Dark Red - Bonnie Smetts

I put on the darkest reddest lipstick I have. I tip tap my lips together to smooth it out, take another swoosh with the powder brush, and push back my hair. I can’t get used to the ocean always living right beside me, I can see it in the corner of the mirror. I forget it’s there and I kind of jump when I walk out of the kitchen and see it again. Right there in front of me, like I got a big blue ocean scene as a painting hanging in my living room. Except it’s moving, like a movie right there in front of me, following me around.

I like the blouse I’m wearing tonight, blue and white stripes, crisp is what they called it on the label. I read that every girl should have a crisp white blouse but I couldn’t settle for white when there was this ocean blue and white one hanging next to the white one.

I’m nervous as a cat, the idea of this date. I’m nervous as a cat just trying to feel at home with that ocean following me from room to room, and the idea that I got a new job in two days. I’m so nervous that I guess that’s why I just said yes to this man. If I’m gonna be nervous I may as well give myself something really big to be nervous about. Going out with somebody I don’t know a thing about.

I’m seeing somebody I don’t quite know starring at me in the mirror. And all I see is me standing there all alone in my white bathroom with the white towels I got to match all the white everywhere around me. I’m starring so long that I jump, like I almost fall over, when that man knocks on my door.

“Hi, come in,” I say. He’s shiny and tan and he’s wearing tan pants and a pale yellow shirt, looking like what a man would wear if he lived at the ocean. His aftershave touches me like a whisper.

“Rawling, baby, you look hot,” he says. “Whoa, I didn’t mean to shock you with that!”

I must have moved just the tiniest bit when he said that, I’m sure I moved a little bit to the side. “Come in,” I said. It would have been too awkward to not.

“Nice place, almost like mine, but you got a new one. I’d heard that they’d fixed up all the apartments in this wing. Maybe I should get the manager to move me over here,” he says. By now he’s moving around the apartment like a breeze blowing through, not the least bit nervous looking everywhere in my house.