When Size Matters

4

I’D BEEN LATE getting to Skinny’s. With all that time to spare I’d still managed not to make it on time. No wonder we drove guys crazy! I’d felt better after my talk with Guinness, had taken a quick shower and raced around my apartment trying on different outfits. Good thing my roommate, Andie, hadn’t made it home from the wedding yet, to delay me even more, asking a billion questions I couldn’t answer. I did have to keep stopping to explain to Guinness that we weren’t playing fetch. But that wasn’t why I was late. I’d felt so relaxed in my jeans, short sweater and favorite tennies—really, for the first time in ages—that I’d decided to walk down the long hill from my apartment to the coffee shop instead of driving. Or maybe I was stalling. I never know with me.

Brad was still wearing his suit pants and dress shirt, but he’d pulled off his tie, undone the strangle button on his shirt and rolled up the sleeves a couple of turns. One yummy look.

He was waiting for me in the parking lot, leaning against his old, faded-blue BMW and looking out over Lake Austin, that lengthy stretch of the Colorado River where they’ve dammed it up on the West side of town. I could feel the lick of the flames again as I walked up to those long, long legs. Brad pushed himself off the car—no hands, just legs—told me I looked great and kissed my cheek. There were those lips again, wrapped around the off-center smile. Matt who?

Skinny’s was a big deal to me, my wild life refuge, a place I went by myself not to be lonely. And I never shared it with people who wouldn’t be good to run into at a ragged three in the morning or at ten o’clock on a dateless Saturday night. Brad lived in Dallas, which made him pretty safe.

“Hey, thanks again for the rescue,” I said to fill the silence while we were waiting in line, perusing the pastry case. “I’d been about to do something dire.” It came out breathless. Maybe because of the gravitational pull.

“My pleasure,” Mr. Magnet replied. I could hear the smile in his voice. “I’m not really all that fond of bullies.”

“Yeah, me neither,” I answered, witty conversationalist that I am, apparently out of brains as well as breath.

And that was the end of that conversation volley. The quiet grew so thick, it was like having another person there. Then I remembered what Brad had said about Chatty Cheerleader and my vow that Silence was my new best friend. She inched forward in line beside us.

I looked back over my shoulder at him. He stepped closer and smiled. I started rationalizing—we excel at that in my family. Really, Dallas and Austin weren’t all that far apart, less than an hour away on Southwest Airlines. By car, they were hooked together with a straight, flat, slice of the same freeway that linked Mexico to Canada. You just got in the left-hand lane of I-35, set the cruise control for 84 miles per hour, leaned back and prayed. And there was a lot of interface between the people in the two cities. That’s what Brad and I could do, interface.

We moved ahead one half step. Skinny’s was quintessential Austin. Besides the best coffee, Skinny’s could claim the most sinfully decadent desserts on earth. The owner had the genius idea of hiring two pastry chefs: one French pâtissier and one local Austin guy, each to create their own desserts. Hot-blooded sparring between the two had given birth to such creations as Mocha-Morning Blossoms and The Czar’s Chocolate Clouds, Aphrodite’s Cream Puffs and, my favorite, Cupid’s Toes in Cocoa Sauce. Skinny’s wasn’t very big and sometimes the cozy little rooms with the overstuffed chairs weren’t enough to hold the multitudes that crowded there after movies and night classes and on weekends. It didn’t matter. There was always space. Outside, on both sides of the little shop, were acres—okay, maybe not acres—of wood decking, at different levels. On mild nights, like that night in October, you could take your Cupid’s Toes, find a private little world at a table under a gas lamp and contemplate life, talk or just sit there and watch the boats putter by on the lake.

We waited until we’d finally gotten our coffees and cakes, found a secluded table outside and sat down across from each other before we said anything more. “Sorry I let it go on so long. It took me a while to come up with a plan,” he chuckled. I could see him remembering. I hoped he’d had the face view.

“Well, it was perfect and I thank you.” It had come out like a coo. As though I was saying, “Oh, you’re so big and strong…and poor little me.” Except I’m not a very good cooer; I run out of pucker too fast. “You were there on the groom’s side?”

“Yeah, roommates at U.T. Used to play squash, have a beer together whenever I was in town. Good guy. Or he was,” he said wistfully.

“Married, remember?” I reminded him. “Not deceased.” “Well, I haven’t seen him once since she got her princess-cut boulder. Think she’ll let him out now?”

Good point. End of another conversation volley. Dylan: 0.

It was Brad’s serve. Silence sat down, hung around, watched the boats with us. And then finally, he said, “So, what do you do?”

“I’m a bridesmaid. Certified.”

He smiled his smile. Thank goodness. When you joke around as much as I do, you have a better-than-even chance of a flop. “Full-time?” he asked, eyebrows up.

