The Reason

I thought I was a real hard ass, I got to everyone. I knew how to get under your skin and I always knew how to swoon a girl so that she would fall right onto her back in my bed and I took everything away from her including her dignity and when she was sleeping, whatever I found in her wallet. Girl’s weren’t hard to get in my book. I had a formula down.
1) Meet a girl at some shitty ass bar or dive
2) Buy her a few drinks, make her forget my name
3) Make a move on her, touch her hands, touch her thighs, compliment her hair.
4) Start telling her how fucking beautiful she was. Girl’s love hearing how pretty they are. It works every time, tell her how fucking pretty she is.
5) Make sure she’s really good and buzzed. Don’t give them your real name either. I told them my name was like Nick or Jeff or something. Filthy names they shouted out in bed.
6) When you get her back to your place, you better make sure you have some sheets you don’t care about on because if you’ve made it this far, this chick is not the most well rounded.
It was a total formula and I used it every time. Girl’s sitting alone at diners, girls stranded on the strip, girls who would show up at a bar just to have a few drinks. Ha, bachelorette parties are the best. Those girls are as brittle as sugar glass when their friends are getting married. They always need a shoulder to cry on. That’s why I didn’t own any fucking white shirts. White shirts were for the weak. I had girl’s crying on me all night. Yeah, if I was really lucky I got puked on too. That shit stains. No I stuck to black V-necks. Before V-necks were cool. I’m no hipster but I didn’t wear V-necks because it was the latest style at Pac Sun or Abercrombie. I used V-necks because it makes you look vulnerable. If you’re playing cards and your opponent can see your neck, they think you’re vulnerable. Like you don’t know what you’re doing. And a hickey or two is always the latest accessory in my business.
Meeting him didn’t have any formula at all. None of my tricks worked on him like they had worked on these chicks. I guess it was because he wasn’t a bitch. He wasn’t a chick looking for a quick hookup.

/“What’s a guy like you doing out here?” I snarled, pulling a cigarette from my leather jacket and placing it between my lips. I patted my pockets looking for a lighter. It was sometime in the middle of winter and it was as cold as Alaska to a street kid. He wasn’t wearing hardly a damn thing. A bright white shirt, god how I hated white, a bright white shirt with minimal grease stains across the front and the tightest pants I had ever seen on any human being. But he was so skinny, they couldn’t have even been for humans. My sister’s jeans were bigger than this guys but he was just falling out of them his legs were so skinny. I looked at him from under my mess of raven hair, pushing it out of my eyes.
“A guy like me? What’s that mean?” he scoffed, standing up and dusting off his hands. He had been fucking with something on the ground, some little bracelet or something that looked like it had broke or something. It was something that like an eleven year old made and I didn’t understand why he didn’t just leave the damn thing. Instead he cradled all the pieces in his hands. He was a really small guy, probably came up to about my shoulders. For such a cold place his skin was absolutely golden, nothing like the paste that graced my arms.
“Y’know, some… kid who looks like he’s got a family, or like… a dog or something. I don’t know. Like…”
“Like a street kid?” he said with one eye brow raised, crossing his arms across his chest in defiance. He knew exactly what I meant but I thought I came off sounding pretty good. I didn’t want him to think I was classifying him as anything. Because he didn’t look like a street kid. I looked like a street kid. Fresh cut above my eyebrow, wrists as thin as pipes. He looked loved. Maybe it was the touch of color to his skin, the kiss of life as I think of it now. It wasn’t the kind of glow you could get from a booth.
“That’s not what I was saying,” I corrected abruptly, still searching desperately for my lighte, patting my back pockets with a real look of concern on my face. I watched as he reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out something as quick as I could blink and there was a flame just inches away from my face.
“Light?” he asked in a soft cured voice, leaning close to me and I nodded hypnotically as he cupped his hand over the cigarette dangling out of my mouth and pulled the light close to it, letting me pull in a deep drag before he pulled the lighter back and let go of the safety switch. “I look like the kind of guy who would have a dog?” he said with a soft chuckle and a warm smile, completely ignoring the fact that he had no idea who I was. “I’ve always wanted a dog.”
Now this is rare. I’m going to tell you this doesn’t happen every day. But this guy brought the biggest smile to my face talking about the dog he didn’t have that I couldn’t help but laugh a little bit that was followed by his wild laughter which sounded like Christmas bells, something so loud yet pleasant to hear.
“I’m Jesse,” he said pausing for a moment for whatever he had been messing with on the ground was in his right hand and he couldn’t offer a proper hand shake. I looked down at the ground for a moment and then back up at him and gave out my left hand and watched him take it with an awkward shake because for some reason people don’t know how to shake left hands.”Jesse Cross.”/

For some reason that is the only meeting I really remember specifically. I don’t remember meeting any one girl or what she looked like or ever what color her hair was. They all just started to become like one big hook up. But I still remember exactly what time it was, the color of the sky, and the fact that he had a freckle on his upper lip that I never quite understood.
I still wish I would have never said anything to him that night. I wished I wouldn’t have seen the scrawny boy in the alley way messing with something on the ground. I wish I would’ve kept walking and just bought a lighter from 7-11 or something. I didn’t have much money on me at the time because Rent had just been due but, I had enough to get a lighter if I didn’t want to eat dinner. That was my next mistake.

