She does not enjoy the covert observation of his walk from the bar to the tables, rather it is an imperative, a decree overriding the conscious desire to appear aloof and acting without filter upon the physical self, the slow turn of eyes in sockets. Similarly, once he notices her almost hidden against the bruised purple wall, he cannot subdue the desire to steal glances, almost tripping, endangering the integrity of the surface tension in his glass. Both of their hearts pick up, soldiering molten oxygen to fight obviousness, bringing in psychic reserves to replace fallen mercenaries in a civil war against acknowledgement of the larger enemy. Calamity: he is blocked ahead by an early loud and overly drunk bachelor party, spilling flailing limbs and incendiaries into his path. She stirs her drink, concentrating, breathing through her nose. Pulse filling his ears, he looks for a way around, somewhere to pass without slowing, but the only path leads straight toward her averted eyes.

Unable to hold the pose, she looks up again as he is trapped, head spinning, mysteriously endearing as though she could see the perspiration seeping between his palm and his glass, giving him away. Evasion ceases to be an option. He stops, switching hands so that he holds his martini with his left. Bravely, she raises her chin. It all goes to shit.

A dry flood of months wells up in his eyes, darkly soaking his irises, like paint spilled down a drain. Her mouth becomes a small O, an invisible Jello quiver, her eyebrows drawn up behind her bangs. As though they were ballroom dancers, conducting the room, contracting it, moving toward each other without stepping down a virgin highway made holy by a black light spotlight.

As he sets his drink upon her table, the crowd evaporates, giving him an escape route in the nick of time. He does not flinch, nor follow her eyes following the exodus. He says, "Hi," in a voice that is a saxophone when we should all be in bed, floating palely into an insomniac bedroom through invading cracks, both beseeching and challenging.

"Hi." Her drink swallows the trailing end of the syllable, and she watches him over the glass, throat working fervently, as mountains collide and swallow each other up, and the former floors of oceans brazenly break the horizon to become islands and continents.

Clearing his throat for subterfuge rather than emphasis, he pulls out the chair, sits, realigns his drink, pushes the chair in, moves the drink closer to his body, and kamikaze dives headfirst across the table, widow's peak directly above the center. "How are you?"

"Good. Good." Nodding without looking, she is lighting a cigarette, one of those practiced and ritualized movements that can be relied upon to salvage one's composure except in the most anxious circumstances. On the fifth try, she gets the butane stream and the spark of the flint to line up chronologically so that the lighter catches, just as his fingers touch the seam of his breast pocket. "How are you?"

"The same." Tension begins to ebb off to other tables, more sexually frustrated and morally shackled couples trying to negotiate contracts of accountability for what may or may not go on after last call.

"Wonderful." As in, "I don't care." Icy hipsters poses click auspiciously back into place on both sides of the table, so that the casual eavesdropper would find nothing suspicious. But a casual eavesdropper would not be teased by strains of a remembered smell straggling through the smoke, nor have to check him or herself before speaking to ensure that his or her expression was not nude as Sunday morning.

A vapor condenses over the table so combustibly dangerous that the smallest spark of a word would send them exploding out of their seats, find him hammering her naked ass against the tiled wall of the men's room. Thus, they don't speak. They choke on the strain of avoiding staring through the bleeding holes of each other's open windows. There is the clink of ice vs. glass, the snowfall sub-waveform of ash into the ashtray.

Someone bumps a switch and the lights go up, diffusing again the toxicity of the sexual tension.

"You're the only person I know who can make a Long Island Iced Tea look classy," he says.

There - that patented sleepy eyed half smile, the subtle incline of the chin. "And you're the only man in the world who doesn't look pretentious and compensatorily macho through the lens of a vodka martini." Perhaps she catches herself in the act, which it is. Perhaps she is merely and inexplicably taken by a desire to be genuine. It is nearly a whisper, "You're a dear."

"So, how are you?"

"You mean besides fine."

"Right. Everyone's fine. You deserve better."

"Let's see... There's the job. Mundane, soul-crushing, cheaply thrilling at times but generally malignantly boring, fraught with dangers of burning my delicate flesh on hot steam. There's the car, still in fine condition even without an oil change, still excellent for driving fast late at night once the drunk has been washed away by the clean deep fried air of Truck City, when the moon comes out and singes the edges of the clouds white and makes the asphalt all shimmery. There's the boyfriend..." unsubtly, she checks his face. "Dreary, unchallenging, droning on with violent unawareness about the tiresome fodder of his days, peppering his anecdotes with characters he never bothers to introduce."

"I didn't know you were seeing anyone."

"It's not serious."

He sucks an olive into the envelope of his pout. "I'm unfortunately and passionlessly spoken for, as well."

"Did I say unfortunate or passionless?"

"Not in so many words."

In this round, the quiet is itchy, barbed with blame and regret and the threat of a contest that will be forfeited for reason of the tiredness that comes of being powerless to affect change. And indeed the forfeit comes, cemented by clouded eyes that platonically shake hands, though still with the longing, now depressed so as to be bittersweet.

"How are you really?" she asks, and he knows what she means.

"It's ok. Free room and board. The domestic works. She even picks out my clothes. In ten years that will cease to be so charming, I'm sure. She'll get fat. Dye her hair some atrocious color. Her taste in clothing will be the same, only tenderly modified to include elastic waistbands."

"But you're happy?"

He only stares at her. "No."

With the scaffolding of Serious Business lying all nearly assembled on the table, the two people a breath away from each others' carbon dioxide, two bodies in motion appear around their respective corners of the bar, combined forces whipping up chaotic dust devils of flustered shame. Their significant others march in from both sides, two rampaging armies ready to fall upon them, raping and pillaging in ways just this side of metaphorical. He stands and executes flawlessly the popular and stylized fake kiss, disaffected as if glad to be saved.

But he whispers in her ear, "I'll always die for you. As many times as necessary."