2:21 Wednesday Afternoon   Mobsters and Lovers We can pretend... I'm a smuggler. Always crossing the borders with illegal goods with such an innocent smile and pretty face. Not sexy or smoldering, mind you. Just...a nice girl passing through. Sexy is too suspicious. I just hand the goods off for a nice little fee/percentage of profits, and am done with it. I go to a bar with a neatly wrapped parcel (in my imagination, the content of these little parcels is completely irrelevant) to trade for some good hard cash with one of my favourite customers, who happens to also be the barkeep. So I laugh about exploits and adventures with my friend, each customers of each other, over a dry martini, when I see him. He looks rushed. Dishevelled, unshaven, and very, very Sexy. I wink at the barkeep and put on a Frank Sinatra song on the jukebox, one of those new songs he just put out in 1946. I don't even care that he doesn't write the lyrics or music. I skip over to the dishevelled stranger in a haggard fedora and a white zootsuit with a few reddish-orange stains here and there. Mysterious. Blood? Or maybe catsup? "hey there, handsome," I say as I slide onto the barstool next to him. "Hello," he replies. "Do I know you?" "No, but would you like to?" I ask completely innocently. "We can get to know each other over dancing to this cute little ditty sung by Ol' Blue Eyes, then maybe cocktails afterwards? Whaddaya say, friend? At least a dance?" "What's your name?" he asks me. "Ah ah! the small talk--it can wait until you agree to dance with me," I smile. He stands up, and i uncross my legs and offer my hand to him so he can help me up. He takes it and strangely, I feel more attracted to him than I ever have to anyone...and i have had my fair share of men. I think I'm blushing, even, as I hop off the barstool and get led by this indescribably handsome man...as rundown as he looks...maybe it's part of the appeal. so we're swaying to the long-over Frank Sinatra song and to some song from a different member of the ratpack comes on the juke box, and i say, "I'm Teresa," with a coy smile. We talked for hours. I don't know. We just clicked. It was crazy. He came back to my place with me. He said he had no where to go. He got in a row with a guy at work...in the mob.... great, a criminal. just like me... So he's leaving town. Well I'm pretty well off with what i've got from smuggling jobs, and i say i'll go with him and quit working. Because the thrill of being on the run is sooo much better than the thrill of being glanced at by the Pigs and those Customs Cats in the airports and trainstations. At my house we sat at my kitchen table and laid out plans for ditching town and finding somewhere to start a new life together. We stayed up hours talking, then went to bed at 2 a.m. But when i woke up at 7 sharp, he was gone. And I don't know why i actually believed this guy i'd not even known for 6 hours, that we could run away and live happily ever after like in all those cutesy fairy tales, but I did. I got my hopes up and every day i wait for him to come back to me. Maybe I found my soulmate, this raggedy man in the bar. Maybe I'm just crazy. But still I wait. Maybe someday he will come back for me. Until then, I'll just wait.