Looking For the Good Stuff

I think it must be the way he looks knowingly at me when we're talking about random stuff with a few other people. Or maybe it's the secret smile thing... you know that just got caught looking, look away quick and then look back, eye contact held for about two seconds longer than normal grin. I remember the exact moment when I realized I felt something for him. It was about three years ago and I'd come up to Portland with a girl I knew for a show. We had planned to crash on the guys' couches and go home to Eugene in the morning, so we were sitting around with the rest of the folks who'd come over after the show just talking about nothing in particular. Things started to wind down, there were five of us left sitting in the living room and everyone was getting tired. I jokingly said he should tell us a bedtime story. His brother and pretty much everyone else in the room said that was a bad idea, since they'd heard his stories and they apparently went on forever. I said please and that was that. Story time. Everyone else sort of tuned out but he had my complete attention. It was like no one else was even in the room. And that's when I knew. But I never did anything about it. Then, earlier this year, I had come up to visit and the house was overflowing with people crashing on couches and in the newly opened spare room, so he offered to share his room with me. I asked him to show me some of his sketches and he pulled out a children's book that his brother had written and he'd illustrated and read it to me. I loved it...the story, the drawings, him reading to me... all of it. And there was that feeling again. I've felt it a million times since then so it's too late for me. I'm hooked. Damn guy.