“Nope. Believe it or not, it’s actually not much of a moneymaker. I have to sell stuff to support the habit.” I realized, all of a sudden, that I hate telling guys what I do. It was one of those midchat epiphanies I get sometimes. And midchat, I started to wonder why.

“Like what stuff?”

“Services.” It wasn’t the job I hated, so much. I was new at it but that wasn’t it. The real problem was trying to explain my industry to people who had no idea what the whole thing was about. It could get painful. They usually ended up saying something like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.”

“Are you makin’ me guess or somethin’? All right…I know. Wedding services? No, no. I got it. Dance lessons.”

At least he didn’t say peep show. “Professional.” Now comes the painful part.

“What kind?” he asked.

“Um…professional services.”

“Yes, Dylan, I got that part,” he laughed. “What…kind of…professional…services?” His slow Texas syllables got even slower. As though I was deaf. Or really stupid.

I didn’t want to get into all this. I wanted us to be on the same page. I can’t believe I said that. I hate that stupid expression. But I knew Manly Man wasn’t going to know about all this stuff and it was going to get embarrassing. For both of us. “How do you like Cupid’s Toes?” I asked.

One eyebrow shot up. I’d kill to be able to do that. Maybe I should start interpreting his eyebrows instead of his eyes.

“Your little cakes,” I answered the eyebrow.

“Dylan,” he said with a big, exasperated sigh. “This is real painful. Are you gonna tell me what you do or not?”

“I sell professional services. B-to-B. Um, that’s business-to-business—Internet logistics, human contact technologies. Stuff like collaborative browsing.” I waited for the zone-out.

“What? Like e-Boost?”

Okay, maybe someone else could have seen that coming. If I’d had any fillings, he’d have had a great view. It took me a while to get my jaw back in its socket. “That’s my company,” I said with a big, old, toothy grin. In the collaborative browsing world, happiness is being on the same page.

“Sales, huh? Seems like I’m remembering somebody told me you were a programmer or analyst. Designer or something like that. Something super…nerdy.” He gave me one of his scrumptious grins so I wouldn’t be offended. I pursed my lips and pretended to consider it. But I was really just thinking about his mouth.

And then I got the uneasy feeling that maybe he knew more about me than I knew about him. Like maybe that’s where he’d gotten the idea about thick glasses and stringy hair. Another midchat epiphany: Duh, Dylan. It’s the job, not the name. Damn. I’d rattled on about my name for no reason. Talk about paranoid. Get over the name thing, Dylan. Lots of people have weird names—Pawnee, Breeze Zed, not to mention Keanu and…Rats! What had my friends said about him? I couldn’t recall. Did he really bowl and skin opossums and pick his teeth with a knife? No clue.

He was waiting with Silence.

“Yeah, I was. All of the above. Except for the part about being nerdy.” I gave him a little stink eye for that. “In the business, we prefer to call it technical,” I informed him. He kept grinning at me, enjoying himself. “But I decided to get into sales instead. Something opened up and I went for it.”

“Why?” he asked.

I had to think a little about what to say in response. There was no way I was going to tell him the real reason.

“Money?” he guessed, while I was doing my pondering.

“No, not really.” I mumbled it.

“Did you like your job, like being…technical?” he asked. “Yeah. I did. It’s who I am.”

“Then why?” He really wanted to know. This was one of those first-date tests, I could tell. What if I did switch for the money, was he going to think less of me? Probably. And why did I care what he thought? Because I did. For some dumb reason, I cared a lot. And why do you suppose that is, Dylan? I asked myself. Because, I answered a bit testily, gravity is one hell of a force to resist, that’s why.

“If I tell you, could we talk about you for a while?” “Sure, if you want. Not much to tell.”

“Deal,” I said. “But you’re going to be sorry you asked, and, okay, here it is. I got out of development because I have a good friend, Rex, who’s one of the best technical guys I’ve ever seen and we were talking one day and he said if I wanted to be really good at it—I mean, really, really good—then I’d have to turn off certain areas of my brain so that more blood could flow to other parts, the analytical ones.”

His left eyebrow rose slowly toward his hairline.

I ignored it, took a breath and pushed on. “And the parts Rex was talking about shutting off were the social parts, the parts that care about other things besides geeky stuff, the parts that make normal people different from techies. I thought a lot about what Rex had said and I knew what he meant. And also knew he was right. But I couldn’t do it, didn’t want to do it—I like those social parts—so I got out.”

Both eyebrows were up. He just sat there looking pleased.

It was essentially the truth. My decision had been only a little bit about the money. Okay, maybe more than a little bit. But did I pass his test? I wanted to pass. I could tell he was getting ready to follow up with a whole barrage of other questions. I’d never been with a guy who wanted to talk about me so much. You think that’s what you want, what’ll make you really happy, but then it happens and it’s sort of weird. I cut him off before he could launch them. “Okay. It’s your turn. How did you know about e-Boost?”