This Is Not How It Happened

She walks into his apartment behind him, eyes adjusting from the dark of the front stoop as he flips on the light.

"This is it." He says. "Pretty small. Normally, I'd make some excuse about how it's not usually this messy, but this is pretty much how I keep the place..." he let's that last comment trail off and hang there, maybe a little nervous, but she doesn't notice. She's a little nervous herself, not entirely certain why she was there. He was nice enough, but not really what she was looking for. Not that she was looking for anything really. At any rate, it hadn't seemed to be one of those kinds of invites.

"Get you a drink?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Beer, wine, something stronger? Something weaker?"

"Just water's fine." In a strange man's apartment she began to second guess her decision to follow him home. She hoped he didn't turn out to be some kind of creep. She looked around trying to force herself feel comfortable in his place, trying to get a feel for him at the same time. She took in the couch, the dining table, the brightly lit kitchen he was now walking towards but she couldn't zero in on much of anything. It was neither like the pigsty of the last guy she'd mistakenly gone home with nor like the yuppie nightmare of leather and Crate&Barrel that young single men with extra money and little style of their own tended to go for. No, this was pretty much just a place. Nothing quite matched, but it all fit together OK. Nothing felt staged, but it wasn't in total disarray. Not much on the walls except some photos of friends or family and a couple pieces of pop-art she didn't recognize. There was nothing there for her to make sense of him, except maybe the small piles of books she began to notice, scattered throughout-- a couple stacks on the coffee table, one on the TV, some on the kitchen table, more on top of a shelf. Novels, short stories, non-fiction of a seemingly semi-political, leftist bent, a couple coffee table curio books, gifts maybe, a few history books, one on religion- mostly authors she didn't recognize, despite her voracious reading habit. She looked from stack to stack idly, thinking perhaps it was time to make some excuse and leave.

"You sure? I can make some tea if you're tired."

She looked up, a little surprised, at first she had expected him to argue with her over not having a drink. That was, after all, what he had invited her back here to do. Ostensibly at any rate. If she wouldn't do that, what else wouldn't she do? Men, always with their little schemes, always getting so bent out of shape when things don't go their way.

"Sure, tea would be nice." She could use the caffeine after all. It was getting close to last call back at the bar, and she'd been in bed by 9:30 most nights for the past three months. Not much of a social life anymore. God I feel old, she thought.

She put her bag down and sat on his couch that was, for some reason, smack in the middle of the living room at an odd angle to the walls. She considered asking him about his layout choice, it divided up the place strangely and made her feel a little dislocated at first, but once she sat down, she felt the dimensions of the room settle in around her. It was set up for comfort, not looks she supposed. Besides, it wasn't a conversation she was interested in having. She flipped through the first pile of books and paused at a compilation of comics from the New Yorker was in the middle of the stack-- a pretty good choice actually, and normally she'd have settled back and started read, but she didn't feel like getting comfortable yet. Instead she turned to the second stack, on top was a strange little book called Oaxaca Journal.

"What's this one about?" She asked.

"Ferns." Came his reply from the kitchen where she could hear him, just out of sight, filling a metal pan or kettle from the sink, then lighting up the gas range to set it to boil.

"You a plant lover? Why would you read a book on ferns?" It came out sounding a little more critical than she had expected, and she felt like a bitch for a moment, expecting him to hit back with something defensive, but when he popped his head around the corner he was smiling. He looked straight at her for a few seconds, like he was formulating a question, then stepped from the doorway of the kitchen back into the living room, without breaking eye contact. His expression shifted, turned inward and became distant as he searched for an answer."

"It's a good book." Was all he came back with, still smiling a little.

"A good book," she quipped, that note of criticism back in her voice, but feeling less guilt this time. What kind of answer was that? Was he being coy? She didn't want coy right now. Fuck coy, they all thought that crap was cute, but she was over it. Or maybe he was just that soda cracker boring that he didn't have a better answer in his head. He hadn't seemed that bad back at the bar...

He sat down next to her, a little closer than she would have liked, cutting off her line of thought.

"Yeah. A good book. I know it sounds really boring, but it's well written and it's full of interesting little facts about plants, people, history of the region. I guess I've got a bit of a head for that sort of stuff. It's written by an author I like a lot, he wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and that book Awakenings that they made into a movie-- did you see that movie?"

She shook her head.

"Anyway, he's a good author, kind of a fascinating guy, a neurologist. Most of his other books are about patients, people with disability, injuries, deafness, amnesia-- all quite fascinating. This is something completely different, but it's good. I know I keep saying that. Pretty generic, but it's hard to describe. I think he might be mildly autistic, certainly hugely nerdy and socially awkward... I used to be like that a little."

He smiled sheepishly. He was still a little like that.

"I just like seeing the world through his eyes. I like the way he can take the smallest thing and make it sad or a little sweet-- his friend's love of birdwatching, the conversations he has on airplanes. He makes me slow down a little, he makes me think about what I'm doing, makes me appreciate it better. I like those little moments in between, you know?" She nodded a little. "It's odd, sometimes people ask me what I do for fun-- you know when I'm not working-- and I don't have a very good answer for them, I mean I read a lot. I watch movies. I go to the gym. Obviously I go out for a drink or two every now and again." He started talking a little faster, his sentences blending into each other and he leaned in just a little but closer and smiled again as though laughing at himself. "And that doesn't sound interesting, does it? But the thing is, it is interesting. I mean, it is to me, in my head. While I do all those things, while any of us do the things we do-- the ordinary and little things-- we're filled with thought. We daydream. We compare. Memories are sparked. We Philosophize and so does he, and he does a wonderful job writing about it. I guess I just like the way he thinks." He was looking right at her when he finished and she wondered if this was some kind of pick-up line, some sort of literary I-want-to-fuck-you talk that was supposed to get her all riled up at his "depth" and right into bed, but he didn't have the sort of fake-intense look in his eyes, that sort of cultivated smoldering look she had seen on other men just before shutting down on them entirely. Besides, she was already affectively picked up, at his place on his couch waiting for tea.

"Does that make sense?" He asked, leaning back a little, giving her a little more space, "Am I sounding too corny?" This last said without a trace of false self-deprecation as though he was every-bit aware of her thought process, his eyes still on hers though, not embarrassed about what he'd said, just wanting to make sure she was OK with it.

She smiled a little, looked back at him and then-- and how much of this was real and how much was her own projections onto him it's still not clear-- she saw that he was maybe a little bit lonely too. Not desperate or sad, but maybe a little bored and fed up like her, maybe not so much with the expectations, just honestly wanting to have a little company and talk a bit over some tea.

The kettle whistled in the kitchen. He stood up to get it. Maybe he hates waking up alone too, she thought.

"I'll stay the night," she said, "but we won't have sex. Do you have anything for me to sleep in?"