Late Lunch

"Why haven't you tried to hit on me, James?" She asked the question in a soft, dispassionate voice that made it clear that the answer was of no real consequence to her. "Every other man around here has."

She wasn't eating...I'd never seen her eating at lunch time.

I'd taken a late lunch and there was nobody in the small lunchroom except for her. I'd nodded at her and taken her return nod as an invitation to share the table she was sitting at.

I weighed my answer for a long heartbeat. "I'm afraid of you," I responded truthfully as I unpacked my lunch bag.

Her eyebrow shifted upward and she looked at me directly for the first time since I sat down. "Afraid of me?" she said, vaguely intrigued.

"Afraid of your sadness," I said correcting myself. "You live in a deep well of sadness," I said, consciously purging any traces of pity from my voice, "and you don't make any effort to climb out of it."

She nodded slowly with neither regret nor irony. "How presumptuous of you," she responded, though she was neither offended nor angered.

"Perhaps," I agreed, though my footing was solid. "But not incorrect."

She almost smiled. "No," she said with no remorse, "not incorrect."

She shook a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it with the blue plastic lighter she had tucked into the pack's cellophane outer wrapper. Deftly lighting the cigarette, she looked up and away from me and allowed a thick, acrid mist to sigh from her lips.

I ate my sandwich and waited. Though the conversation seemed over somehow I knew that it was not.

"So why aren't you trying to save me?" she asked, luxuriating in the wispy texture of the cloud of smoke in her mouth before allowing it to escape and join with the rest floating just above our heads.

"Excuse me?" I said though I had clearly heard and understood what she had said.

She snorted a half-sigh through her nose, clearly recognizing the feint, and repeated the question. "Why aren't you trying to save me?" she said, a bit of an edge gleaming along the outline of her words. "You say see me down this well...this well of sadness as you call it...and yet you're not trying to save me. Why not?"

I looked at her face but she did not look back at me. "I'm not a hero."

That caught her off guard and she turned her full attention towards me. "Excuse me?" She said though I knew that she had clearly heard and understood what I had said.

"I'm not a hero," I repeated evenly, putting my sandwich down on the waxed paper that had once covered it. "I'm doing all that I can to keep myself upright and I very much doubt that I would have the strength to dive into your well and pull us both out."

She put her cigarette back up to her lips and took a long drag, her probing eyes boring into mine. She tilted her head up and away from me and blew the smoke out with enough force to scatter the cloud that gathered above.

"Hmph," she said, vaguely impressed, "an honest man. How...unexpected."

It was neither a compliment nor a condemnation. I picked up my sandwich and resumed eating.