Progressing right along

"We need a strategy." Babs was speaking with both palms on the cafe table which meant two things:


a) she meant business; and
b) she meant business.


"Is this about the love coach thing again? It took me three emails to explain myself of that one," Greta's cackle displaced the air of seriousness Babs had sought to instill. She sat back with a sigh as Lucy returned with their drinks.


"No love coaches - look I have to stop screwing Richard, you need to move on from Eliot and you," Babs said looking at Lucy who was in the process of slurping the whipped cream off her Irish coffee. "What's up with you anyway?"


Lucy's eyes rolled up to meet theirs. "Me? Nothing. Finished another chapter of the thesis last week, my supervisor is supposed to get it back to me by Tuesday, Jason tried to email me and I think my fridge may be broken again-"


"Jason? Wasn't he that-" Greta began.


"Loser? Yes. It's nothing, anyway let's talk about something else." Lucy put her coffee down. "Babs what's up with you and Richard? Plus - have you called that number that was written on your back yet?"


"No," Babs looked a little dejected. "I really don't want to strike up a conversation with some douche bag stranger who wrote on my back when I was drunk."


"But what about those long johns?" Greta asked, tracing her finger in a sugar pile on the table. "did you ever figure out how you go those?"


"The ones you bought me?" Babs raised an eyebrow "no. And what about that page you received two weeks ago? Did you find out who that was?"


"No I never called them back," Greta admitted, snapping open her purse to fish out her pager. She scrolled through the numbers until she came up with the odd one she'd never returned. "Must be a wrong number." The only thing was, the person had now paged Greta 5 times. It was getting annoying and she'd said as much earlier in the week to Babs in an email.


"Well how about we make a deal, if you-" Babs began but was interrupted by Lucy. "Oh my god!" Babs jumped a few inches off her chair and Greta whipped her head around. While they did this, Lucy quickly slid under the table.


"What's wrong?" Babs asked Lucy's empty chair before realising her friend had disappeared.


"Don't look at me!" hissed Lucy. As she did so, a tall man with long dark hair in a faded leather jacket walked past their table. Greta didn't catch a look at his face, neither did Babs. Lucy did.


"What's going on?" Greta asked Lucy, looking at Babs.


"That's the guy whose Metallica shirt I stole!" Lucy muttered.


"It is?" Babs asked excitedly, turning to check the guy out. She couldn't see him though, he was ordering at the counter and his back was turned to them. Babs thought he had a really nice ass though.

"Who?" Greta asked almost simultaneously, straining to get a look.

"Don't look at him! Wait until he leaves!" Lucy shifted at their feet, her voice a little desperate.

"This is ridiculous," Greta said, toeing Lucy under the table. "Why are you hiding from him?"


"I don't know," Lucy admitted. "But please just let him leave."


The three of them sat (albeit one of them under the table) and waited until the man received his coffee to go, turned and walked past their table and out the door. As he passed Greta smiled at him and he smiled back. Lucy's breath caught from her vantage point under the table, he was even more beautiful than she'd remembered.


Babs quickly rose after he went out the door and left herself.


"Where's she going - ouch!" Lucy got up too quickly and hit her head on the the table.


Greta grabbed for the coffees that were slopping over "I don't know. So who was that guy?"

"Just a one night stand, you know from that night we all went out after my faculty party. I stole his shirt and never called him, never even told him my name."

"And that's why you were hiding from him? Because you stole his shirt?"

Lucy let her head fall back, and closing her eyes she said "no, because for once I never told my name and I didn't ask his. I didn't give away anything, and I didn't ask for anything in return. I left no opportunity for disappointment."

Greta was silent for a moment and sipped her coffee "sounds like the end of a Margaret Atwood novel."

Lucy laughed "that's true, plus I did steal his shirt."

A minute later Babs returned, red faced from the cold and smiling. "I followed him a couple of blocks. As far as I can tell he lives around the corner and I can show you where."

"Babs!" Lucy cried sitting up "what if he saw you?"


"He didn't," Babs assured her, sliding back into her chair and picking up her coffee. "But this changes everything. Suddenly this deal has gotten a lot more interesting for all three of us. I have a strategic plan and it involves all of us taking a big fat risk."

Running

Greta is going to pass this test, and then she is going to start paying attention to people again. Instead of spending all her "free" time running and thinking (latently, too-lately) about comebacks against that snarky gyne-onc fellow who's been on her case all rotation. She's running running running, and doesn't feel much at all.

