What he said was, "I've never really been a respecter of persons, as it were." He had meant to say, "I just want to stay here with you, just the two of us. I want to make love to you several more times before the weekend is over. I don't want you to leave." That's what he had meant to say, but he had never been able to say real things of a certain ilk. It was a part of his pattern. She was talking excitedly about someone, some guy who was speaking at some meeting this evening. She was drying the shower water from her fair skin and talking excitedly about things that had nothing to do with him, about some meeting he was learning to hate.
"A respecter of persons?" she asked. "What does that mean?"
"Like experts and such," he answered, flushing red in his cheeks with dismay at his impending loss of her. "I don't believe in them."
"This guys isn't like that," she said, pulling her bra over her arms and the slipping straps down onto her shoulders. She adjusted everything into place and then turned for him to work the fastener. "This guy is really revolutionary. I think you'd like him."
A lump rose in his throat as he fumbled with the hooks, not wanting to clasp them together. "I don't know," he muttered. She was leaving and he wanted to scream. He was fairly certain he hated the revolutionary speaker intensely.
Later that afternoon, when she was gone and he was lying broken in his bed, he decided to hate her. This was the type of bullshit he always did to himself and to everyone who cared about him. He didn't have to do it, but it was his pattern. It was what he did. It would be years yet and he would have to travel thousands of miles before he met the crisis that would finally break his pattern of pointless hate. After that, so many years from now, when he stopped crying and began learning to live again, he would think of her. She would be the first person to come to his mind.
Hello, friends. How are you today?
Later. Love.
