cyanideparty

Rated: T

She often spoke with an unlived sense of authority on topics she surely couldn’t have been an authority on. Topics such as love. She loved to talk about love. She was only nineteen, and straight out of a Convent at that, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that she was so enamored with the idea of love.

Of course she would be. She was nineteen and straight out of a Convent. A girl whose lush sex appeal would’ve gone wholly unappreciated had she remained there, been wasted entirely on the envious, resentful eyes of old nuns who woodenly walked about corridors thoroughly hollowed-out.

But the authority with which she spoke about love was entertaining. Remarkably, he liked listening to her prattle on with charming certainty, chin high, shoulders straight, padding her lofty statements with information she had surely stolen from advice columns lining the glossy pages of the French glamour magazines girls her age liked to pass around. She seemed to have already lived an entire life through magazines and movies alone.

“Men want a woman who’s elegant,” she said one day as they sat out under the late afternoon sun in the grass beyond Hoffmann’s back patio. “But she must also mysterious. She can’t give too much away.” She was holding herself propped up on her hands, her legs stretched out before her.

“Is that so?” he said, his bare forearms resting across his knees. He had rolled his white shirtsleeves up right after she had kicked her heels off, and he kept glancing back and forth between her exposed knees and her small, stockinged feet. They looked downy soft in the sun. He kept fantasizing about pulling them into his lap, running his hand up her leg, kissing the inside of her ankle.

“Yes,” she said with a nod. “Mystery creates desire.”

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