Sylvia 1

Sylvia – that was her name. I don’t remember her last name, but it wasn’t hers anyway – it was her ex-husband’s or soon-to-be-ex-husband’s.

I didn’t really know much more than that about her, because all I ever heard her say in her halting, deliciously-accented English was, “chHello, Zhay-mie. chHow are ju?” Her friends from the warehouse would tell me, “Sylvia says ‘Hello’, Jamie!” and “Sylvia thinks you’re cute, Jamie!”, but they just giggled and told me to ask her when I pressed them for more information. They giggled the same way each time I showed up in the warehouse to fix something and she bounced over to hug me ‘hello’ in a sort of lingering way that pressed her pert breasts up against my chest. Sometimes the hug ended with a glossy-lipped kiss on the soft part of my neck beneath my ear. I liked those days.

She was a little older than me, but still really cute in a slender, petite way that didn’t usually appeal to me in other girls. She always looked great – she wore shirts and jeans that hugged her curves, darkened her lashes to make her speckled brown eyes pop from her toffee-colored face, brushed something over her lips that made them plump and glisteny – even while most of the other girls in the warehouse didn’t bother with more than a hair-clip and pull-over sweater. It was enough to make me double-check each morning that my teeth were brushed, my polo wasn’t wrinkled, and that I hadn’t forgotten the bodyspray. I didn’t realize until much later that she she was always primping when I was around, that she was always just putting the lip gloss away because her lookout friend by the stairs had told her I was coming.

The sad thing was that I was too embarrassed to use my four years of high school Spanish to tell her directly how cute she looked cute, how I liked her jeans or her her hair, so our conversations always started bursting with promise, but ended quickly and awkwardly. Still, her part of the warehouse seemed to have an awful lot of things that needed fixing, and I always made it a point to be the one to answer the call.

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