Another cup of coffee.  The sun slanted down from somewhere to his right, down by the sea where it was born.  It didn't seem right that it should be born there before she arrived.  Not when her skin was so lovingly kissed by it, when her hair evoked its dying colors.  But that was the way of things; sometimes they didn't make sense, or at least, they were less beautiful than the world in his mind. Very often in fact.  That internal world had seemed doomed to never see the light of day, not in any tangible sense, until he'd come here on vacation.  A few trickles of something like creativity,devoid of the brilliance he knew he possessed, in a magazine, or a collection.  He needed someplace tropical, someplace that burned with heat and with...


Seven thirty five!  He couldn't see her yet, but she always passed at the same time.  He admired that like he admired everything about her.  He had questions, and invented answers to many of them.  Did she pass at the same time every day by the clock, or by her lover/father/child the sun? He'd only been coming to this cafe for a week and a half, so he imagined it could be either.  In the pages of his mind, though, it was clearly the latter.  She was not a thing of the modern world, of cogs and clockwork, telephones and radio.  She was an atavist of a pure pagan past, a sea nymph, a siren.

There!  Her gait was fluid, her hips rolled as she approached.  Her jeans a bright, vibrant blue that caressed her form like a jealous lover.  Her top today was daringly white, exposing her entire stomach and the sensual curve of the base of her ribcage.  It was just...just barely thick enough that he wondered if he could see through it?  We're those nipples, or just his lust tinged imagination?


Since he had begun to...await her here, he tried several ways to attract her attention.  A pose with his journal, eyes seemingly fixed on its pages, pen in hand poised with the tension of an arrow at the string.  Shrouded by a cloud of clove scented tobacco smoke.  Once he had invited a lovely young woman to sit with him, bought her a meal and told her a witticism at just the moment the girl passed by.  They both laughed, but out of the corner of his eye he could tell her head did not turn even the slightest.  She was a work of perfection!


She saw him.  Of course she saw him!  Decadent raven hair down to his shoulders, piercing pale eyes and a visage fit to have been carved on the sarcophagus of a long dead king.  Finely tailored clothes and finely tailored manners, a stately height even when lounging, seated, at the Cafe's patio.  Several times (Three times, he knew.  Several, he thought, but he knew, a record burned in his memory of her every movement, her slightest deviation from the routine) she had waved, nodded, called out in her barbaric but beautiful tongue to another on the street.  She saw their faces, their glances...so of course she saw him.  Of course.

She seemed to ignore him.  That meant she wanted him to think she did, wanted him to try harder, to prove to her what they both already knew: that he was worthy of her acknowledgement, of her approval.  Her affections.  Ah, what a vain little peacock she was!  And yet he loved her for that as well.


When she passed and he could see her no more, he would write.  Frantic and sweating, now heaving gasps of humid air, and now forgetting to breathe because mere oxygen was not the life of a true artist, an artist inhaled beauty and exhaled wonderment.


He wrote of love and pain as he imagined what it would be like to wriggle her willing hips out of her jeans.  He made allusion to the stars and the sea as he imagined the taste of her diamond hard nipples painted with fresh salty sweat and the soft, welcome bite of his teeth.  How she would sigh, when he slid home into her, and how she would cover his neck and face with passionate kisses while declaring her desire for him to never leave in a language he could barely understand.

Blood dripped onto the page and he merely took it and dragged it into shapes and meanings that were true and pleasing.  Sweat also dripped onto the page, in a less artistic and more literal sense.  The process if creation that went on in her wake was suffused with bodily fluids, and more than once he had to sit, spent, exhausted, and trembling with the ink dry in his book but the damp, sticky patch in his lap still needed a few more cups of dark, bitter brew before he could rise and stagger back to his hotel.


Today he was determined to smile.  He wore a brand new hat, a dusky indigo with a blood red band.  It was too small for his head.  The haberdasher assured him in broken, beautifully accented English that this was just the style.  Was it too small? It is supposed to be that size, Senhor! It is to show off the finest features of a man, his poise, his posture, his face.  A slovenly man, barely a man at all, might slouch his way down the boulevard with his cap swaying and skewing like a boat in a storm, but not a fine, handsome specimen such as his customer!  But would it not threatened to blow away in a strong sea breeze?  Again Senhor pointed out its fine qualities!  For he was quite right, quite right that it seemed that it would, did it not? So what did it say about the man who wore such a beautiful but ephemeral accessory?  That he was a man of taste and means, but one who was...what was the word...free of spirit.  He loved things that were beautiful and costly, but he was not shackled by the material like so many wealthy men.  Also a discreet clip like so greatly reduced such an unfortunate event from harming his investment...

So he sat in the morning sun, his left leg folded over his right, his open journal in one hand, his cup of steaming coffee in the other.  In such a position, he could not, obviously, wave.  No, waving would be too familiar. She wanted him to wave, of course, it would set her maidenly heart racing and quicken her step into a girlish skip...but this was the game they played with each other.  He could not be too free with his admiration, not until she signaled her own intent.  No, he smiled.  Bright, even, warm, inviting, ~~predatory~~ charming. She pretended to take no notice, but he knew her well enough to detect the flush in her skin.  She was flattered, she was set alight.  She was probably achingly moist.


She walked by without a turn of the head.  He, of course, pivoted over the back of the chair to watch her recede into the distance, her shapely form swaying in a display just for him.  His cup trembled and he nearly spilled coffee on his lap.  He looked down...ah, wait.  He must have.  Coffee.