Tonight, exasperated with my rather unsuccessful cooking and eating over the past week, I went out – fairly late, at 9 pm – to the Italian restaurant up the road.
As with several Italian restaurants in the area, since I've made a point of telling them I'm Italian, and often sit alone with a book, quietly, and a glass of wine, they treat me almost like family. It was also a quiet night – Monday, fairly late – not as noisy and busy as it can be at its most irritating.
The waiter.... oh my. I've seen him before, a couple of times; but he was working alone tonight, and not overworked, so it was easier to pay attention to him. What an amazingly handsome man: dark hair, midsummer tan, built big and naturally muscular – and, most of all, at the peak of his looks. Even people who are very attractive for years on end have a period in their lives, often not very long, when the freshness and intensity of their beauty is at some perfect zenith: and sometimes it seems that beauty is helped when it is also a time of their lives when they are most enjoying, reveling, exulting in their own beauty. Like a flower at its peak, it makes you acutely aware of time, almost sadly: you are immediately aware of the brief time that you can look at such a thing, and you drink it in.
Beauty is, unfortunately, at a premium up here; one sometimes sees a certain rather heavy or rough-edged sexiness, but even that is not very common. So he is wonderful to see – even if I'm shy of looking at him directly. But even glances at him didn't seem to bother him (and that is one of the great advantages of Italian men: they don't mind being admired).
Sorry, there's no picture: I didn't have the nerve to take one.
Pale blue eyes, beneath dark eyebrows, in the light and shade of a slightly sunburned face: such....
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