Repetition

Sitting on the park bench he could feel, he thought, her heart beat, and he hated the nearby softballers. Some after school, intramural, "fun" type of league, the kind where you shout because you're a child and you don't know any better. She was telling a vaguely racist joke that made him laugh. He never got that feeling from her between nine and five. "Don't date a chick from work," his friends told him. But he didn't listen.

The girl, Hazel, the girl next to him, had finished saying something and he was pretty sure it wasn't a question. "So," he started, "you said you found a cat, right? How's that working out?" She told him about the cat, about its green little eyes, and its flat little nose, and its white little paws that looked like boots. Three schoolgirls passed from one periphery to the other, and the one in a fluorescent orange dress drew his eye away, until it finally landed on two guys trying to push each other off another bench. "Sorry, what was that?" She repeated herself.

There were dogs everywhere. This isn't a damn dog park, he thought. Big dogs, little dogs, one man walking four at a time. There was one, howling, some twenty or so yards behind him, howling as if it was trying to save little Timmy down the well.

He looked at Hazel's skirt. It had buttons—he supposed you'd call them medium-sized—going down the front all the way to the bottom. The second to last one was missing. It was cute and quirky, like her.

Some boy (Sam he thought he'd heard), was running in from left field. "What? What! What?!"

"What do you think?" He looked at her.

"Oh... yeah, totally." Her face told him that it was either the wrong answer or the first part of a right one, and he wasn't sure which. So he turned and looked ahead. "A lot of dogs out here today." There was sudden gust of wind and a car alarm. Then another. And another.

"It's getting late. I should go."

"I'll walk you home."

"I'm not going home."

He asked if he could give her another call sometime and she said she would see, but that her schedule was very busy right now. He understood, he told her. And he did understand, but still he didn't change anything. He understood as he was doing it.

It wasn't the worst date he had ever been in charge of, the worst he'd ever acted. But it stayed with him in his stomach, all the way home, as he thought about how to act at work the next day, and whether or not to look at, or speak to, or avoid the girl entirely.