The Girl on the Metro PART 2

Pierre held the door from slamming shut just in the right time. He entered the building where Amélie is living and saw that she was taking the elevator. She held the door of the elevator with her arm, and she waved at him, "What are you waiting for?"

When Pierre got into the elevator, it was very narrow and the space very tight. The building was probably as old as the Revolution of Bread.

So without even thinking about it, Pierre slowly moved his gaze to her just like he did on the metro, but this time Amélie smiled and told him, “Don’t get any thoughts, monseigneur”.

He smiled and gesticulated back, “Who said I am getting any?”

She just looked at him and said “Yeah, whatever”.

The elevator beeped and the doors opened. Both of them stepped out of it with Pierre hinting at how claustrophobic it was, and then they made their ways to her apartment. She brought the keys out of her bag and rotated them to the left on the door knob. The lock clicked, the keys clinked, she gave the door a small kick in the bottom, a thud heard, and then she pushed it open.

Pierre, trying to act politely, stepped inside the apartment and stood right next to the door. Amélie was taking her shoes off on a chair near the entrance door of the living room. She looked at him and waved, "Alors? Come in! Do I have to tell you this at every door?"

"Maybe you should" he said. He took his shoes off and was told by Amélie to put them outside of the apartment. They waged a chemical war on their noses. And then he followed her inside.

Liza, Amélie's 2-year old husky, came running at her which she received by crouching and letting her jump on her lap. She kissed and cuddled the dog for a few seconds and then the shewolfdog  showed her sharp fangs and started growling at Pierre.

"Easy now, girl. I'm not who you think it is. Amélie, do something. I don't want to end up shredded to pieces tonight. I just want to eat pasta".

"Stop acting like a little girl. Are you afraid of a puppy?" she said while caressing Liza and having her eyes wide open and jaw dropped at the stranger in the house.

"No? I'm just afraid of her teeth and that aggressive growl she just gave me?"

She chuckled silently. This tickled Pierre from within. He found it so cute and feminine. “Don't worry. She does that to everyone she sees for the first time. Soon, she'll grow fond of you. Just relax and make yourself at home." And she grabbed her bags, snapped her fingers twice at the dog and went to her bedroom.

Pierre, not knowing what to do, decided to first go to the toilet and answer the call of nature. After he finished, he noticed that Amélie’s living room was quite the show.

One corner of the room seemed like it was Amélie's painting workshop. The floor had spots with multiple colors here and there, and  there was a pile of paintings stacked one next to the other behind an old easle. He walked slowly towards them while admiring the classical architecture of the apartment, and when he reached them, he extended his arm and gently picked up the one in middle.

An approximative representation of Amélie's painting corner

The painting he grabbed was that of a woman in her mid 20s who wore a formal attire: black short skirt, high heels, white bottomed shirt with a black jacket on it, glasses with black contour, and was sitting on a chair looking 45° to the right with legs crossed. He blew the dust off it and followed it by a few coughs- he is allergic to dust- and then he followed it by a sneeze, “Argh, putain de merde...” he exclaimed.

He admired the subtleties of the painting though: the facial expressions, the little wrinkles in the corners of the woman’s eyes, her luxurious accessories and the gradual black shade of the clothes. He also liked the confidence she exudes just by her sitting posture- she sat upright with shoulders wide and hands on her thighs one on top of the other, and he found her long pony-tailed black hair that lied on her left shoulder attractive. She wasn’t tall in height, she was rather average, or so it appeared to Pierre- the  long tanned crossed legs had blurred his sense of judgment. She had brown eyes and a clear skin. He wondered how she would look like without the glasses.

He put the painting back and then he grabbed another painting that was situated at the end of the stack. He lifted it up, and he made that face that everyone does before sneezing- ”Achoo!” looked for some tissue and then went back to gazing the paintings.

This one it was an unfinished picture of a flower vase. The vase was situated on a window’s sill and the lightning that found its way through to the room was pretty bright, so Pierre assumed the day was quite warm. The picture was unfinished because the vase and the environment were fully sketched but only the environment colored. The vase was as colorless as a gloomy Sunday in the cruel month. He wondered why this was the case as the flowers in the vase were quite the collection: lilacs, narcissus, daises... and a few other handful of colo- “Achoo!” and his chain of thoughts was interrupted.

“Jésus,” he exclaimed. He put down the picture and was about to continue his little tour when Amélie finally got out of her bedroom in her pyjamas and asked him to come in the kitchen to help her cooking the pasta.

“You know how to cook basic pasta, right?” she enquired.

“Yes, I do. It’s the easiest meal on the planet”.

Even though Amélie couldn’t hear him well, she could definitely hear the sarcastic tone in his voice.  That’s why she assigned him the easiest task which is basically boiling the pasta and stirring it every now and then, as to not make it stick to each other while she prepared the sauce.

After 20 minutes or thereabouts of Amélie reminding Pierre to stir the spaghetti and stop criticizing her cooking skills, the dinner was finally ready and they both with Liza next to them sat on the dining table and started eating.

Pierre took the first mouthful and said nothing. Amélie looked at him waiting for him to say something, but he was so immersed in the variety of the delicate flavours in those few strings of spaghetti dipped in  the sauce bolognaise with the French rapé cheese that caressed his tasting buds, so much so that he started hearing Beethoven’s 7th Symphony inside of his head. The pasta had such an amazing taste- probably the best he had ever tried.

While this romance was going on in Pierre’s mind, he looked like he was mourning the death of a relative from the outside, which perplexed Amélie. So she sat there with eyes wide open trying to gauge his reaction, and after a few minutes, she waved at him, “Alors? How do you find it?”

No answer. A second mouthful gobbled.

She tried a second time, but still no answer. So she knocked twice on the table to which Liza stood up and Pierre suddenly snapped out of his daydreaming. “Alors??”

“Meeh, above average a little. A bit too spicy for me," he said while chewing a third mouthful, "but you could’ve- mumgh mumght- done better, I guess”.

She raised her middle finger and then waved, “That’s funny. Get the fuck out of my apartment,” while angrily smiling at him.

“I’m kidding sweetie,” he said with a reassuring smile, “it’s the best spaghetti with sauce bolognaise I’ve ever tasted which is quite surprising- your cooking looked so sloppy,” and he grabbed the bottle of wine and poured some in his cup and hers. Then he held it up and said, “À votre santé”.

Amélie gave him a wide smile and also grabbed her cup and clinked it to Pierre's.

Pierre took a sip of the wine, it was a Hungarian red wine called "Medina", and it was mixed with a bit of spaghetti inside of his mouth, and Beethoven's 7th symphony turned into Mozart's Eine KleineNachtmusik. At this point he just closed his eyes while they were filled with some tears and he laid back on his chair while exhaling softly from his nostrils and enjoying the music in his head.