High on Her

I sat on her couch. She handed me a pill. I watched her swallow hers before I swallowed mine. She dimmed the lights in her living room and lit a couple of candles. She put on a Rufus Du Sol playlist. I watched every movement she made with great intrigue. I rubbed the tops of my kneecaps with my sweaty palms. She looked at me from across the room. She lifted the corners of her lips. I tightened my abs. She came over and sat in my lap.

“Give it a couple of minutes and it’ll kick in,” she said. “Have I steered you wrong yet?”

“No! Not yet, at least!”

I hesitated then mischievously questioned her.

“What do we do until then?”

She snickered. I smiled. Her snicker disappeared. My grin did not.

“I have a couple of ideas!”

She was straightforward in her response. I interrogated her.

“What’s the first one to hit your brain?”

I thought I was being clever by my follow up. She pretended to think for a couple of serious seconds.

“Let’s play a board game!”

Her response rattled me. I think, she is joking. She was not. I wanted to reply in a way that would not make me seem like the typical male and sabotage my future advances.

“As long as it’s not Jumanji, we should be fine!”

I acted interested.

“Which one did you have in mind?”

She smiled at my crummy improv. She burned a hole through my stiff composure. It slowly melted away like dying snowflakes. She threw a couple of stones at me. I flaked away like creme filling that had been sitting underneath a hot summer sun.

“You are a bad liar! I saw the disappointment wash over your face as soon as I mentioned a board game! You ought to see yourself! Sheez!”

She giggled at her joke. I raised the corners of my lips and shook my head in agreement with her. It was time to turn our little game back in my favor.

“Well, I’m glad I’m that transparent!”

I put my hands on her hips and dug in with my fingers.

“Since you are a psychic and all the formalities are out of the way, and since we’re being honest with one another right now,”

I cleared my throat and prepared for my grand entrance,

“how about you tell me the first thing that honestly popped into your head when I asked you what you wanted to do and, let’s be real, it wasn’t a board game!”

She neared my face. She smiled. I smiled. Her smile made out with my smile and conquered it into submission. She waddled around in my lap and unsaddled herself from me. She walked to her coffee table and knelt down. When she stood up, she was holding two boxes in her hand.

“I wish you were right, there, handsome, but,”

she revealed the things she retrieved,

“you are not! Scattergories or Yahtzee! You pick! It’s the least I could do considering which brain you are currently thinking with at the moment!”

Her eyes met mine. She turned me on in more ways than just one. She had not changed a single thing about herself since the time we had our first in-depth conversation! Even though we were about to get an acquired buzz from the pills we had just swallowed, I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t high already!

I was high on her and had been since the first time I laid eyes on her!

* * * * * * * * * *

She worked as a waitress at a fancy cafe near my house. It was a ritzy kind of eatery in the historic part of town. They were open from early morning to late at night and served coffee, sandwiches, local brews, and well-plated, pricey dishes. A crowd of people always convened there. The restaurant had a reputation as being one of the most popular eateries in a thirty mile radius because of the atmosphere, food, and service.

Long story short, which does our narrative no justice at all, I was seated at a table outside on the patio. She was working that specific area on that glorious night. I was writing in a journal of mine.

It was the beginning of fall and the temperature outside was perfect for jeans, sandals, and a shirt with rolled up long sleeves and a couple of buttons undone up top. She came to my table and introduced herself and, for a moment, I let her stand there. Our eyes met in that one inevitable moment that words cannot describe. I had to look away.

The local guys and out-of-towners, who thought they were the cream of the crop, practiced their overcompensated one liners with her. They deflected off her guarded exterior like a bowling ball bouncing off a fully inflated hot air balloon. She was not rude, by no means, but she did stand her ground professionally. She had nine hundred and seventy-three other places she wanted to be, and the last thing she had time for was to be hit on by another countless over-confidant male.

