10086 Sunset Boulevard

Sunday afternoon was all she had to look forward to now. She would sit on the porch, alone as she had been for the past two years, sipping absinthe, allowing her mind to wander. When he had been here, he would drink absinthe with her on Sundays and after the absinthe they always made love. As they grew older and their sex life diminished, the Sunday absinthe ritual remained, even if they only lay together in an absinthe afterglow.

Sipping the aromatic aperitif she remembered the first Sunday they had shared a glass. Forty years ago, when he was a man in his late thirties. He was her neighbor, a friend and he’d offered to do her hedges, claiming that he needed to try out his new electric hedge trimmer. Her hedges didn’t really need trimming. Afterwards she invited him inside for some refreshment. Absinthe.

He’d downed the first glass in one gulp. He was a beer man. She laughed and told him to sip the second glass, it wasn’t a gulping beverage. He wasn’t sure he liked the taste, but it was seductive.

He wore no shirt that day, just jeans and a tool belt. She savored the absinthe while she took him in with her eyes, letting her gaze lower in a slow tease, following the sweat as it made a trail from his chest to his navel. By the time her eyes dropped below his tool belt his zipper was strained.

The taste of absinthe mingled with the taste of him. How a sense memory could bring everything flooding back to her, almost too painful and yet such a delicious memory. He had joked later, to their friends, that she had gotten him drunk and taken advantage of him.

He didn’t know that she’d had many an absinthe Sunday alone. Sipping and watching him while he worked on his house or his yard or washing his car, she’d fantasize about the first time they would drink together, wondering if she’d ever have the nerve to make a move.

Now, once again, she drank absinthe alone as she looked out upon her overgrown hedges.