Member-only story
Thy Fearful Symmetry
Speculative Fiction
It was too easy to catch the boy in the corner of my eye. He was a regular; I could see that in the way he laughed at his bar mates’ jokes and easily joined in conversations that an outsider would have known were already claimed territory. Another night, perhaps I would have stepped into the banter, offered an inviting smile to the boy in question, and bought him another drink.
That’s what an ordinary girl might have done. Perhaps. But I wasn’t ordinary, even by — well, the typical standards. I preferred to watch and wait, biding my time for the most opportune moment. If I were another species, they might have called me a predator in wait. Better the predator than the prey, or so my father had instilled in me. He didn’t want me to be at the mercy of any man’s intentions. And thus such nights went like this, with me mulling over a drink — always a rum and Coke — as someone caught and eventually lost my attention.
This boy, however — he wasn’t losing my attention quite so quickly. Perhaps it was something about the way his lips curved into an unselfconscious smile as his cohorts talked over him. Perhaps it was even the way he caught me looking at him once, twice, and then glanced away quickly, like his gaze was a moth flitting away from my flame. Resistant, yet still curious.
