chaidrops

- What's that spot on your paper?
- Chai tea with nutmeg.
- When from?

When he took me out for coffee; I'd smiled and laughed and ducked my head, said yes, I'd love to.  And we'd gone to the coffee shop on the little road downtown, where the cars drive by past white-washed window panes with rippled glass.  He ordered a caramel mocha latte - I got chai.

And I opened the top and shook the nutmeg onto the foam, again and again - I was frustrated 'cause it wouldn't come out.  He came up behind me and tickled my sides with his long-fingered hands, and I shook like the nutmeg with the laughter - and it fell, like little brown-sugared snowflakes onto a field of eidelweiss.

We found a seat by the window, where the cars drive by and the people go past, and the music plays softly in your ear.  A boy behind us had spilled his coffee, and his girl sipped hers with a good-natured smile on her lips as he scrambled to clean it up.  When they left, their voices faded into the white noise of whispers and tinkling coffee mugs.

- But the spot on your paper...

That came by the window.  We were deep in conversation, about politics or why the trucks always sing at Bb or how long the sky has been blue - - and he fixed me with a gaze so deep intense powerful that I shivered.  My shoulders shook and my heart stopped - all the world seemed to stop in that instant.  The birds, the cars, the music, the people, the tinkling of the coffeeware.  He reached in with his eyes and caught me so deep my bottom lip trembled, and that is when the chai drop fell.