Love Unrequited: A Salutary Lesson

I hovered, make-up clotting, watching the setting sun transform the West Village into a tawny Tuscan terrain, anticipating what was to come, and wondering, what if— A buzzer rang. My finger seemed to be on it. “C’mon up,” he said, through the intercom. I glided north. “Hi Annie,” said the Most Beautiful Man I’d Ever Met (MBM), standing at the open door. He wore khakis, a white T-shirt, Converse sneakers, and a mocking smile. I wore a trying-too-hard, silk, knock-off Prada frock that made me look as if I were taking part in a fashion show instead of a fiction- writing class. It was the final fiction-writing class of the term, being held in our teacher’s apartment instead of the usual classroom. “Beer or wine? Red or white?” he said. I chose red, thinking it rendered me more sophisticated than boring, ubiquitous blanc. “Oh, you like flowers?” I said, staring at the Sweet Williams shooting out of every receptacle in his cluttered, book-encrusted apartment. He sighed. “They sprout weed-like on the roof garden, despite all my attempts to kill them off.” I hooted nervously to dispel the growing tension between us, then hurtled through to join my fellow writers. Holding forth was his old college friend Ira, an overweight, over-opinionated, and over-married lawyer, pontificating about Norman Mailer still being able to get it up when it came to writing. <a href="https://medium.com/the-narrative-arc/love-unrequited-a-salutary-lesson-7d070f6c0072">Website</a>