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She always looked up as the top of the door brushed over the bell above the entrance to the coffee shop. He usually came in at about 10 til 8 every morning except Tuesday's. He often entered the shop looking mildly disheveled with his hair doing probably more of what it wanted to and less of what he intended it to...anyway, she always had to smile and laugh to herself when she saw him.

It was Wednesday-Columbian Dark Roast was the flavor of the day-she was sitting in her normal seat, the left side of an old leather couch with a fleece throw folded over the back of it. There was some odd version of Louis Armstrong playing, barely audible, over the speakers sitting on wooden pannels mounted on the walls above her, but she wasn't listening because she couldn't get the last song she'd heard on the radio out of her head. She liked Alanis Morisette, but she laughed to herself and shook her head as she thought about how none of the events in the song seemed particularly ironic to her.

The crossword puzzle was unusually difficult this morning, and she decided to finish it at lunch. As she leaned back against the cold leather she tilted her neck and began to follow a single blade of ceiling fan with her eyes, really just as a filler activity until the best part of her day happened-and just as her eyes followed the fan blade on about the twentieth revolution around its motor-the best part of her day was happening; the bell sounded and he walked through the door. "That's odd," she thought as she was subconsciously tapping the eraser head of her pencil against her cheek, pretending to be occupied with the already abandoned crossword puzzle. His hair was cut very short today, and she wouldn't have even noticed unless he had been wearing a strange hat-sort of styled like a cowboy hat, but black leather suede and more stylish. As he finished ordering his coffee, he browsed the pastry cabinet, all the while reaching in down the top of his shirt, seemingly adjusting something. As his eyes made their way around the room, she looked down at the puzzle so as to avoid eye contact. As she glanced back up, he was still rummaging through the top of his buttoned-down shirt. "I wonder if he has an itch-it's kind of tacky to scratch it in here," she thought.

"Do you have a copy of today's paper?" the guy asked as the girl behind the counter handed him his coffee. As she handed him the newspaper, slightly crumpled, he said smiling, "I wonder what's on the front page today." This was the

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