I'm in the audience, watching her team grin their way to the winner's circle, giving, taking, and soaking up high fives with the crowd as they all but fell down the bleachers. I watched the girl's yellow plaid shirt flutter by, but I didn't raise my hand to slap hers in congratulations.
While I gawked, my friend had noticed the hesitance and pressed a blush onto my cheeks with a wide grin on his stubbly face. I told him that giving that girl a high five was just as stupid as shaking someone's hand after a romantic afternoon together. To properly express how I was feeling to the girl in yellow plaid, I would need to stand up, climb over the audience, and stop time falling into her lips with mine.
The rest of the ceremony ended, and I still hadn't done anything, so, as she walked back to hear seat, I raised my hand to high five her. I felt anxious in wait for her as the crowd paraded by, proudly slapping my hand in the camaraderie of engineers-to-be. Finally it was her.
I pushed my hand toward hers, and much like a normal high five, our palms clapped together. It was different this time through; in her first step after contact, our hands kept pressed, fingers wide as she walked by. The second step pressed them closer, rounding the shape of our small embrace. In her third step, our hands were full of each other, held like lovers, and in her final step, slowly slid apart, and our eyes met.
It was this moment I kept, held, and told about again with a song. Being a moment, however, it slipped by and continued on its merry way towards the commune of moments past I sometimes take a bath in. Contact broke, and she walked to the rest of her team.
The bolts on my joints torqued against my will to move while my eyes ran after her. I could feel my sensibility about to give into the broad romantic stresses building on my aching knees, poised to tear into the moment of touching lips at the front of the arena's stadium seating.
I didn't move.
"Riley! Crazy matches, right? Bummer we lost..." my mentor excitedly called from behind. I turned to acknowledge him, then looked back at her, and she was an outline. Just the first of a few moments she would be an outline to me.
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