17. Blush

There’s no other word for it. The woman three tables over is actually blushing.

He hadn’t intended to stare, it had been an exercise suggested by his therapist–watching strangers for signs of abnormality–to prove that nobody was, in fact, “normal,” but Lucas got distracted by the couple in the café that was seemingly having a picture-perfect date.
There had been no familiar expressions of disappointment or judgment that he’d experienced during his own first dates. Everything that was said either charmed or amused the two people at that small table. Lucas couldn’t understand it. Where was the abnormality? The fumble? The struggle to connect?
He rips open a sachet of sugar and pours it into the centre of the foam on his cappuccino. He thinks about the word blush. Everything about it sounds romantic. That scene in his mother’s favourite movie, Steel Magnolias, comes to mind. The one where Julia Roberts announces her wedding colours are “blush and bashful,” in a forced Louisiana accent. He’d never paid much attention to the word blush before that.
The man sitting across from the woman says something in a low voice, avoiding her gaze. It makes her smile shyly, bashful, Lucas thinks.
A recent jilt has left him cynical. Looking for the bits of a person that are just a little bit off, a little more human, has made him feel better. He’s noticed it in the stutter of the cashier, the clumsiness of the woman at the next table, and the tone-deafness of his barista. But the young couple a few tables over are carefully hiding their flaws. It’s unnatural.
It’s been almost three weeks since he heard from the person who couldn’t love him at his worst. In return, he couldn’t love them at theirs, either. Now, watching the besotted couple who are practically spewing honeyed words and fluttering their eyelids, he feels gratitude for the silence that fills his life. It's taken that silence for him to learn that, with the right person, you can love someone even when you hate them.
He wonders if the couple at that table will figure that out, perhaps they already have. As he stirs his coffee, sips, and wipes the foam from his upper lip he watches them leave, smiling and wrapping their arms around each other as they cross the street. Lucas quietly hopes that they both know how to love each other, even when they, inevitably, end up hating each other.