The city girl

She was a city girl. And so she liked city boys. There were the born-and-bred-here guys who were reared by urban professionals and soon to become the same. There were the born-and-raised-here fellas who grew up in the tougher areas, prided themselves on their blue collar upbringing and supported themselves through college. There were the metrosexuals, paragons of grooming, fashion and accessorizing. And there were the transplants, guys who moved to the city from the suburbs or other cities.

City boys. She liked them all. She dated them all.

And so it was peculiar when one night, she happened to meet a certain country boy at a certain city bar. He grew up in a small town in the southern part of a Midwestern state. He was tall with light blonde hair and light blue eyes, unpretentious and almost uncomfortably charming. And he spoke with a slight drawl. The way his words slowly formed on his lips, comfortable and easy, made her want to curl up into one of his sentences and just lie there in his drawl.

He was walking her home that night after dining on fine cheese pizza when she turned to him and asked "You know you have a drawl, right?"

"Yes, I know," he said smiling.

They stopped in front of her house and he looked at her with a half smile. She smiled back. He leaned forward and she closed her eyes when he kissed her.

She rarely rated kisses. In fact she rarely rated guys on anything. But this kiss, on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being absolutely dreadful and 10 being absolutely perfect, was a 9.5. Maybe a 9.6. His kiss was like him, disarming and irresistible.

When their lips parted, he looked at her and placed his hand on her cheek. She shifted uncomfortably beneath his gaze. "What?" she said.

"You have no idea how beautiful you are, do you?" he asked holding her face. Had this come from a city guy, she would have rolled her eyes and mocked him. But his soft drawl made it sound perfect and she shivered and smiled.

"Stop it," she said, unable to stop smiling.

"You are." And as he held her face, he kissed her again.

When she went to bed that night, she laid her head on her pillow, curled underneath the blanket and thought of him. His light eyes. His arms wrapped around her waist. And his lips. She touched hers, trying to remember his. And with that she fell asleep.