‘Yes you are!’ she insisted.
With bottom lip again protruding, he evaded her stare and offered no
reply.
The man’s passive behaviour was infuriating the woman more and more.
She scowled. ‘You want it to be me who says it?’
She reached for her coffee, from which all heat had now gone. With the
sweetest part of the experience lost, it sent her mood plummeting further.
The man looked at his watch again and counted back from the boarding
time. He had to leave the cafe very soon. Unable to compose himself any
better, his fingers had found their way back to his eyebrow.
The sight of him so obviously hung up about the time annoyed her. She
recklessly plunked the cup down on the table. It came down hard on the
saucer. Clang!
The loud noise startled him. His fingers, which had been busy caressing
his right eyebrow, began to pull at his hair. But then, after taking a short
deep breath, he sat back down and looked her in the face. All of a sudden,
his face was calm.
In fact, the man’s face had so clearly changed that the woman was quite
taken aback. She looked down and stared at her hands clenched on her lap.
The man who had worried about time didn’t wait for the woman to look
up. ‘Now, look . . .’ he started.
No longer muttering, he sounded collected and together.
But as if she was actively trying to stop short his next words, the woman
said, ‘Why don’t you just go?’ She didn’t look up.
The woman who wanted an explanation now refused to hear it. The man
sat motionless as if time itself had stopped.
‘It’s time for you to go, isn’t it?’ she said, as petulantly as a child.
He looked at her perplexed, as if he didn’t understand what she meant.
As if she was aware of how childish and unpleasant she sounded, she
uncomfortably averted her eyes from the man and bit her lip. He rose from
his seat, and spoke to the waitress standing behind the counter.
‘Excuse me, I’d like to pay,’ he said in a small voice.
The man tried to grab the bill, but the woman’s hand was pressing down
on it.
‘I’m going to stay a bit longer . . . so I’ll pay,’ was what she meant to say,
but he had pulled out the bill from under her hand with ease and was
walking to the cash register.
