He was beautiful. Head bent over a book, his hair was a mass of glossy chestnut. It was perfectly tousled and mussed but he didn’t look the type to have done it on purpose. I think it was a byproduct of leaving the house in a hurry. 

He looked up from his book and reached for another. Soft green eyes scanned the library briefly before settling into the new read. Across the table I sat, watching him over the rim of my glasses. I wondered what he was studying. His books didn’t look familiar.

As I was trying to melt into my chair and be as unobtrusive as possible I noticed that a piece of hair had fallen into his face. It just hung there, waiting to be swept back into place. It was just long enough to be hanging in front of his eyes but it didn’t seem to bother him. He went on reading as if he didn’t even notice it.

I had one of those crazy impulses to reach out and put it back into place.  The impulse was so strong that for a moment I thought I was going to do it. I didn’t even know him!  For that split second though it didn’t matter. I just wanted to put that bit of hair back in place, feel it’s softness and run my fingers through the rest of it. I realized that my fixation was starting to sound bizarre and I capped that thought before I ended up acting on it. What was wrong with me?

I tried to turn my attention back to physics.  No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t focus on Newton and his three laws. Ok, the First Law of Motion, I thought. An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Well that’s a fact, isn’t it? Here I was sitting mere feet from this beautiful creature and I couldn’t even act.  And unbalanced? Definitely.

The Second Law of Motion. The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, blah blah blah. Simply, a force causes an object to accelerate. The force that was causing my heart rate to accelerate looked up again, this time toward the door. I wondered if he was waiting for someone. That hair was still out of place.

I chewed on my pencil and tasted wood. The Third Law of Motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What would be the equal and opposite reaction if I leaned across the table and kissed him? His lips were full and looked soft. Wow, I needed to get out of here. This was getting out of hand.

I collected up my books and notes and started shoving everything into my backpack, not bothering to tidy up and organize my work. Across from me, the object of my mini obsession looked up briefly and smiled at me. There went that Second Law again.

I slung my backpack over my shoulder and started towards the door. I had taken three steps when I suddenly stopped.  What the hell. I turned back around and walked over to him. I don’t remember my heart beating.

“Excuse me?”  He looked up at me and I gently brushed the hair out of his face. “That’s better”, I told him. I caught his smile as I turned and walked away.

I woke up wrapped in my blankets and curled into a ball. I thought I smelled bacon coming from the kitchen.  My ears perked and I looked around but didn’t see or hear anyone in the kitchen. Maybe I was dreaming it.  I dropped my head and lay there for a minute, trying to nestle back into the blankets and get back to sleep. After a while I realized that it just wasn’t happening. Oh, well. I was awake so I may as well get up.

The floor was cold as I walked out of the bedroom and promptly stepped on a Spiderman motorcycle. Dylan! He leaves his things everywhere. It would serve him right if I had broken it because it smarted. Not the best way to start the day.

After a satisfying Downward Facing Dog I went off into the kitchen in search of food. I think the bacon in my dream must have jump-started my belly because it was growling pretty loudly. I passed the kitchen table where there was last night’s pizza still left out. Someone forgot to put it away. Such a shame, and home made, too! I don’t mind it cold but it’s much better hot. I took a piece off of the table and stood there eating it, relishing the cold pepperoni.  What was one or two more?  A growing girl needs her food! I polished off the last of it and then went to wash it down with some water.  Someone was going to be upset that they forgot to put it away in the refrigerator. Their loss, my gain.

I spotted one of the cats on the kitchen counter drinking milk out of a cereal bowl. As soon as she saw me looking she rushed off, knowing that she was caught. Don’t these cats ever learn?  I chased her over to the basement door, intent on teaching her a lesson but she made it through the kitty door before I could reach her.  I nearly slid into the wall door going after her.  I think the cat actually turned around and laughed at me through the little window. Oh, I hate that cat! 

