Virtually Mine: a love story (4 page)

Kate wasn’t a fashion plate. She didn’t
have the kind of beauty that got applied every morning and washed down the sink
at night. Kate was just girl-next-door, fresh-scrubbed pretty. Unlike most
girls Charlie met, Kate actually looked him in the eyes when she talked to him.
She’d ask about his day, then stop to listen. She said please and thank you
when she requested his help. She let him walk with her to church, since Dustin
had to work.

Charlie had known Kate was taken from the
very beginning when Dustin had helped her move into her so-near-yet-so-far
apartment next door to him. It’s not that Charlie found Dustin to be worthy of
Kate, but he reasoned it was just as well since he didn’t deem himself worthy
of her either.

Kate was the girl of Charlie’s dreams,
this marvel of a creature who sat on the counter to the right of where he
worked on his back, underneath the sink. As he cleared the culprit cucumber
peelings from the garbage disposal trap, she vented the pains of her unexpected
break-up, dangling her shapely calves from her perch, driving his smitten soul
berserk.

“How can that not turn personal,” she
asked, not really waiting for an answer. “He’s human. He’s wired to respond to
sensory stimuli. And an acted kiss—I don’t care what anybody says. It’s still
in the same physical universe of kissing.”

Conversation about kissing was almost too
much for Charlie in this company. He sat up too quickly and bonked his head.

“You know what it’s like,” she assumed.

Charlie did not. Here he was, a grown man
of twenty-seven, living in the big city, and he’d never once in his life kissed
a girl, except for his mom and his great aunt Cecelia, neither of which he
figured should count.

Kate went on, elaborating every detail of
what Charlie had never experienced. “Your mouth gets all tingly,” she
described, “and your hormones go completely wha-ho! And even if it is in a
technical sense
work
, it still pushes exactly the same chemical buttons
inside. Whether you claim you’re acting or not, a kiss is a kiss. Don’t you
think?”

♥   
♥    ♥

Blocks away at the neighborhood Fluff & Fold, M.J. toted an armful of wet
Meter Maid uniforms toward an open dryer. As she stooped to pick up a renegade
sock, an elderly man and wife toddled by in front of her. They took the last
open dryer, right out from under her.

“Oh, look, Honey, here’s one,” the woman
beamed.

“Actually, I was going to use...” M.J.
sighed. There was no way she was going to wrestle the dryer away from that
sweet old couple. Instead, she put her wet wash down and plopped into a plastic
chair. “I’ll get the next one,” she said, as nicely as she could muster.

Missing M.J.’s nuance completely, the
woman chattered merrily to M.J. as she loaded their clothes into the dryer.
“You know, we met sixty years ago, right in this Laundromat. I was waiting on a
dryer at the time, just like you.”

“Were you, now?” M.J. replied with more
enthusiasm than she felt. As the old woman nattered on about their story,
M.J.’s mind drifted. She glanced out the window just as a dog walker stopped
out front to untangle the leashes of the five pooches in her charge.

“There he came,” the matron continued,
“right through that door. I’m telling you I would have missed him entirely if
I’d gotten into that dryer when I wanted it. Good Lord slowed me down, though,
let me see what I was supposed to see.” She patted her husband’s back. “Haven’t
missed a Tuesday night here since, have we, Dear?”

“Nary a one,” her husband replied. “Just
goes to show, the bug bites and love can grow from just about anywhere.” As the
old man started the dryer, his wife leaned in for an affectionate squeeze.

M.J. took the couple in. Her parents had
hardly been models of affection, toward her or toward each other. It made her
want better than they had ever had. M.J. turned her gaze outside, where the dog
walker resumed her duties.

Suddenly, an idea struck M.J.
 
She forgot about losing her dryer. She tuned
out the elderly couple. All she could see was that dog walker heading down the
sidewalk, behind that band of canines.

Watching intently, M.J.’s wheels turned.
This idea had possibility written all over it.

