Tonight I took my six-year-old son to the Rec Center to sign up for soccer league and he wanted to play basketball. So I cozied up on the bleacher with Les Mis and peeked through my eyelashes to see if anyone interesting was among the full-grown men romping around and grunting on the court.
Indeed, I spotted him immediately. We exchanged glances as he wiped the sweat off his brow in a massively sexy way. His hair was dark and longish. Tousled and just beginning to be sweaty. Chiseled features, nice bod. He played with an aggressive style I admired, though he was not the best player on the court. I caught him peeking at me to see if I'd noticed every time he made a basket or performed some devilishly clever maneuver.
I just happened to be reading the part of the novel where the love between Marius and Cosette blooms on the fertile ground of their first passionate glances toward one another. Their eyes had not met, but they shared a complex and intimate dance of noticing and noticing and pretending to not notice one another. I imagined something similar happening to me just then, subtle glances followed by lowered eyelids and quickly turned heads. Twice he walked near me to get a drink from his water bottle and adjust his keys and cell phone where they rested on the bleachers two rows down.
My son, perhaps aware that my attention had shifted to the adult side of the court, wandered over and managed to place himself in a spot where my new Tease would plow him down had he not the presence of mind to stop himself in the nick of time and simply crash into him instead.
How peculiar the sensation of having someone you're closely associated with, such as your son, come in physical contact with someone you are noticing quite intensely and whose physical contact you are beginning to desire, more and more. My son had touched him. My son had received the warmth of his regard for a moment, his attention, his direct gaze. He knew my son existed, yet I had no concrete evidence that he knew I existed at all.
Then it occurred to me that my son now had the man's sweat on his person. The sweat I could see now, soaking his soft gray tee shirt in a triangular pattern down his back and dripping from his forehead and forming sexy curly ringlets of his hair. My son. Had that sweat. On him.
I called my son over to me and said it's time to go. I wanted to sniff him like a hound dog. And with one final gaze of longing at the Tease, I turned and left the building. Such chance encounters often lead to nothing. But I may have been clumsy enough to drop my business card, which I was using as a bookmark, and leave it lying on the bleacher where anyone could find it. If they were looking.
No comments:
Post a Comment