The house was still pretty quite. No one else was up yet, so that meant I had the whole house to myself. What to do, what to do? The possibilities were endless. I considered all of my options and then decided to take advantage of the stillness of the morning. I curled up on the couch and enjoyed the silence.

It was short lived. I heard Dylan get out of bed and go into the bathroom.  He came out of the bathroom and proceeded to help himself in the pantry. He headed over to the table with a box of cereal and opened it up. After digging through the box for a minute he pulled out a toy and held it up in the light. “Cool”, he said with a yawn. He didn’t see me on the couch.  Dylan was too busy eating dry cereal straight from the box.  I guess growing boys have to eat, too.

I dragged myself off the couch and went into the bedroom. It was still dark in there but I could see that Mom was still asleep in bed. I stood there, waiting. Sometimes if I just stood there she’d wake up, feeling me watching her. It was time to get this party started, and I needed to pee.

“Katie?” She lifted her head off of her pillow. “Do you need to go outside?” she asked.

“Woof!” I answered and wagged my tail. When you gotta go, you gotta go.

I lay next to my daughter, cuddled into her.  She was contentedly sucking on her thumb, a habit that I had unsuccessfully tried to break.

She sighed, drifting.

I kept my eyes open for a bit, watching her. When I shifted, her eyes opened briefly then settled as she continued her journey to Sweet Dreams. Her lashes were so long.

I closed my eyes. My mind wandered.

I had been working on a story in my head. It came to me out of the blue, this sudden jolt that stopped me from all other thought. I quickly wrote down key ideas and set it aside, intending to get back to it later that day.

And then life happened.

I came across the scrap piece of paper a few months later and the idea still sparked in my head. As I lay there I began to imagine the opening chapter:

"Get this thing off my lawn." Daddy waved his arms when he was annoyed, and he was pretty annoyed right now.  It looked like he was trying to fly like a bird.  With his briefcase in his hand that looked kinda funny.

"But it's our fort. Sissy and I made it together. Wanna come inside?" I asked. Sissy was peeking out of the fort that we made, looking worried. She started chewing on her hair.

"No, I don't want to come inside. I want you and your sister to take this thing down. It doesn't belong in the front yard." His hands went on his hips. Not good.

"You don't like it?" We had spent the whole afternoon working on it.

Daddy sighed. "Yes, I like it but it doesn't belong here on the front lawn. Look, you can put it up somewhere in the backyard just so long as it's not out here. You're going to ruin my grass".

I wondered if Daddy was going to go get the lawnmower next. He spent a lot of time in the front yard.

"We'll take it down." Sissy let out a big yell.

By the time we had finished taking the fort down, the sky was turning orange and Mama called us in for dinner. We'd have to put the fort up tomorrow.

When morning came, Sissy and I went out to the backyard right after breakfast. We used all the boards that we found in Daddy's workshop yesterday and a couple of boxes that we found in the shed. There was a sheet that covered one of Mama's old bicycles so we grabbed that, too. Since we had already built a fort we were pretty quick about building this one. When it was finished Sissy and I stood back and looked at it. It was so much better than yesterday's fort.

"This one is special," I said to Sissy. She nodded, her hair in her mouth.

We went inside for lunch. PB and J on toast. That's the only way Sissy will eat it but that's okay because it's really good.

After we ate our lunch and drank all of our chocolate milk we went back outside to play in our new fort. Sissy went into the fort as I grabbed some Barbies for us to play with. I heard Sissy yelling for me from inside. "KAYLA!"

"WHAT?" I yelled back as crawled in. I couldn't wave my arms around like Daddy while crawling because I had Barbies in them. “Here’s yours,” I said, handing it to her. And then I saw. 

We weren't in the fort anymore.

My eyes fluttered open.  I heard my daughter's deep, even breaths and knew she was in a deep sleep.  She had lulled me into my story with her breaths. I could see what was now inside the fort that no longer was.

I got out of her bed and headed downstairs.