I met the sound of his cowboy boots pounding the floor before I met him. It was the very first class of the prep-course preceding our MBA program. He was late. He walked into the theatre-style lecture room heading straight towards the front, descending the steps sure-footedly and loudly, and sat down in all his tallness in the front row, in the closest spot to the professor still available. Other latecomers had discreetly snuck into the room and stayed in the back row. What a showy guy, I thought, and also stunningly handsome with crispy short curly hair and thick broad shoulders.
After the recess, I came back to my seat in the middle section, and found a pen and a notebook on my left side that had not been there before the recess. Somebody had squeezed in my row and made room for a spot beside me. Shortly after, the cowboy boots strode in and occupied that seat. He introduced himself, and then said, with his head half tilted towards me: “Would you like to come out to play Frisbee this Saturday?” He had a very sweet smile made of ninety-eight percent confidence and two percent shyness, just the right mix to entice a conversation with a young woman. His voice was alluringly deep.
“I have never played Frisbee and don’t even know what it is,” I replied quietly.
“It’s not about the Frisbee; it’s about the beer afterwards,” he followed on.
“Maybe”, I said, although I knew I was not going to go. I noticed his pale blue eyes and the cute mini-donut on his chin, which formed a perfect profile with his firm nose and sunny forehead. The tiny curls above his ear looked inviting.
It was hard to imagine that he picked that spot randomly, since it was an invisible place buried in the thickness of many other students and not close to the professor at all. It was even harder to imagine that having arrived late, he nevertheless had time to look around and check out already the women in this large classroom with about a hundred students.
Despite my curiosity, I thought that a guy who wasted people’s attention so conspicuously when he was late, and was so quick and smooth in asking a lady out for beer should receive a lesson. Who knows? I was probably the 28th girl he asked on that day, and with his good looks, he probably got a yes from 27 of them. That thought of mine cost him two years. It wasn’t until almost two years later when we were graduating and parting ways that I had a beer with him. What happened? I will leave that for another story. But I will tell you that before I sat down to write this story I was polishing those mighty cowboy boots, twenty-four years after I first heard them.
Yanzhi on the Seventh Day 