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I was sitting with my back to the bar, elbows propped on the rail, so I saw her when she walked in. So did many others, and whispers were exchanged and heads turned. A significant number of eyes followed her as she crossed the room and took a seat at the bar several seats away from me. She seemed casually self-contained, unaware of the stir she’d caused. It was a convincing act, but I felt certain that she was fully aware of it.I spun my chair so that I could face the bar and study her in the back-bar mirror, trying to decide just what quality it was that made her so fascinating. She was undeniably beautiful, but she wasn’t the only beautiful woman in the room; she may not have been even the most beautiful woman in the room, but she’d caused a sensation like no other. Her body was spectacular and her lithe and graceful bearing was certainly attention-getting, but now, seeing only the above-bar portion of her in the mirror, I decided that it was her remarkable face and chestnut-brown hair, red highlights gleaming in the bar lighting, that had drawn so many pairs of eyes.Her features were flawless and refined and her skin bore an ethereal radiance as if lighted from within; her hair was a glistening silken halo, and she had fine cheekbones and lips that begged to be bruised by passionate kisses, and she possessed a loveliness and innocence that made older people like me recall and yearn for our youth, and wonder if we’d ever been as earnest and unsullied and naïve as she appeared. My longer look revealed that my first impression had been wrong; she was not only by far the most beautiful woman in the room, but she may also have been the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.At the same time that the bartender delivered her order – something amber over an ice cube in a rock’s glass, a serious drink – a young man approached her from a nearby table where several of his friends sat watching. He was trying to affect a confident air, but the cracks in his bravado were apparent in his hesitant steps and the increasing tension in his shoulders. Understandable, given his high-value target.Still, I admired his courage and determination as he leaned an elbow on the bar beside her and spoke to her, his back to me. Almost immediately, I could see that his approach had not been welcomed; although he mostly blocked my view of the girl I could see that she’d moved so that her face was inches from his and was speaking to him, low and urgent and angry, every bit as earnest as she’d appeared but not nearly as innocent or lovely.The tension in his shoulders spread to the rest of his body and I watched a red flush of embarrassment climb his neck and set his ears ablaze, and when he turned away he was utterly destroyed, his body now rigid in defeat and humiliation, shoulders bowed, his steps slow and shuffling, looking for all the world like he was carrying his testicles in a basket in his hands rather than still dangling where they belonged.I was shocked and embarrassed for him, but I watched him return to his table and saw that when his friends tried to engage in a little good-natured teasing he merely hung his head in humiliation and didn’t respond. To their credit, they quickly gave up and went back to their conversation, leaving him to suffer alone.I felt bad for him but it was none of my business, so I went back to studying my drink as I wondered what could possibly have precipitated such a devastating rejection – and what she could have said to cut him so deeply. When I looked up, I again observed her in the mirror, but this time, it was with the knowledge that beneath that magnificent exterior must lay something hard and feral and considerably less lovely.I turned and looked at the unfortunate young man for a moment and saw that he was still hurting badly, confused and dismayed that he’d said or done something to earn such a brutal response but utterly unable to fathom what it might have been. He had both hands bahis siteleri wrapped around a long-neck Bud, his fingers interlaced behind it and his thumbs tracing slow lines in the condensation that had formed on the label, his head down as he stared at the tiny beads of water as if the answers might be reflected there.When I looked back into the mirror, she was watching me, and our eyes met and held. Neither of us smiled, neither of us acknowledged the other in any way, we just looked, and then moved our gaze from the mirror to each other, looking directly into each other’s eyes over the length of bar between us. After what may have been half a minute, I just shook my head sadly and looked away, the golden image of her innocence and the loveliness that I thought I’d seen now badly tarnished. For some reason, I felt that I’d lost something of value.I wasn’t terribly surprised when she brought her drink and slid onto the empty barstool alongside me, nor when she said, “Why are you looking at me?”Her ego would have required it so her approach didn’t surprise me, but when I turned and met her eyes, I discovered that they alone might go a long way toward making a man forget what he was going to say and become a babbling idiot; they were a unique sage-green, something that had not been apparent at a greater distance, and with only a few inches between us, I could see tiny golden rays radiating out from her pupils across the pale green irises. That her eyes were as remarkable as the rest of her probably shouldn’t have surprised me either, but it did.