♥   
♥    ♥

Dustin
sat on his sofa, half leafing through the pages of a scene and half monitoring
Wissy in his kitchen. With a confident smile, she kicked off her shoes and
picked up the wine bottle. Dustin waved her off, showing her his half-full
glass. “Thanks, I’m good.”

Wissy eased herself onto the cushion
beside him. “I suspected that.”

“What?” Dustin asked, not really getting
it.

“That you’re good...at whatever it is you
do.” Wissy put the wine bottle down and cozied up to Dustin, looking over his
shoulder at their scene.

Dustin scooted away a bit and handed
Wissy her own copy.

Wissy accepted the pages. “I was thinking
we should just jump right into character, see where it takes us.”

Dustin wrestled with what to do. He
thought about Wissy’s job in casting. He thought about what Kate had said. “We
don’t have to do the whole kissing part yet.
 
I mean if you’re—”

Wissy moved away. She tossed the scene
aside and stood. “Maybe an exercise would help. Ooh. I have one. We’re going to
speak to each other without words.”

“We are?” Dustin stymied as to how that
was possible.

“Go ahead, Sweetie,” she coaxed. “Stand
up.”

Dustin stood a few feet away, but Wissy
waved him closer. “Come as near as you want, feel the chemistry building for
the scene, but resist actual contact.”

Confusion clouded Dustin’s mind. “Don’t
touch you?”

“Let me show you,” Wissy offered. “Turn
around.”

Dustin pivoted, not altogether sure what
to expect. From behind Dustin, Wissy moved her hands slowly around his face and
neck, millimeters away, never grazing him.

She whispered softly into his ear. “If we
do it right, we should be able to unearth what these characters are feeling
without even so much as the slightest physical brush. We just light the match
under it, let it simmer a little, disturb the molecules as they say and... Do
you feel that?”

With Wissy’s warm breath and the sound of
her sultry voice in his ear, Dustin’s resolve fell as his temperature rose.
“This is an excellent exercise,” he pronounced. “I’m just a
little...whoa...okay...”

“You’re not nervous about this, are you?”
Wissy teased. “Come to think of it, maybe you’re right. Maybe we shouldn’t
rehearse the kiss. Maybe we should let everything we’re feeling here compound,
right up until the actual
 
performance.”

♥   
♥    ♥

Kate
paced opposite the sink where Charlie still busied himself with her garbage
disposal. From his vantage point under the sink, he had to fight not to watch
her willowy legs as they passed. They were just legs, he told himself. He had
seen legs before, just never from this exact angle.

“What do you think they’re doing right
now?” Kate asked.

“Well, I...” Charlie blustered, “I try
not to think about those kinds of things, things I can’t—”

Kate stopped pacing. She hopped back up
on top of the counter. “You’re right. Why am I torturing myself? I should just
focus. Think about...I don’t know, I should conjugate verbs or contemplate
asparagus or—”

“Sometimes I think of pi,” Charlie
interjected, understanding the feeling.

Kate seized on the suggestion. “Back home
in Virginia, my Mom makes the best pie. It’s this apple custard with little
bits of apricot jam dotted in it. I’m telling you, Charlie, there’s not a
sweeter thing that could ever touch your lips.”

Charlie felt himself going even paler
than he normally was. In fact, he came close to passing out altogether. “I was
thinking of the mathematical kind of pi, solving it, but—” Charlie tried to
scoot out from under the sink smoothly, but he banged his head soundly on the
cabinet frame. “Ow-ow-ow,” he yelped, before he could stop the words from
exiting his mouth. He’d always felt like something of a doofus, but never more
than at that very moment.

Kate jumped off the counter. “Charlie,
are you okay? Let me look.”

Kate’s close proximity only increased Charlie’s
anxiety. She brushed the hair back off his brow. “Hold still. Lemme see.”

Charlie winced. “It’s only a
little...blood and—”

Kate examined Charlie’s scalp. “You
sure?
 
I could put some ice or...we
don’t have ice. How about ice cream?
 
Ice cream might work.”