Babs at work

It had been a week since Babs and Greta had talked in that small cafe and two since Babs had woken up with a hangover to kill and a mysterious message written across her back. She had yet to call the number and she still had no idea who J.W. was. At the moment though, none of those things mattered as Babs stared at the huge pile of case law she had to read in the next two days. It took her roughly an hour to read 10 pages and fully understand them so at this rate... Babs lifted the pile of paper at its middle half-heartedly then let it drop.

She'd be here until midnight both nights.

Grimacing at the tiny words written about a boring topic, Babs jumped when someone knocked at her door. It was Richard. She could tell it was him out of the periphery of her eye as he tended to fill the doorway - especially when he wore his robes as he did now.

"Were you just in court?" Babs asked him, trying to keep her voice level. She hated that even now, after an affair of nearly three months with this man, he still set her on edge. She turned in her chair after she'd said this.

Richard nodded. It wasn't that he was extraordinarily good looking. He was smart but not that smart - and not as smart as Babs for that matter. It was that he was... confident. Confident and tall and slightly condescending. Babs was putty in his hands and she hated it. "Thought you'd be there. You could have learned a thing or two."

Babs scowled at him turning back to her work, "my loss. I'm busy - did you want something?"
She felt rather then saw him approach. And as he did so, she heard her office door click shut behind him. He stood directly over her without touching her, saying nothing. The tension was unbearable. Babs did not turn around nor did she say anything. Eventually she felt his hands on her neck, pulling her head back...

Later, after he'd left, Babs waited a respectable time before making her way to the bathroom. There was a private one on the third floor and at this point she knew the most discrete path to get there. Looking in the mirror in the tiny, windowless room Babs checked to see if her mascara was smeared and it was then that she took a good long look at her 29 year old face. Every line, every mark, every uneven feature stared back under the florescent light. And of course, she started to cry. She didn't know where it came from but she clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle the sobs that rippled out of her body. She lost track of how long she stood there, one hand on the sink for support, the other covering her mouth, staring into the mirror and crying. Every now and then someone knocked but she chose to ignore it.

Eventually she sat down on the toilet and forced herself to calm down. Deep breaths. And then she stood, splashed water on her face, fixed her mascara and went back to her desk.

She'd be here until at least 2 am now. Damn him, Babs thought, this was the last time.

The last time I saw Richard

"I don't know how it started - actually no, that's a lie I do know. It was when I first saw him. He was doing a public speaking engagement about ethics and the law. He was so callous, so funny, so-"

"Tall?"

Babs laughed taking a sip of her wine. "Yeah, that too."

"Go on." Greta tried to hide her yawn behind the back of her hand. She looked like a child that was overtired but didn't want to go bed. It was quiet, warm and dark in the small cafe they'd found near Trinity Bellwoods. It was also crammed with people caught between afternoon and evening, too cold to wander and too far from downtown to go home. The waitress in the place moved carefully to avoid the winter coats piled up on the backs of chairs.

"Well anyway, after I was hired things between us were always friendly. I'm sure he knew how I felt but it wasn't until the Christmas party that things started to happen between us."

"Wait that was when?" Greta was rummaging through her bag now, trying to find her buzzing pager.

"Late November. So I guess it's been a couple of months now - do you have to go?"

Greta was frowning at the page number - she didn't recognize it. Could someone page you long distance? And who had her pager number except her colleagues at work? "No I - I'm not on call. This is probably a mistake." Still, she pulled out a pen and scribbled the number down on her cocktail napkin for future inspection.

"'This is probably a mistake' - I think that's what I said the first time we got together," Babs smiled faintly. "So how do I correct it?"

Greta shrugged and drained her glass.

Somewhere else in the city, Lucy ate her fried egg with some freezer burnt wonder bread, Jason the metal head did a line of coke off his dirty living room coffee table, the lawyer Babs was fucking took out the garbage, and the garbage Greta had neglected to take out began to stink up her apartment.

Elsewhere in the city, a tall lean man with long dark hair was wondering where his favorite shirt went to, J.W. sighed and rolled over in his sleep, and from her desk in the emergency ward at Mt. Sinai, the nurse who had given Greta's pager number away to a complete stranger, could see that it was starting to snow.

Jager-filled dreams

Lucy blinked and looked again. The tag line actually said "do you like Metallica and shit?" Right, her eyes were playing tricks on her - or maybe it was the state of her computer screen after she'd spilled juice all over it 6 months ago.

