I was running on adrenaline that afternoon, and my brain pounded on the walls of my skull, crying out for some sleep. I had been so excited to see him that I ended up not sleeping for the entire night; because of this I thought he was making a bad joke when he said I looked cute. How could anything which had been awake all night and was now perspiring under the hot Mountain View sun of early July be considered cute?
In the cool of the taxi, I didn't dare look at him. He paid for the cab without hesitation when we arrived at the sprawling brown-brick campus that was Netscape's headquarters, and I decided to be flattered.
It was the first time I had met his co-workers, and their eyes blatantly measured my worth as a human being as they stared at me with that innocent rudeness that only computer nerds and the really gorgeous can get away with. After I spent enough time with them to satisfy their curiosity, I asked him to take me to a place where I could nap, as I had told him about my fatigue in the cab, and he made me comfortable in a dark conference room, leaving a few moments later to finish up his day's work. For a few minutes the adrenaline prevented me from sleeping so I rested in the chair and marveled at the fact that I was in one of the buildings of the company that produced my Internet browser.
I shut my eyes for a second, and when I opened them again two hours had passed and the throbbing in my skull had stopped. As I wallowed in the feeling of renewed alertness, I heard him come into the room toward me, and I leaned slightly back in my chair so that my head would touch his body when he came to a stop right behind me. I asked quietly how much more work he had left, and he said he was done for the day as he handed me a stuffed animal.
It was a small green dragon, unbelievably silly-looking. I loved it.
Except for the heat and the humidity and some banter about my lack of spine, nothing else sticks out in my mind about the walk from Netscape to his apartment except when we both made the exact same joke about Thoreau at the exact same moment. We looked at each other and sheepishly grinned, considering the implications - if any - of that coincidence till we entered his second-floor apartment. The apartment was sparsely furnished, which I would detest later but loved at that moment because hot weather always makes me more irritable when there's clutter all around me.
We were both exhausted - him from work, myself from lack of sleep, and we both collapsed onto the cool carpet next to each other, too tired in the thick heat to do anything but chuckle at the rather anticlimactic turn of events.
Then I felt his hand cover mine, and a moment later I wasn't tired, and the weather wasn't an issue.