As quickly as he could, Charlie rose to
his feet. In fact, he rose so quickly that he made himself a bit woozy. “That’s
okay. I should... You look good...I mean, the disposal looks really...good,
now, and I better go.” With that, Charlie hurried out.

It’s not that he wanted to leave Kate. He
craved every moment of any and every excuse to be in her presence. But there
was something about this conversation that had escaped his control. It had been
more challenging to his constitution than he’d ever before experienced with
Kate.

So, as much as Charlie wanted to stay, he
knew he should go, before he said or did anything to overstep his self-imposed
bounds or to embarrass himself more thoroughly than he already had. He needed a
bathroom, his bathroom, and he needed it just as soon as was physically
possible.

♥   
♥    ♥

Kate
poured coffee for regulars at her day job at the Doo-Wop Dinette. It was a
kitschy kind of “Mom and Pop” eatery that had been part of the Santa Monica
landscape for generations. Petitions had saved it as a landmark when it was
threatened for demolition. Fifties music and throw-back uniforms completed the
theme.

Kate had been grateful to Dustin for
getting her hired to work alongside him there, but given their exchange from
the previous night, she felt unsure just how to behave. She wondered if she
should try to act normal, as if nothing had happened, but that didn’t feel
right to Kate. Something had definitely shifted between them and she had no
idea what more to say than what she already had. What she knew for sure was
that she needed her job to pay her bills, Dustin or no Dustin.

Mercifully, Kate was on the sunrise team
that week. She’d been up before dawn, at it for hours before Dustin coasted in
for second shift. Careful to avoid his notice, Kate watched Dustin as he
trailed the head waitress. At forty-five, Reesa Davis was a straight shooter
with a heart of gold, very at home in her plus-sized body.

“I promise, Reesa,” she heard Dustin
plead. “I’ll be gone an hour, ninety minutes tops.”

Reesa studied Dustin with a skeptical
look on her face. “Didn’t you just get here? Kate’s off in ten and I’ve been
slinging hash since the birds woke up.”

“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t, okay, the
absolute biggest break so far in my entire career,” Dustin justified.

Reesa chuckled. “Uh-huh. And just what is
this commercial for?”

Filling sugar jars nearby, Kate bent an
ear toward the conversation

Dustin’s shoulders bobbed. “Some kind of
cold stuff.”

Reesa drew back in her inimitable style.
“Sneeze medicine? Baby, if this is as good as you got, then far be it from me
to stand in your way.”

Overjoyed, Dustin planted a wet one on
Reesa’s cheek. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Reesa chortled with a nod toward Kate.
“Best stop that kissin’ on me, now. You’re gonna make that girl of yours
jealous.”

Kate averted her eyes as Dustin glanced
over at her, but she overheard his reply to Reesa.

“Yeah, we sort of, well...” Dustin
shuffled. “She brought it up that we should see other people.”

Dinette cook, Andre, rang a bell and
placed a steaming plate of spaghetti and meatballs on the pickup counter. He
called to his wife. “Order up!”

Reesa whirled to Andre congenially. “I
got ya, Cup Cake. No need to go mashin’ that bell.”

Gathering her courage, Kate approached
Dustin, who was already removing his apron. “Hi,” she managed. Awkwardly, he
returned the greeting.

Kate struggled for a way to break the
ice. She followed Dustin toward the staff locker room. “So, I’m sorry I
interrupted your...rehearsal.”

Dustin opened his locker, oblivious to
the elephant in the room. “No problem.”

“You going somewhere?” Kate already knew
the answer, but she still had to ask. It was the only way to keep the
conversation going.

Dustin bubbled over with excitement.
“Okay. Try to remain calm. Wissy called me this morning and she said she’s
already getting me in on a national commercial.”

Kate didn’t know whether to be thrilled
or devastated. “Really?”

“I’m not on the official list,” Dustin
continued, “but she’s working the session and she says she’ll let me crash if I
can get over there in the next thirty minutes, so—”