12/10/2023 0 Comments Whiskey bent hat co![]() He greeted her without ceremony, as though he saw her every day, and took her inside to choose some snacks. At first, she deflected this with another joke, because she really did have to study, but he said, “No, I’m serious, stop fooling around and come now,” so she put a jacket over her pajamas and met him at the 7-Eleven. Then, one night during reading period, she was complaining about how all the dining halls were closed and there was no food in her room because her roommate had raided her care package, and he offered to buy her some Red Vines to sustain her. She still didn’t know much about him, because they never talked about anything personal, but when they landed two or three good jokes in a row there was a kind of exhilaration to it, as if they were dancing. A few times, she got distracted for a day or so and wondered if the exchange would die out altogether, but then she’d think of something funny to tell him or she’d see a picture on the Internet that was relevant to their conversation, and they’d start up again. Soon she noticed that when she texted him he usually texted her back right away, but if she took more than a few hours to respond his next message would always be short and wouldn’t include a question, so it was up to her to re-initiate the conversation, which she always did. He was very clever, and she found that she had to work to impress him. ![]() “Concession-stand girl, give me your phone number,” he said, and, surprising herself, she did.įrom that small exchange about Red Vines, over the next several weeks they built up an elaborate scaffolding of jokes via text, riffs that unfolded and shifted so quickly that she sometimes had a hard time keeping up. “I’m up for a promotion, so,” she said.Īfter the movie, he came back to her. “You managed not to insult me this time.” “You’re getting better at your job,” he told her. “O.K., then.” He pocketed his change.īut the next week he came into the movie theatre again, and bought another box of Red Vines. Or, if he did, he showed it only by stepping back, as though to make her lean toward him, try a little harder. Robert did not pick up on her flirtation. But he was on the heavy side, his beard was a little too long, and his shoulders slumped forward slightly, as though he were protecting something. He was tall, which she liked, and she could see the edge of a tattoo peeking out from beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. Not so cute that she would have, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed up an imaginary crush on him if he’d sat across from her during a dull class-though she was pretty sure that he was out of college, in his mid-twenties at least. She didn’t earn tips at the movie theatre, but the job was boring otherwise, and she did think that Robert was cute. Flirting with her customers was a habit she’d picked up back when she worked as a barista, and it helped with tips.
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