Love is Blind

Running my hands through my hair, I attempted to pull out the tangles that the wild New York wind had caused. It was cold outside and I should have worn a hat, but I had decided against it. I didn’t want to mess up my hair, but the wind had done far more damage than a hat ever would.

I took a deep breath, as the warmth of my building helped to heat up my face. The feeling gradually went back to it, stopping when it went back to the tip of my nose. I was used to the constant thawing and unthawing that happened when you lived in New York City, but I still felt chilly just the same.

My hand pressed against the elevator call button, sending the large machine moving towards me at its slow and leisurely pace. I tapped my foot against the ground as I waited. It was a habit I had picked up long ago.

When the front door opened, letting another one of the residents in, the cold wind came in with them and whipped against my face. I used my hand to push my hair back down to its natural place.

As I turned to meet the wind, my eyes fell on Louis’s soft ones. My thoughts immediately flooded with images of our night together the week before. I hadn’t seen him since, but the visions were still fresh in my mind. By the look in his eyes, it appeared that his were too.

His eyes looked into mine as they shifted into that longing stare I’d seen so many times before. Every guy did it, whether they wanted to admit it or not. Once you slept with someone, your first thought when you saw them was always of sleeping with them again. It was inescapable.

“Audrey,” he said, as his feet fell next to mind. His hand moved to press the button, but seeing that I’d already done it, pushed back into his pocket. “How have you been?”

He tried to remove the smirk from his face, but he couldn’t hide it from me. I took note of it immediately and refused to meet it with one of my own.

“I’ve been good,” I said, keeping my eyes on the slowly opening doors of the elevator. We stepped into it simultaneously and the door slid behind us. “How about you?”

“Good as well.”

From there, the conversation died completely, words moving as slowly as the elevator we stood on. Neither of us knew what to say and it made it even more obvious that we had no connection to one another. We’d had sex, but that was it. We’d shared fewer words than a waitress shares with her guests. Most of the words we’d shared hadn’t even been full sentences, but just simple words begging each other for the things that we wanted.

If we’d talked first and had sex later, things might have been different, but it was hard to start at the beginning when you’d already been to the end.

“You got any big plans tonight?” I asked in an attempt to make the elevator ride seem like it wasn’t moving at the ridiculously slow pace of an inch every hour.

Shaking his head, Louis looked back at me. “Probably just holding myself up in my apartment and trying to stay warm. What about you?”

All the small talk was starting to get my head. It was boring and tedious and so unlike what I wanted to be doing at that moment. I hated forced conversation and the kind that took place in an elevator was always the worst.

Instead of answering his question, I latched onto his hand, pulling him out of the elevator as the door slid open to his floor. I already knew where his apartment was, having remembered it from a few nights before, so I was in front of his doorway before he was.

When we reached it, he stuck his key into the lock. His hands were trembling so much it took him a few tries to get it turned.

The moment the door shut behind us, his hands gripped onto my hips with all the force of a week’s worth of waiting. The pressure was tight and I knew he didn’t want to let me go.

His lips pressed against mine just seconds later. As his body heat passed to me, I felt every part of my skin begin to tingle. A flood of peppermint filled my senses, bringing me back to the night I’d had with Louis the week before.

I wanted to feel everything he’d made me feel before, and when his body pressed more tightly against mine, I knew it was only a matter of moments before it happened again.