fiction?

reality meets fiction in the brain. they fret and fidget like two devils in a cage. outcome? fiction.

she looks over her shoulder into his eyes. she sees a glimmer of what she'd been hoping to see. secretly hoping to see. she does not tell anyone. a secret is a secret. the eyes look away once they've noticed that she's noticed. when they look back at her they're glazed again, with the look of studied blank polite indifference. her mind twitches painfully. it was her imagination - but no- it was not. he does what she does. all the time. she veils admiration, she sweeps it away from her eyes from her mouth from anything outwardly visible. and wears safe polite friendliness. but eyes speak out on their own, sometimes. she's faltered and he falters now. she lets her dark eyes settle over, into his blue ones. books describe moments suspended in time. they say everything around you fizzles into background noise. but she felt the fat beads of sweat meander down her neck. she felt the humidity heavy around her. she saw the smoke emanating from her cigarette. it made its way towards him and spiralled into his smoke as he took another puff. he makes her want to smoke because it's sexy to smoke. a cigarette. she thinks about how ridiculous how ridiculously ridiculous that is. how she pretended to fumble with his lighter until he took it from her, cranked it open in one fluid motion and met her halfway, crossing fragments of conversation to reach her tilted neck and slanted eyes. now, she looks at him, armed with her cigarette. she lets him see that he puzzles her. she asks him with her eyes. he responds briefly into hers. she feels him leaning imperceptively in her direction, ever so slightly. she is sure she got to him. people rarely talk without words unless they are mute. that was not a joke, they really do not. for her a beautiful poem does not need words. words have a way of breaking poetry. he glances at her, stuck. she sees that he's struggling his shyness. he stubs his cigarette while looking at her still. she feels she is on the hills of a western movie and could have sworn somebody spat a piece of chewed tobacco at that very moment. and yes, her heart sped and skipped. she had been so sure it would never do that again. never, and she had told everyone who was close to her, had asserted in dramatic overtones that her heart had been baptized into steel.
it skipped again as his eyes were silent with something, maybe a silent question as they gazed at her.
the fact that her heart did that funny little beat, scared her.
she broke the silence with a word.
'what?' she threw at him.
and he responded with words.
she saw herself scolding herself, shaking her head in exasperation. she did not understand. no, she did. that funny little beat had really scared her.
his words, of course, were polite. 'excuse me?' he said.
behind his veil, there was a hint of understanding, though.