“Was I looking at you?”“You know you were.”“You must be used to it; you’re very beautiful.”She snorted. “Jesus! Just another guy perving on me, huh?”“Is that what I was doing?”“You tell me; are you a pervert?”“Possibly, yes, but I will point out that there’s nothing perverse about a man looking at a beautiful woman. It’s probably one of the most natural things there is, and while the standards of beauty have changed over the centuries, appreciation of it has been a constant.”“That’s quite a speech. You do know you’re probably twice my age.”“At least. More than, I’d guess.”“I guess I’d hoped that a more, umm… mature man, like you, might be more interesting, but no; just another guy gawking because he’s got a hardon for me.”“You assume too much. I said you must be used to people looking at you because you’re beautiful; I didn’t say that’s why I was looking at you.”She pondered that for a moment, possibly thinking back to what I’d said. “So why, then?”“Curiosity.”“About what?”“About what that young man could possibly have said to you that provoked you to utterly shred him, and what you said that hurt him so badly.”“Huh?” To her credit – or perhaps not – she seemed genuinely unaware of the destruction she’d left in her wake.“It takes a certain amount of courage for a man to approach a woman. It’s a nervous time for most men, and the more beautiful the woman the tougher it gets, in my experience. That kid worked up his courage and came up to you, undoubtedly the most beautiful girl he’d ever laid eyes on, full of excitement and hope and optimism and you cut his legs out from under him.”“Who are we talking about?”“My god! You have no idea, do you?” I inclined my head toward the unfortunate young man, who was still sitting, head down, studying his beer bottle, where the answers he sought were still not forthcoming.She turned and looked at him for a moment. “Oh. That’s the guy that came up to me at the bar a few minutes ago.” I nodded and she went on, “I was probably a little harsh on him.”“You think? Look at him. Whatever you did to him, it’s gonna leave scars.”“Jesus. I didn’t mean to hurt him, but do you have any idea how tiresome it gets, being hit on all the time?”“I’m sure being incredibly beautiful must be a heavy burden, but look at me; do I look like I’d know how that feels?” She smiled, but I wasn’t going for humor. “Seriously, no, I don’t have any canlı bahis siteleri idea, but if you get it so much you must know a thousand ways to decline politely… gently. Did you really need to destroy the kid?”“It just gets so old…”“This may be tough for you to believe, but a lot of people go through life with a much heavier cross to bear than being gorgeous. Take him, for example. He came into tonight just a normal guy – maybe even a real nice guy, not that you gave him a chance to show you – but from now on he’s going to be much less able to be that guy, to let his guard down and approach a woman with anticipation and excitement instead of anxiety and fear of rejection. He feels thoroughly emasculated. You did that to him.”She looked at him for a moment that stretched on and on, then at me and then back at him, her expression softening and sadness now in her beautiful eyes. “God. I truly hurt him, didn’t I? You must think I’m a terrible person.”“I can’t make that judgment; I don’t know you. I think you fucked up.”“It wasn’t even about him. I was pissed about other things; I just took it out on him.”“Does that strike you as being at all unfair?” She sighed heavily as I looked at her. “What did he say that made you so angry?”“Nothing. He just asked if he could buy me a drink. Banal, and right after I’d just gotten one, so bad timing but harmless.”“And yet you ripped him apart.” I didn’t ask what she’d said; I didn’t want to know.She winced under the criticism. “That was stupid and thoughtless and he’d done nothing to deserve it. It wasn’t his fault, it was me; I was just in a bad place. I took out my frustration on him. Now I feel like shit.”“Don’t tell me. Tell him.”She looked from him to me and back at him again. His position and demeanor remained unchanged. She used my words: “You think?”I shrugged. “You’re the only one here that can say anything that will make him feel any better about himself.”“He probably hates me. What if he rejects my apology, tells me to fuck off?”“Then you’ve earned it, right?” When she didn’t reply, I went on. “You know damn well he won’t. Women who look like you know that their beauty buys a kind of latitude not allowed to average people.”“You’re a little cruel yourself, you know that?”“I suppose. Honesty can be brutal sometimes.”“Is he a friend of yours or something?”I shook my head. “No, I’ve never seen him before tonight, didn’t even notice him at all until he went up to you.”