CHAPTER THREE

PAST

The most outgoing girls, all English speaking, are the ones chosen to do promo work and they are all great, or at least worth 20 minutes of laughing and flirting, as they try to sell you whatever it is they are promoting at the time. But this promo girl was different. From the moment she came into my vision, I was transfixed, completely unable to take my eyes off of her. She was dressed in a green fairy costume, the bright green dress clinging to her body accentuating her breasts, her tiny waist and clinging seductively to her hips before exposing her long slender legs. In Bulgaria it was normal, in fact it was expected of men to take their time savoring the eye candy of a woman’s body, but at the moment I was struggling hard to portray gratitude on my expression without crossing the line into creepy, stalker type. It was not easy.

It’s not that I wasn’t accustomed to seeing beautiful women, in fact that was one of the surprising perks of moving here from London. It had been refreshing to see girls wearing beautiful, stylish summer dresses, exposing blemish free olive skin, slim athletic bodies along with their shiny, thick hair cascading down their backs and swinging gently as they sashayed down the streets. What a nice change from the women back home who had to wrap themselves up in layers upon layers of clothes, hiding their pasty white skin which exposed the fact that everyone there was suffering severe vitamin D deficiency. Thanks to the fast food chains back home, the last thing that women needed was to add more layers to their bodies and for that reason, beautiful girls are so rare that they act like a godlike species – fully aware of their status. But here, beautiful women are everywhere. In fact, my friend Carla who was a UK full on 10/10 – literally stopping traffic everywhere she went – would probably only score a 7 at best. What a nice surprise it was to learn that the women in Bulgaria were ranked in the top 5 of the most beautiful women in the world.

But this woman before me was not only beautiful, but also graceful and elegant; my eyes followed her every move until she was literally standing right before me.

“Здравейте, мога ли да ви заинтересувам в този нов дезодорант?” The sound of her voice confirmed that, while she was dressed as a fairy and as surreal as her appearance was, this was in fact a very real person who spoke absolutely flawless Bulgarian. Any Bulgarian I had learned these past four years went out the window as I was cast under the spell of her inquiring eyes. I wanted to say something meaningful, impressive, something, anything that would keep her right there in front of me.

“I’m sorry I don’t speak Bulgarian,” was the only thing I could think to get out and I desperately hoped this would not end the conversation. To my surprise she switched into perfect English with no trace of an accent. She began trying to sell me something, what was it, deodorant, but my mind was ignoring the meaning of her words as it was in awe with how well she could say them.

“You’re English is amazing,” I said with sincerity, as I interrupted her sales pitch. She paused, took in my wonder and decided to have some fun with me by suddenly switching to German. The depth of my astonishment shot off the scales when the fairy then gracefully switched to beautifully crafted Japanese. Her eyes were laughing at me as I struggled to understand that this was no ordinary person before me. It’s one thing to be in a country where beauty is plentiful, but to find such surpassing beauty combined with off the charts intelligence, is a rare find. This was definitely turning out to be a far better day than I had anticipated. She was now thoroughly enjoying my predicament, my nonexistent ability to keep up with her, thanks to my limited language vocabulary.

“How many languages do you speak?” I finally asked in disbelief as I resisted the urge to reach out and touch her to confirm that I was, in fact, not seeing things.

“Four fluently: Bulgarian, Russian, English and German. I can hold my own in Turkish, Hebrew and Japanese, so I guess, 7 in total,” she shrugged nonchalantly as if it were no great achievement. Once again, my face refused to hide how impressed I was; after all I had never met a woman who had so much presence and character, who could wear a fairy costume with so much elegance and pride, who could speak so many languages flawlessly. I wanted to know more about her, a lot more, but she had moved passed impressing me and gone back to business trying to sell me this new deodorant. I tried to listen politely as she went on and on while trying like hell to keep my eyes from wandering down to her amazingly fit body. It was a losing battle so I decided to take refuge in the safety of her eyes.

That was a big mistake. Her eyes were just as, if not more, seductive than her body. There was a depth of passion and I felt as if I fell into them as opposed to simply staring into them. Those deep brown eyes seemed to have one purpose and one purpose only, to melt the souls of any man fortunate enough to gaze into them. They were fully locked and loaded, weapons grade, militarized attention-grabbing devices that were reaching their goal; she had my fullest attention.

What was I to do at this point? Well, I did what any man would do in my circumstance: I bought the deodorant! As I paid and she rummaged for change in her purse, my eyes were free to roam other parts of her and decided to settle on her long, elegant fingers which had impeccable manicured nails with bright red polish on them. The finish on her nails was so perfect that the red gloss reflected the neon tubes of the strip lights above us, four white lines on each nail. She placed my change in my hand, one coin at a time and I watched as if hypnotized by her movements and enthralled by the grace that she so effortlessly possessed.

We didn’t speak as she took her time placing the money in the palm of my outstretched hand, and it felt as if we were engaged in some kind of unspoken ritual of sorts. As the last coin was deposited, her fingers remained and the tip of a red nail began pressing surprisingly and painfully into my hand as she watched every expression that came over my face.

We stood there in silence, staring at each other, and her dagger like nail coming dangerously close to breaking through the first layer of my skin. As my insubordinate eyes wandered again, I couldn’t help but feel passion and staring into her eyes produced love. Wait, staring into her eyed produced –what? What was it those eyes produced? Love? Was that what was really produced? Yes, the eyes were producing love, while that crimson colored fingernail was beginning to produce sever pain that I could no longer ignore.

“Can I take you out for dinner tonight?” With no good options available to me, this was my default setting kicking in. I was not expecting the world’s most seductive looking/brainiac fairy to say yes; in fact, I would have been perfectly content had she simply stopped digging her fingernail into the palm of my hand.

Having grown bored of her infliction of pain, she removed her fingernail, leaving a visible dent the shape of a crescent moon and brought her slender finger to her face so that it rested on her perfectly painted red lips in the traditional “I’m thinking about that” pose. If her goal was to make sure that I noticed that her lipstick was as smooth and polished as her nails, it worked. Her lips had a totally matt finish and held a very “full” look. Here lips were not designed to induce anything; they were designed to imply something, one thing, one very specific thing: Sensuality. She knew this and as she watched my face, I could see she wanted to be sure that I knew this as well.

“No,” she said and allowed the word to linger in the air. I was about to protest, to desperately beg if I had to but once again she was two steps ahead of me. Her perfectly manicured finger now rested upon my own lips and I made a conscious effort not to gently take that delicious looking finger in my mouth and suck on it gently. But honestly, I felt transfixed in her presence, simply waiting upon what she would do or say next that would put me in awe.

“But, if fate should dictate that we meet again, and you have it in you to ask me again, then maybe I will say yes.” And with that she walked away and I stood there frozen, watching until she was fully out of sight.

As an atheist I did not believe in a higher power that would orchestrate events like these for some greater purpose; I did not believe some things were destined to happen a certain way for a certain purpose. But, ironically fate, or pure chance, did dictate that we would meet again and that meeting would send my life into a downward spiral into the deepest, darkest abyss I had ever experienced. And yet, looking back to that day, the day that I stood there, her delicate finger placed gently on my lips, I often wonder if I had the chance to go back and erase that day, would I?