SWEET.

He was just so sweet. SWEET. She hated when people called her that. It just seemed so airbrushed so generalized. She wanted to punch those people in their face with her sweet little hand. Cute. Cute was another one. Cute. If you are under 5ft 5 you are cute, you are not hot you are not beautiful, maybe you are pretty, but you are cute, sweet. At 5ft 2 she was sacrine. And here she was thinking this of him. Sweet. And the truth is, she wouldn’t have said yes. It’s just he was so-nice, and she was over her usual weight, and tired, and thought why not. It was just a drink, a drink with a nice guy. A nice guy who wore baseball caps and hadn’t bought new clothes since high school. Which was more annoying than sweet. She didn’t want to be a person who tried to change another person. So despite how sweet he was, this could go nowhere. Because she didn’t want to change him. And she wondered if that makes it worse, makes her more or less of a snob, that she entertained it for what she thought was his sake. It was one drink.
She didn’t eat before. She’d been trying not to. Not starving herself really. She drank a coffee. She didn’t dress up, didn’t try her usual to not look cute. She didn’t even wear lipgloss. It would be one drink. Not a pity drink, but a practice for her, I mean after all he was/seemed so very sweet.
He had a stain on his shirt, and his voice would pitch high, and he held open doors. But he laughed at her jokes, and asked questions, and after a while she was actually asking questions back. Questions she wanted the answers to. And after a while she stopped hearing the answers and saw how they were said, his gaze intense, genuine, sure sweet, but strong.
And as she looked at him and his eyes melted into his face, and his face melted away, and then they came back again. She thought I could sit and do nothing with this man. I could see this man working on science projects, and doing dishes, and maybe bickering with me now and again. I could sit in silence on a Sunday morning. And it wasn’t overwhelmingly animal or sexual, or because her hips felt big that day, or the insecurity of swollen breasts. and you may think it settling, or patriarchal, but it wasn’t that. She just looked at him and thought ‘ he won’t call me cute’.