Page 39 of Meeting Her Mate

It was yearning.

Bittersweet yearning. Burdened with the realization that I had rejected her, hurt her feelings, and had been the primary cause of her leaving the commune, I could not feel the yearning in its purest form. I had to experience it mixed with the distorted emotions that my actions had caused.

But she had kissed me first. What did that mean? Was she ready for a deeper forgiveness?

I hesitated at the apartment building’s entrance. I had done something foolish. It was only nine in the morning. For all I knew, she might be sound asleep.

I scanned the parking lot for her truck, hoping that would give me some insight. But unfortunately, at this time, there were tons of cars parked here, making it nearly impossible for me to determine where she had parked her truck. Maybe she hadn’t parked it here at all. Maybe there was an underground parking lot or garage system where she had parked it.

Oh, God. I was getting mind-boggled just standing here.

This was ridiculous. I wasn’t going to accomplish anything by being confounded. I made up my mind and climbed the stairs leading to Alexis’s floor.

But I stayed strong and walked to the end of the hallway and knocked on Alexis’s door. My heart hadn’t hammered this fast in a long, long time. I was suddenly nervous, unable to think of what to say when she opened the door.

I knocked again, my hands feeling cold and clammy.

When there came no response, I knocked a third and final time.

Perhaps it wasn’t fated that we’d meet today.

“Will?”

Or perhaps it was.

“Alexis?” I turned around fast enough to make myself dizzy.

It wasn’t Alexis. It was her friend, Maliha.

“Alexis was being super mysterious,” Maliha said. “Didn’t even tell me where she went.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. I was up all night doing a coding marathon. She came by my place at around six in the morning. She didn’t even, like, tell me where she was going. It’s not like her to be super mysterious. But then again, I never knew that she had a relative who lived in Germany, so maybe that girl’s pretty mysterious after all,” Maliha said. She was sucking on a lollipop in a most comedic fashion. She was dressed in almost the same attire as when I had last seen her. She’d swapped the top she was wearing for a floral shirt.

“I’ll just come back later, then,” I said, turning to leave.

“Or you can wait for her at my place. I saw you looking at my rigs. Don’t tell me you want to have a go at them.”

“I don’t even know the first thing about computers,” I confessed, hoping that it didn’t reveal too much about me.

“Old fashioned. I like that,” she said, twirling her hair around her finger. “Just to be clear, I’m not putting the flirts on you.”

“Do you have any more of that Monster energy drink?” I asked.

“You bet. Come on now, weirdo. We’re going to wait for your fraulein.” She strutted back to her apartment, holding out her lollipop as if it were some sort of cigarette.

In all my life, I had never seen a more bizarre character.

***

Maliha insisted that she wanted me to have fun, so she poured me a Monster energy drink into a glass and added a third cup of whiskey to it. In her own words, this drink was called the devil’s venom. After the first gulp, I didn’t care for how it tasted. It just warmed me up and sent jolts of energy through my body at the same time.

But she didn’t just stop there. She piqued my curiosity by introducing me to an altogether new form of digital entertainment.

“So, this is a video game. You’ve heard of video games before? No? You must be one of those Mennonites or those Pennsylvania Dutch Country folk. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said, making me sit down in front of a giant computer screen. The words GTA V were swimming across the screen next to a very lewd picture of a woman revealing half her bosom.

Then she handed me a remote controller with many multicolored buttons on it. “These are analog sticks. You make your character move with them. You press these keys to shoot a gun, X to run, and so forth. It’s really intuitive.”

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