Coffee and a Revelation

Sorry to be updating so late. I just came back from coffee (or COFFEES, as in 4-5 of them) with Fredrika.

It turns out the girl is quite the geek, and I mean that in a serious way.

Let me start at the beginning. We were supposed to meet for coffee around 8PM, but I finished work a bitl ater than usual (rush project), so we pushed it back to 9PM. And unfortunately, I got held up by some last minute edits on a book, which just had to be done tonight, so I arrived about 15 minutes late. So there she was, waiting quietly as a mouse in her little dark corner of the coffee shop, listening to music and tapping the screen of her iPad. (I discovered a bit later, during the conversation, that she was making sketches and caricatures of the people in the cafe.)

I apologized for being late, offered to buy another coffee (she’d just finished her first, which suggested she’d been here for a bit), and did the usual introductory chit chat. I was kind of dying to find out why she wanted us to have coffee, but I didn’t want to be the one to bring it up. So it was a good 15 minutes before she broached the topic.

“So, did you ever find that woman you were looking for? And that hobo you had me draw?”

I explained (with very little detail) how everything had gone, told her that I’d seen Morgan a few months back (before Christmas), but never the hobo. She said it was too bad and kind of fell silent.

I waited for her to talk, but she was mute. So I did what I usually do, and I filled the silence with the sound of my own voice.

“Him, I don’t care about, he’s just some creep pervert. But Morgan, well… we had a… close relationship. I’m kind of hoping she’s all right, but at the same time, I think my life is better without her. She really messed things up, maybe not deliberately, but she really messed things up with my girlfriend at the time.. So I kind of don’t miss her, but at the same time, I’m really wondering what happened to her.”

And I went on, and rambled for a bit. Then I realized Fredrika was pretty silent, and I looked at her.

“So why am I here? I mean, why did you want to have coffee with me?”

She fidgeted.

“Do I need a reason? Maybe I’m just mysterious and unpredictable?”

It was meant to be coy and flirtatious, but she had all the timing and confidence of a gangly teenager. I didn’t know what to say, but I knew if I didn’t come to her rescue, this would become disastrously awkward. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I nodded at her iPad.

“Third gen?”

She nodded.

“I hear the camera’s great.”

She jumped on the safely line I was throwing her and ran with it.

“Oh yeah, the best! And that’s not all…”

She started spewing all sorts of iTechnicalities and iSpecs that I was only mildly familiar with. I could see she was getting excited about it, so I encouraged her to show me some of the cooler features of her device. And at some point, while it was in my hands and I was browsing through some of the apps, I stumbled onto her photo album, and one of them was titled “SDCC” (which, I discovered later, meant San Diego Comic Con). I started browsing at some of the photos there, and there were a lot of them of this hot chick doing cosplay (if you’ve never heard of this, look it up!). She was doing an amazing Lara Croft, but also Bayonetta and a very sexy Catwoman (the goggles version). When I asked Fredrika who was that hottie, she just blushed. And my faerie sight told me she was VERY pleased at the compliment.

I blinked.

“That’s YOU?!?”

“Y-yeah… but you can’t tell anyone about this, I’d die if my colleagues found out I do this.”

“No way!” I said. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

I poked around the albums a bit more.

“Any more of you in there?”

“Um, yeah… Let me show you…”

So folks, it turns out that this little conservative, repressed librarian-type-girl has some kind of volcano inside her that is just waiting to erupt. Some of the photos she showed me were… well, I’ll just say they weren’t photos she’d show her parents — ever!

And before we left, she made me promise I’d do a photo session with her some time soon. She wants to show me some of her costumes…

So. To be continued, I guess.

Next Update: Thursday