Lucy sat back in her chair, thinking about the last Metallica guy she'd gone for. She'd justified the pursuit with the conclusion that all those years of singing "Master of Puppets" at the top of her lungs while making scrambled eggs on Saturday mornings had to count for something. The truth was, Lucy had always loved the dirtbags. She couldn't help herself. There was something spectacularly seductive about a greasy ponytail and tight jeans.

For their first date, they had met at a heavy metal bar. Jason wasn't quite as hard-core as she would have liked him to be (no Pantera armband on his jean jacket, no tattoos on his knuckles), but he did have an air of heavy metal about him, with his longish hair and guitar calloused fingers.

They spent the night drinking Jagermeister and talking about a wide variety of topics. Lucy almost punched him during their discussion about Russian literature (she not being a fan and Jason being a groupie of the gulag), but all in all it was a very successful date.

The only problem was that at the end of that night, Lucy, in a drunken horny haze, grabbed Jason and kissed him. She just couldn't handle the sexual tension any longer. It's not that he didn't respond, or that the kiss was bad (in fact it was very hot and Lucy had felt slightly quivery every time she thought about it), it was just that Jason didn't call her for several days after that date.

She had spent that time, as so many women do, wondering if her forwardness wasn't the reason why. She feared she was falling back into that familiar position as an emasculating/horny feminist and she'd asked herself why this always happened and why couldn't she keep her hands to herself for once?

As the silence between her and Jason grew, she knew she couldn't be the one to call him. She couldn't be the one doing ALL the work. She just had to wait patiently for him to make a move. It was imperative that his balls stay intact at this point...

Ghah! Lucky clicked on the email, trying to wipe the rest of that memory away. Jason had ended badly, with bad sex, some lame exchange of vague promises and an early morning exit.

The screen loaded up with pictures of the prospective candidate.

It was fucking Jason.

Jesus christ. Lucy closed her laptop and went to go fry an egg. Thank god she hadn't posted a picture. But then again, he was so stupid he might have sent the email anyway.

And what's that Lucy up to anyway?

Lucy stepped into her tiny kitchen and began putting away the 17 dollars worth of groceries from the Lucky Charm Mini-mart near her apartment. It was always a gamble grocery shopping at the Lucky Charm; you never knew when the store would have fresh vegetables or just rotting heaps of things no longer recognizable. Remarkably the prices, though always varying, never appeared to reflect the quality of the produce but rather the particular mood of the store's owner.

Today's spoil included milk, carrots, lettuce, almonds, some sort of chutney to add to her collection and "damn!" Lucy swore. "I forgot the filters." Another week of carefully reusing her last coffee filter stretched out in front of her.

She sat down at her kitchen table and clipped open her laptop - why had she said that out loud? There was no one here but her. This thought, coupled with the muffled laughter coming through the walls of her apartment, guided Lucy's mouse arrow to the online dating site she'd been trying to avoid. On line dating had been nothing short of a disaster for Lucy. Amongst the few non-55 year old 5"4 men from Mississauga who consistently sent her pictures of themselves and their compact cars, had been Giles who'd been gay, Chris who'd also been gay, Dan the 24 year old asshole, Phil who had been married, and her latest disaster: Mick who'd broken her heart and sent her into a downward spiral of depression and binge drinking within 36 hours of meeting him.

She could see that her account, untouched for the past two weeks, had one new message waiting for her. She blinked several times, reading the tag line of the person over and over, it said "Do you have my Metallica T-shirt?"

Life goes on in Boyland

"JW? No I don't think so. Oh wait a sec I want to get some zucchini."

"What? It's November they don't have zucchini - if they do they probably got it from Loblaws." Babs stood with her arms folded in the middle of the farmers market in Trinity Bellwood park. Only in Toronto would there be a farmer's market in a downtown park at 730 pm on a Tuesday, in winter. Greta, having just worked an 18 hour shift, still wanted to go and was currently molesting some potatoes, her fingerless gloves she used for smoking out the back of the hospital, also handy in this situation.

"Anyway can't you think of someone? Who writes a note on someone's back?" Greta rummaged through her handbag that looked like it could hold roughly half the contents of the entire market if she wanted it to.

"No," Babs said a little miserably. Looking around her she saw nothing but hipster families. Tall skinny men with curvy wives and stylish children - it all made her sick.

"Anyway, how's work?"

"It's fine, I spent 13 hours yesterday trying to understand aboriginal treaty law. I think I know less now than I did when I started - are you going to buy those or not?"

Greta dropped the potato back onto the frost-bitten pile with a sigh. "Nah - let's go get a drink. Lucy told me you're doing some married guy and I wana hear about it on my one night off this week."