I had always wondered why guys thought the need to practice their jive with waitresses, bartenders, nurses, cashiers, secretaries, and other blue collar connoisseurs. I know it is what society defines as customer service interaction, yet it seemed like an overreach for some of the more non-clever patrons and a fake, exhausted role for the ones who have to service that said patron to take on. Some people get off on this certain robotic menagerie, I understand, yet, when she approached me and we looked into each other’s eyes for the first time, something happened.

Something magnetic.

Gravity pulled us together and, as we all know, gravity is the strongest of nature’s forces. At least, that is what we have all been taught to believe.

“What can I start you out with?”

I shut my journal and left the pen inside. I smiled without looking at her and picked up my menu. She put her hands on her hips, shook her head, and faked a grin. I quickly scanned the select items. I already knew what I wanted, but I stuck to playing my role. She was impatiently patient with me.

“I was thinking of starting with a good, local IPA, if there is one. What would you suggest?”

I looked at her then quickly broke eye contact. She stepped closer to me and scanned my menu with her pen. I watched as she did this. I ignored where she was pointing and tried to pick up any scent she was giving off, no matter how creepy it may have seemed to all of the voyeurs around me. Her pen stopped and tapped the name of a locally brewed beer. I could not quit staring at her face. She caught me and rolled her eyes. She blushed and backed away from me. I still did not look at the menu.

“That one is our best, in my opinion!”

Our eyes met again. I studied the deepness of her eyes, the curvature of her lips, the texture of the skin on her face and arms, the outline of her nose, and the fabric of her hair and eyebrows. I responded without thinking.

“Sounds great!”

She made a clicking sound with her tongue, gave me a two thousand mile stare, and put her hands back on her hips.

“You didn’t even look to see what I picked! You were too busy staring at me!”

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders.

“Why should I look if I trust your judgment?”

She closed her eyes. She bit the corner of her lower lip. She shook her head and jotted my order on her notepad.

“Hmm! Okay! So you want one Bitches Brew? Really?”

She had been testing me, even while I tested her. Two games were transpiring simultaneously, same rules but different boards.

“Bitches Brew it is! Sounds very low key and delightful. Great suggestion! Thank you so much! You are so helpful!”

She giggled at my sarcasm. I was winning where others had failed and it was simply because I was being myself and not putting on another countless re-run for her to watch and be a part of. She replied with sarcasm.

“Anytime! You know how to treat yourself, huh?”

She smiled. I smiled. She tapped her pen on her pad. She pretended to write something. I made eye contact and did not back away this time. She looked tired and that was okay. I kept her on her toes.

“Well, why eat anywhere else when the atmosphere is so exceptional here?”

She scoffed. I grinned. I knew she was busy and had other patrons to wait on, yet I wanted to be selfish with her since this was not my first time having her as my waitress.

“The service must be good considering how often you eat here.”

She was onto me. Something tried to tell me that she had been holding off on this invasive maneuver of calling me out for quite some time by making the first move. Me, well, I had extreme amounts of patience and had been building up to this moment in time and space.

“I think you meant to say food and not service, right? The food must be good considering how often I eat here?”

She shook her head and grinned.

“Oh, my apologizes! Wow! Okay! I see how it is considering it seems like I’m always your waitress!”

I smiled at her sassiness. She had been hustling about so much that she had started to sweat. I admired the wetness her body was pushing out. Girl’s sweat always starts at the base of their hair first. It saturates where their bejeweled, golden crown should sit, glazes it in oily fashion, and mats everything around it. The sweat makes them shine and glisten in whatever light currently exists, if any. The glossy layer carries over to their skin, and most women, most being the key word, look like an oiled Caribbean princess.

“Apology accepted! Everyone is allowed at least one mistake in life, right?”

She tapped her foot on the brick layered ground. She shook her head left to right. She was dumbfounded by this exchange. She was getting bothered but in a good way, the kind of way that makes a girl shake her head left to right while smiling.

“What would you like to go with your Bitches Brew?”

She smiled and referenced the only joke she had on me at the moment. It was a weak offense but I allowed it anyway. She knew I was pitying her advance.

“Surprise me!”

