You step forward. “Hold up – can I just tell you something?”
She pauses, looking in your direction, but her body still facing down the hallway.
“I don’t want anything from you,” you assure her. “I just had to say: you are one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.” Another woman rubbernecks as she strolls past you both, with an appraising glance at Inez.
Inez flashes a shy little smile, turning to face you full-on now. “Flatterer,” she accuses you.
You shrug. “Like I said: I don’t want anything from you.” Then you stand back against the wall, acting as if your business is all finished.
“You know,” Inez says, “I don't ever think of myself as the sort of woman who cares about that sort of thing. But even so, it’s always nice to hear it.” She cocks her head sideways. “Even if you don’t mean it.”
“Does it matter whether I do or not?”
“Now that,” she says, taking a step towards you, “is a very interesting answer.”
Your pulse starts pounding in your ears. Don't blow it! you urge yourself. “Would you like to go get a cup of coffee with me to talk about it?”
She sucks her breath in between her teeth. “Sorry, kiddo. You seem nice and all, but I’m not really looking for love at the moment.”
“Who said anything about love?" you ask as she turns away. "Do you know how long it's been since I've just had a really good conversation?"
She pauses, glancing back over her shoulder. And there it is again – that mischievous gleam in her eye.
She turns around slowly and takes two steps back in your direction. "Give me one really good, truly interesting discussion topic and we'll give it a go." She crosses her arms, pursing her lips and raising an eyebrow. You have to admit – it's kind of adorable.
She has no way to know it, but you just so happen to have a great discussion topic at hand. You lock eyes with her steadily and say, "If you had the power to go back and revisit events in your life, try out different options to see which one works out best, what would you do with it?"
She nods, unlacing her arms and pushing her fists down into her jacket pockets. For several seconds, neither of you moves.
"I prefer tea," she says. She walks away without waiting to see if you'll follow.
* * *
It's a five minute walk from Penn Hall to the student union. You spend the first three of them in silence.
"So," you ask finally, "what's your major?"
She stops so fast you hear boot leather scraping across the pavement. "Really?" she asks, incredulously. "You actually get me to have a cup of tea with you and that's the best you can do."
"A good conversation should be savored," you counter. "When it happens, I want to be 100% focused on every bit of it. I want to fly the airplane; right now, we're just taxiing down the runway."
She snorts out a sigh, shakes her head, and keeps heading the way you'd been going. "Ask me something else," she suggests.
You consider for a few seconds. "If someone acting in good faith tries to save a person's life – say, CPR or something – and ends up killing the person instead, has that person committed a crime?"
She keeps her head bowed down watching the sidewalk, but her eyes slide sideways towards you. "I bet you're a ton of fun at parties."
You shrug. "These are the sorts of things I think about."
"Philosophy major, then?"
"Really?" you ask her. "You actually get me to have a cup of coffee with you and that's the best you can do?"
That gets an actual chuckle out of her. "I'm just trying hard not to intimidate you with my prodigious intellect right out of the gate."
Five minutes later, you're sitting across a small table together with two steaming mugs between you. "Ready for takeoff now, Captain?" she asks you, her mouth quirked sideways.
"If you could go back to different points in your life and choose different paths, what would you do with it?"
"So here's the thing," she beings, wrapping both hands around her mug. "Answers really don't interest me that much. But questions … questions fascinate the hell out of me."
"How so?"
"To what end?"
"Huh?"
"To what end would I be making these changes in my life?"
"Whatever you like," you say.
"But what's the ultimate goal?" she asks. "Am I trying to make myself more successful? Avoid mistakes? Stand up to the bullies in third grade that I didn't stop being afraid of until ninth grade?"
"Again, I'd say that's up to you."
She taps the fingers of one hand on the tabletop. "But see, this is why I find questions so damned fascinating. Because your question isn't really about what you want to change."
"It isn't?"
She has to pause while she sips her tea, shaking her head as she carefully swallows it. "It's about what you want your life to be."
You shrug. "Anything you want it to be."
She shakes her head again. "Now you're just talking in circles."
"Talk me out of them again, then," you challenge her.
She leans forwards across the table towards you. "What's the matter with the life you've got right now?"
You pause, studying her face for a few seconds, and then sit back in your chair. "Oh come on," you say. "There has to be some choice you made at some point that ended up being a huge mistake, or at least ended up being a long side-trip down a dead-end street."
"And how would I recognize one of these bad choices if I had one?"
"Because you don't like the way things turned out."
She spreads her hands. "I like my life the way it is."
"But it could be better," you say.
"Better how? Define 'better.' How am I supposed to know when it's better?" She takes another sip of her tea, her eyes smiling at you over the lip of her mug.
"I don't know: the road not taken," you answer.
Her eyes narrow slightly. "You know that that poem doesn't mean what most people think it means," she tells you.
"English major, then," you say – telling rather than asking.
"Frost himself says that he's sorry that he couldn't 'travel both roads and be one traveler.' My choices aren't a road. They're me." She turns her hand palm-up; she wears her wristwatch with the face on the inside. "Speaking of which, I need to get going."
"But we were just getting started."
She standing up now, pulling her jacket back on. "You wanted a good conversation; you got it."
"You haven't finished your tea," you protest.
"But tea wasn't really the point, was it?" she asks. "It was nice to meet you."
"Wait –" you call to her retreating back, "you never even asked me my name."
"No. I didn't," her voice floats back to you.
Which leaves you sitting all alone at the table. Inez's mug of tea is still steaming.
You shake your head. There was never a single moment in that entire conversation where you had any power at all to steer. It occurs to you that the "prodigious intellect" line might not have entirely been a joke.
Still, you have to admit: you're intrigued. Inez has gone from being a distant, mysterious goal to something you definitely want to look deeper into.
"Well," you say out loud, "no time like the present." You jump back fifteen minutes into the hallway full of people, half of them already texting someone on their phones.
Inez appears. You decide to
Or you can think better of it, deciding instead to