns the cotton a wet, deeper shade of purple.

She is beautiful – she is stunning – and she is mine.

I look around, suddenly uncomfortable, suddenly exposed by this uncommon rush of possessiveness, of pride, but no one seems to be paying attention to me. Gray’s is nearly empty on this Tuesday night, late afternoon, really – it is just past seven o’clock – and I look up to see her standing by the bar now, leaning forward on her elbows, smiling. A quick, surreptitious glance around me, and then I indulge in observing her. She is at ease here, more so than anywhere else outside her bedroom, I think, and even in plain jeans and a washed-out T shirt, face free of make-up, she is easily the prettiest girl in the club.

I slide a bit deeper in my chair and twirl my cellphone on the smooth surface of the table. I still feel as though I have to steal glances at her, observe her in increments doled out by hidden looks from across the room, even after nearly a month of dating her. I don’t have her boldness, the Ashley Bravado, that direct way she can just look at you – look straight at you – and let her eyes communicate it all. Even now, even when it’s just the two of us in the quiet of her room, if she catches me looking at her, I blush. She smiles at me at times like that – a sly smile, or a teasing one, or an inviting one, depending on the occasion – and tries to engage my gaze again. And I, I just blush harder.

“After all, still a Brady, Spence”, I imagine her saying, but of course she doesn’t, it’s all in my head. But there it is, after all, that feeling of being out of my depth when I’m around her, of being nothing more than an Ohio bumpkin. A plain small-town goose who can’t even look at her girlfriend – that word still teases my lips into a smile every time I think it, my girlfriend – without falling into a nervous fit of giggles or a blushing silence.