She bit her lip again and nodded her head. I had dropped my defenses long enough for her to quickly slip in. It was the least I could do considering I had the upper hand.

“You’re going to hate it!”

She smiled. I smiled. She had, in turn, dropped her defenses like I had.

“Oh, I know! I wouldn’t expect anything less!”

She placed her hands back on her hips. She was enjoying our petty back and forth. I had waited some time for this verbal foreplay, and I knew she was going to make me pay for this at some future point in time. I could tell she was intrigued. For her, it was different and made her comfortably restless and not bored.

“I’ll be back with your drink!”

She smiled, took my menu, and snapped back one more time.

“I can see why you’re eating alone tonight! I hope you don’t treat all the ladies like this!”

I grinned and slightly blushed.

“No dear, only you!”

She placed the menu under her arm.

“Oh, lucky me, huh? Thanks!”

She giggled. I chuckled. Even while she waited on the other tables out on the patio on that packed Friday evening, she would glance in my direction. I would look up from my journal, make a face while sipping my disgusting IPA she had chosen for me, and catch her wandering glances. She was drawn to the person I was. I was already drawn in to finding out as much about her as I possibly could.

We would later exchange numbers and follow that with a long list of spectacular dates.

We were instantly hooked on one another.

That was that.

* * * * * * * * * *

By the time the pills kicked in and we hit her bowl a couple of times, we had abandoned the board games. I had won the battle but did not make a big deal out of it.

The candles flickered. The Rufus Du Sol playlist continued to fill the airwaves with electronic beats. The lights had been turned off, and she had plugged in her colorful LED lights she had attached to the crown molding around her ceiling. Everything about her felt like home, and our buzz only enhanced this nostalgia.

We wrapped our now naked bodies in a fuzzy blanket I bought her for her birthday. I was sitting upright on her couch, and she was sitting in my lap, facing me. We would kiss, make a wisecrack joke about one another, and slowly go back to kissing one another while wearing smiles as big as the sun. When our bodies touched, the cold pieces rubbed the warm pieces and made us jump and push them together so we could exchange our body heat.

She broke away from me and closed her eyes while arching her back. She brought her nose to mine and asked me the two point seven million dollar question.

“What makes me so crazy about you?”

I rolled my eyes to their corners and pretended to think. I acted as though the answer had just popped into my head while I sat there.

“I guess it would have something to do about that Bitches Brew you ordered for me that time!”

It took a second for the joke to settle in her brain. The buzz that was slowly enveloping our bodies made my one liner even more delightful to her. She slapped me on my shoulder and bit my neck. The one good thing about her was that she had not lost her feistiness. I made her happy. She made me happy.

Why forget who we were while transitioning into who we currently are and wanted to be in the future?

“At least the service was just as good as the food, huh?”

She had remembered. She took my breath away for the three hundredth time that day. I rubbed both of my thumbs over her cheeks and ran the tips of my fingers through her hair. She was lightly sweating. I massaged behind her ears and the base of her neck. I slowly brought her face closer to mine.

“It was never about the food, darling.”

I kissed each one of her cheeks and rubbed the tip of my nose across hers.

“It was only about the service!”

I could see water build in her eyes before she buried her face onto my shoulder. Her left hand ran over my right shoulder blade and her right hand ran through my hair. She pressed her naked body against mine and sat there, content, without saying a single word. Each time my heart beat, her body felt it. Each time her heart beat, my body felt it. We had never been this happy in our entire life and nothing was going to stand in our way.

People can say alcohol, pot, and pills are their desired ways of getting off in this world, and that’s okay if that is your thing, but for me it goes far beyond a chemical reaction that only last hours at a time. One thing remains true, and I will continue to believe this until the day I die.

The strongest drug in existence, whether you want to admit it or not, is one thing and one thing alone.

Another human being.

My addiction was something different, and I planned on self medicating for as long as she would let me keep her in my system. I planned on getting high on her, every single day, until the supply ran out.

Only one question remained: when would that happen, if ever?

I guess there was only one way for me to find out!

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– Personal Playlist Jam below –

– Enjoy –

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