/“I’ve never been inside a real coffee house,” he said in a soft voice as he looked around at all the nicely dressed people on their laptops, plugged into their iPods. IPods were still new and so if you had one, you were in a coffee house. It was before Starbucks was on every corner. This coffee house was where just about anyone who had anything to do went. I watched people here watch porn, divorce their husband and adopt children online.
“What do you want?” I offered as we approached the counter.
“Oh… uh, I don’t have any money,” he said in a shy voice, looking around the room in amazement.
“I didn’t ask if you had money, I asked what you wanted,” I nudged in a soft voice and he looked ta me biting down on his lip. I don’t think he had ever had coffee before that moment because he didn’t even look at the menu.
“Coffee.. Uh, plain. Yeah. Original. I like original things,” he said with an almost confident nod. I gave the barrista my order and leant against the counter and watched as he wandered away from me to a young girl off to the side of the coffee shop. She had a baby in a car seat next to her with bags under her eyes as she slaved over a stack of text books that looked like they were from a college or something. I ddin’t know, I hadn’t even seen a college. He walked right up to the girl and looked at the small baby in the car seat and the smile in his face grew like wild fire in such an innocent way that I felt everyone in the coffee house was looking at him.
“Here,” the barrista said handing me the two black coffees and I took one in each hand as I looked back over to Jesse to see what he was up too.
“Your daughter is gorgeous, what’s her name?” he offered to the young girl with a smile. The irl looked almost frightened but then I think she realized from the smile onJesse’s face he didn’t mean anyone any harm. She returned the smile but could barely turn up her lips, the bags under her eyes weighing her whole face down.
“This is Sophia,” she said in a very exasperated tone of voice. Jesse rocked on his heels for a moment before looking down at the baby again, his expression almost nervous.
“She’s absolutely gorgeous, ma’am, you’re really a lucky lady,” he said in such an infectious tone. She smiled and closed her book for a moment, turning to face him. Now this woman did something I can’t imagine anyone doing with someone they had just met. I don’t know what her motive was, but she looked right at Jesse and down at the little girl and back up to Jesse. Jesse crouched down by the baby who was staring at him with discomfort. “Hi Soph-ia,” Jesse dragged out as if the name felt weird to his tongue. “How are you little angel?” he asked in the sweetest coo any human had ever used before.
“Do you want to hold her?” the woman asked and Jesse looked up at her with the excitement of a puppy at dinner time.
“Oh, could I really?” he asked trying to keep his voice as calm as possible. The woman nodded and looked back down at the little girl and unbuckled her from her car seat and pulled her out, all 1000 blankets and all, and held her out to Jesse.
Jesse awkwardly held his hands out but took the baby into his arms and sort of swung back and forward a little bit. “Hi little girl,” he whispered, his eyes shining brighter than the ocean’s sunset. The little girl stuck her tongue out and smiled so big and let out the biggest giggle, listening to Jesse’s calm voice. It must’ve been relatively new compared to her mother’s tired drawl. Jesse looked up and over to me with a smile from ear to ear, then back down at the baby, holding her close to his body, talking gently to her.
He talked to that baby for about five minutes before giving her back to the mother, putting a hand on her shoulder and telling her that she was an amazing, beautiful woman. I walked over to a window seat that was just big enough for two with our coffee and set his down in front of him, putting mine down. I pulled out a sugar and dumped it into my coffee, stirring it with a straw and then took a sip. Jesse watched me for a moment, intrigued on my movements and followed my league, pouring a sugar into his coffee and then swirling it with three coffee straws. I could tell how amazed he was by how tiny the straws were. I never understood why they were so small or why we used them to stir our coffee, but he didn’t care. He had three little straws and he was happy with it.
He picked up his coffee and took a big swig from it and immediately looked green in the face. I could tell it took everything in his body not to spit the entire mouthful back into my face and I couldn’t help but laugh at the way his eyes turned inward at the very bitter taste of his coffee. It took him a whole 30 seconds to swallow what he had just taken in but after he did it, he looked almost nauseous.
“Good?” I teased softly, knowing very well that was his first encounter with real rich, black coffee.
“Yeah…” he mumbled with a terribly embarrassed eye, looking down at his lap so that the brown locks of hair fell into his face. I smiled and took his coffee from him and picked up the creamer from the table and dumped I swear what was a third of the container into his coffee. I out in three more packets of sugar. I could tell I was dealing with a kid here. I knew how coffee could be your first time. I passed the cup of sugar back to him after stirring it with his three small stirring straws and he looked back up at me.
“Go ahead,” I said in a soft, soothing voice. “Try it now.”
He looked at me with a set of the greenest eyes I had ever seen in my entire life. I could tell there was a moment where he almost faltered trust in me. I had taken him to this coffee house and nearly poisoned him with black coffee. Or at least, that’s how he took it.
He picked up the cup of not just black coffee anymore and took a gentle sip and immediately looked at ease, wrapping both his hands around the cup. I didn’t really want to talk to him. I just wanted to look at him. The silence was comfortable and I couldn’t help but admire this kid. /

He was the only saint I ever knew.

I still sometimes think about these nights when I have sleepless nights. I think about just staring at him while he poured sugar into his coffee and made it sweeter and sweeter. Jesse was the kind of guy that always liked the sweeter things in life. He would always rather have a big piece of chocolate cake over any amount of steak or sandwiches. After we had been dating for a while he loved greeting me at home with something he tried to make out of a recipe he had gotten from the library. I tried to tell him just to rip the page out of the book but he insisted on copying it down, the whole thing. No matter how much trouble he had copying it out of the book, he did it anyway. That was his biggest trouble, he always forgot something or put the wrong thing in and his creations were never how they were supposed to be. But boy, did I pretend I loved it.