She approached, stood a foot away, and leaned in.
"Why does everything have to be so crazy, so...
weird? Why can't it just be
normal?"
She looked happy, not altogether serious at this point, and
she wasn't making any sense. My friend, standing placidly to my right, seemed to know what all this was about, but I was clueless. All I could manage was, "Uhh... What?"
Odd, I guess. She seemed to be expecting me to know what to say at this point. I thought she was still drowsy from just waking up after a brief nap, and was talking gibberish. Then she spiraled into cliched
valley speech, throwing in "like" and "you know" more than I'd ever heard her, or anyone say before.
She'd say something like, "He was like... so
kind,
gentle,
smart... and... you know.." Yeah, I didn't know. How could I know? I'd met her two days prior, and we'd never really talked. Not in all seriousness. My friend, though, had known her for a while, and what a bloody well help he was being, standing there
uselessly.
"Start over," I pleaded. "What happened?"
And then the story came out; two months ago, she had broken up with another fellow, whom she had loved. She was still distraught. And
she could never tell me what happened, never in plain words. Me, who had just met her was left to decipher, "It's so... oh... you know."
Now she was crying, head in her lap.
God, but that was frustrating. I'm a naive guy, what the hell do I know? I didn't know even who she was talking about -- that would only come out after thirty minutes of maneuvering. I didn't know circumstances, I knew nothing. I didn't even know her well enough to put my arm around her and comfort her. At this point, my friend chipped in a bit to the conversation, stating, quite rightly, "See, if you were a girl, from her first sentence, you would've known the whole story.
You'd be cooing over her and making her feel good."
Shit.
I said the first thing that came to mind at that point. Stupid and cheesy as may be. "You're right...
it takes two guys to do half a woman's job."
She looked up. She laughed.