Everything was in hysterics as he felt his throat close. As if a hand was clenched around his neck and squeezing until breath was no longer in his lungs. It felt like burning. It felt like a fire was ignited in his beating chest.
When Pete lost his fiancé, he believed his world was going to end. That death stung. He thought as though he was stabbed in the heart with a heated knife that ripped through his arteries and left him bleeding out on the linoleum floor.
Pete was healing, slowly but surely. His best friend Joe took him out for coffee a few months after the break-up, hoping to lighten his companion's mood and loosen him back up.
Pete was the same person. Just a little bruised around the edges. Joe wanted for him to move on and find someone to rip the knife out of his heart and never replace it.
"You need the exact opposite of Mikey," Joe said over their lunch.
It felt to Pete like they had the same discussion twenty different times. Every time they went out, his married friend spent his time scoping out a guy that looked up to Pete's pretentiously high standards. However, Joe wasn't surreptitious, and he often drove men away.
Pete looked away from Joe's eyes and let them burn into the side of his face. In his mission to avoid Joe's gaze, his eyes caught on perfection.
His golden hair was coiffed up effortlessly, and he ran his fingers through it every couple minutes. His pouty lips were painted red. The denim jacket over his black dress hugged his body. He was too short to touch the ground, so he kept his ankles crossed, gently swinging his boot-clad feet back and forth.
Nothing like Mikey, Pete observed. They were polar opposites, but Pete was positive that he could quite possibly be gawking at the most beautiful person on the west side of the Atlantic.
He sipped from a foam cup as he typed on his laptop. Pete wondered what he was drinking. Coffee? Tea? He wondered what he was doing. Typing a paper for college? Working? Taking advantage of the free Internet and sitting on social media? Pete had so many questions, but most of them revolves around what does lipstick taste like? and can I kiss you to find out?
"Who are we looking at?" Joe asked, noticing that Pete was no longer paying him any attention.
Pete didn't take his eyes off the boy as he said, "Bleached blond. Black dress."
"Wow," Joe muttered after a few seconds. Pete took his gaze off of the blond to look at his friend. Joe nodded his approval and took a bite of his turkey sandwich. "Yeah, he's kind of gorgeous."
"Kind of?" Pete scoffed, looking back over. "Joe, come on."
"He's out of your league, that's what he is."
Pete sighed, feeling completely dejected. "I know." That man would never settle for Pete. Pete never thought himself to be unattractive, but the blond was at least eighteen notches above him.
"So are you going to ask him out?"
Pete almost spit out his coffee. "We just established that he's out of my league."
Joe pushed back his chair. "It's worth a shot," he said, standing.
Pete's eyes widened as Joe waltzed right over to Mystery Boy's table.
"Hey," he said, pulling out the stool across from him and sitting down.
The boy looked up with a smile and closed his laptop. "Hi," he replied, melodic voice resonating in Pete's ears. Pete was immediately embarrassed. If he could hear Joe's conversation with the blond, then there was no doubt he could hear what Pete was saying about him.
"Listen," Joe said, "my friend over there thinks you're really hot and wants to ask you out."
Pete's blush worsened when the boy caught his eye and smiled at him. Pete turned away and pretended to be busy with his phone.
"Oh really?"
"Really. What do you say?"
"Well, you can tell your friend, who I'm sure isn't listening, that I would love to go out with him."
No way. Someone that gorgeous had to have a fatal flaw. And his seemed to be bad taste in dates.
Joe came back with a snarky smile. When he sat, he slid a napkin across the table. Written in dark red lipstick was the boy's phone number. A Chicago area code. All the digits were there. There was a chance that this number was real. But Pete wasn't going to get his hopes up.
When he looked back over, the table that the boy was sitting at was empty, leaving him to wonder if he only imagined how beautiful he was.
