AUTHOR: Missy

EMAIL: lasfic@yahoo.com

PART: 1 of 1

RATING:  PG-13 (Adult Thematic Material; drug content)

PAIRING(s): L/Other (Karen Caldwell)

DISTRIBUTION: To Myself  so far; any other archives are welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine.  Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!

CATEGORY: Romance

FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!

SETTING IN TIMELINE: Post-"Love Is The Tar Pits" by around six years.

SPOILLER/SUMMARY: "Heavenly shades of night are falling - it's twilight time" (Past Lenny/Karen.  Karen Reflects)

NOTES: For Shotzette - But not for her birthday

***

Sometimes I see him on the corner of the Haight, sitting against a lamppost with his old battered Les Paul strapped to his knee singing for change.  When Hannah has a long ballet class I'll watch him, hiding behind the walls of 12 and 6th as he sings "Somebody to Love" or "Almost Cut My Hair" or even "Purple Haze".  When he opens his mouth his eyes go wide and focus straight ahead in an absorbed way that makes you feel desired and yet invisible, his fingers moving in a blur. 

I remember what those fingers could do to me, even now...

But I decided on something firm and substantial to bolster my bearing years.  Can you imagine me sitting on the curb with him, picking through the change for dimes, buying bread and dime bags and condoms with whatever his fingers earned us?

What about my brains?

He loved them; thought was not his superpower, so he tried to glimpse through my eyes what the world had to offer.  Even with the same eyes we saw different things; a life together  in his mind;  a doctorate, years in Egypt and Africa, digs and nights sleepless in tents in mine.  For all he loved me, loved the methezoic era, he would never leave the people who were his friends from birth for a woman whom he'd barely known for half a year. 

So I let him go. 

I shouldn't be vain about.  He seems not to have been troubled much by what we had.  Look at him, sitting in a cluster of barely-dressed girls who tend to his every want, handing him hash brownies and bottles of Shotz and big thick sandwiches; the one with the overbite looks terribly familiar...

To them he's a God, not a goofy little boy afraid of thunderstorms. 

Listen to me go on.  I have a six-year-old child, a steady relationship - eternally open - and a grant to study this fall in Cairo.  I simply can't fathom what keeps bringing me back to such a godforsaken corner of this dying town when we've grown into such different species.

I'll remember the answer in the morning, when I see him in my daughter's blue eyes.