Page 5 of Mr. Match

I know he likes to wear jeans. Well-worn denim with holes and those little white strings. His everyday shirts always come with a message. Shrike Bikes or Hook-Me-Up or Sick Boyz, Inc. He likes long sleeves because he’s hiding what’s underneath. Even in the summer he wears thermals instead of t-shirts. His boots are always dark brown, the leather well-worn, scuffed and cracked. The classic engineer buckles are unseen under his pant leg, but just knowing they’re there makes him more manly.

He is high-end blue-collar on most days.

But when he dresses for an occasion—a meeting, a wedding, a night out—he has the whitest of collars. The most impeccably tailored bespoke suits—always requiring an extended trip to London to be fitted in person on Savile Row—that make his cut muscles disappear into straight lines and sharp edges that draw the eye down—or up, depending where you start—until you realize that this is not just a man wearing clothing… he’s a work of art.

If you are lucky enough to see him bare—and that really requires the kind of luck you only find hidden inside four-leaf clovers or right-side-up horseshoes—you realize what he is through and through.

Oliver Shrike. The Modern Gentleman.

My heart pounds faster inside my chest when he turns away from the window. I will wait here for many minutes to see if I can catch another glimpse. But no amount of seeing him from afar will suffice.

I need to make contact.

He doesn’t come back. He’s a busy man, after all. How many spare minutes does he have in his day to gaze out a window?

I turn away as well. Withdraw back into my apartment filled with custom-made furniture and the art I have created over the past four years. I take a seat on the couch, my legs off to the side, fluffing my long hair and striking my pose as I hold the remote control in my hand.

Click.

I take a picture.

I like to have a still to start things out. Maybe I can sell it later?

But then my thumb finds the right button on the remote and the red light flashes on the camera mounted on the tripod several feet away.

“Hello,” I say, looking into the lens. I start every video with a hello. It’s good manners to greet people when you first make contact. “It has been more than four years since I last saw you.”

I stop to lick my lips. Not to be seductive. He won’t see that gesture because I am framed only from waist to shoulders. But just because of the nervous feeling that overtakes me each time I do this.

“Yesterday was…” I stop to smile. “Surprising, tantalizing, and almost unbearable.”

I saw him up close yesterday. He was coming out of the coffee shop at the Fort Collins Theater, cardboard paper cup in hand, and he was whistling the way only country boys know how. Boys who had a lot of time on their hands growing up. Boys who spent their days outside trying to mimic birdsongs. Who skipped rocks across a river and picked weedy purple flowers for their mothers before they went home for dinner.

I wasn’t even following him. I was walking home after picking up some bread from Anna Amici’s, the little Italian restaurant and bakery down near Laurel Street. There was a crowd of people in my way, but once the image of Oliver Shrike is burned into your brain, it stays there. I picked him out of that crowd immediately. Maybe it was his white Shrike Bikes thermal, or the way his body moves when he walks—that long stride or the tipped-up chin—that alerted me.

But I like to think we have this connection. Some kind of string that binds us together. Signals or vibrations that are attuned to the Law of Attraction. Because he looked right at me. Saw though me, thank God, but right at me.

I stopped walking and a child bumped into me from behind, my sudden stillness catching him off guard. The world kept going, his face disappeared, reappeared briefly as he reached for the door to the old bank building, and then disappeared again as he went inside.

I sigh for the camera. “When will you see me for real again?”

I say it with longing. And I do long for that day, which—God, my heart is beating so fast—could be today. But the possibility makes me so nervous.

He will have questions and he will want answers.

“Yesterday,” I say, forcing myself back on track, “I worked, as usual. And you’ll be happy to know that it was all legitimate business. A patron came to my online gallery and wanted the original self-portrait I did that last time we were together. Is that a good sign or a bad sign? I can’t decide. I only put it up for sale three days ago. No,” I say, smiling at him in the lens. “Don’t worry. I don’t need the money. That’s not why I did it. I just…” My words trail off. “I would just like a fresh start. And I’m tired of looking back, you know? So why keep it? I don’t display it. I mean, good God!” I laugh. “My walls do not need my naked body on them. And I didn’t keep it because of modesty, either. My face is hidden. I still do them that way, as you can see. Shoulders down, only. But out with the old, right? It’s all too much. It weighs me down.”

I look at the window again, knowing that one side of my body will be cast in shadow. Makes the whole thing more dramatic. My fingertips stroke circles around my nipples, then I pinch them, making them bunch up like hard, little spikes.

The wetness pools between my legs when I picture him watching this.

Stay focused, Kat. “So that was a good start. They paid in full. I spent most of the day packing it up properly. I sold the frame too. It’s an odd size, remember? So the frame is custom. They go together like marriage partners. And then I took it down to the post office.”

I stop to think of the war I waged inside my head as I stood in line for postage, insurance, and tracking. Should I pop in to the Fort Collins Theater and get dinner? Maybe bump into him again? Or one of his people? But no, I decided no. A chance encounter is not how I want our reunion to take place.

It needs to be tightly controlled.

“And then I went home and cooked linguini with shrimp for dinner.” I stare into the camera. “I wonder what you did. What does your day look like? Who do you talk to regularly?” A sudden stab of jealousy courses through my blood. All those people who get to hear his voice, see his face, be near him, if only to talk about receipts, or web security, or whatever.