“So why do you care? Why butt in?”I shrugged. “I don’t know; it just seemed wrong. If a man had treated a woman the way you treated him, I’d have called him on it. Maybe I’m an equal opportunity buttinski.”She smiled, and she was so lovely that I had to remind myself that she truly wasn’t. She looked again at him and then at me, blew out a cleansing breath, squared her shoulders, and said, “You’re right, I should apologize. Okay…”She slid from her barstool and moved toward him, and, God help me, all I could think about was how incredible she looked from the rear, her long hair flowing over proud shoulders, slender waist above the feminine flare of her hips, and the soft challis of her dress flattering a perfect derriere as it flowed over her intimate contours. The skirt ended mid-thigh and the bare legs below it were shapely and flawless, and when she turned and looked at me over her shoulder in that way women have, from the corner of her eye, I knew that despite what I’d said to her I was one of those people I’d denigrated, a man that would likely allow her any degree of latitude required because she was physically so very special.As she came alongside him, she touched his shoulder, and when he looked up he recoiled visibly, dismay written on his face. Demonstrating good instincts, she squatted at his side, sitting back on her heels to make herself his height as you might with a small child or a frightened dog, becoming smaller and less threatening.She began speaking to him, and canlı bahis while at first, his face was stiff with pain and resentment, he soon began to relax, his expression softening and the tension going out of his body. When she tilted her head just so, speaking to him as he looked into those liquid green eyes, he smiled for the first time, then laughed softly. Her ability to heal appeared at least equal to her ability to wound; if she was being honest and taking the blame for her attack onto her own shoulders it seemed to be working, and his friends at the table had fallen silent as they watched the two of them.When she smiled and laid a hand on his arm which he then covered with his own, I figured she’d managed to reverse most of the damage she’d caused. She leaned in and kissed his cheek before rising to her feet, then made a request of his friends, one of whom passed her a pen from his pocket. She wrote something on a cocktail napkin which the injured young man quickly tucked into his pocket as if it were a great treasure, then squeezed his shoulder and turned and walked back toward me.She was smiling as she approached, something that only enhanced her beauty. I waited until she drew close. “Everything go okay?”“It did. I think we both feel a little better about ourselves.”“Well, good; I assumed it must have if you gave him your phone number – and since he accepted, of course. What did you tell him?”“I told him to call me and we’d have lunch.”“Good choice, more meaningful than meeting for a cup of coffee and a scone, but less laden with expectations than dinner or drinks.” I smiled. “But what I meant was what did you say to him about what happened earlier?”“Oh. More or less what I said to you, I guess. I told him it was entirely my fault, nothing he’d done, and I apologized, groveled a little…”“Didn’t seem to require a lot of that.”She grinned. “No. He was a very nice guy like you said. Very gracious.”“Good; and you feel better too?”She nodded. “I do, thanks. Are you going to offer to buy me a drink?”“You might understand where I’d feel a twinge of trepidation about that…”She let out a peal of laughter. “Okay, I deserved that; don’t worry, though, I promise not to ‘emasculate’ you,” she smiled as she quoted my word, “but if I’m going to accept, I should probably at least know your name.”“Fair enough. Brandt Williams.” I held out my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Miss…?”“Dana. Dana Norris, and, yes, it’s good to meet you too. Now, about that drink…”I signaled the bartender, who took her order for another of what she was having, which turned out to be a Macallan fifteen-year-old single malt; the girl had good but expensive tastes, her choice surprising in someone so young and so magnificently female. After that, we sat and talked, openly and easily. She was good at it and bright and seemed to bear me no ill feelings for calling her out earlier.She was easy to look at, easy to talk to, and fascinating to listen to; an hour went by quickly, and then the better part of another. It was getting late when she laid her hand over mine and said, “Brandt, you remind me of my father.”I winced – visibly, for effect. “Just so you know, as an older guy chatting up a beautiful young woman in a bar, that’s something he really doesn’t want to hear.”She laughed. “Is that what you’re doing, chatting me up?”“Not by any nefarious prior plan; it just worked out that way.”“I meant it in a good way. My father is a remarkable man, kind and gentle and wise. I love him very much, but if he’d seen what I did to that poor guy he’d have been ashamed of me. You rescued me from realizing later what a bitch I’d been and you gave me a chance for redemption. It’s something he would have done.”“Then I’m flattered by the comparison. Thank you.”“Are you going to invite me to your place for a nightcap?”“Hmm. That almost sounds incestuous, given the timing.”She laughed. “Do you always have such witty responses available?”“Only about fifty percent of the time, I’m afraid; you might say I’m half-witty.” She smiled, and I went on, “So, Dana, am I being picked up?”“You sound surprised.”“I am, a little – after all, you did point out that I’m twice your age.”

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