Ago

August 2, 1992

On the last evening of a summer trip to Montreal, I shared a dance with the love of my dreams on the deck of a St. Lawrence River dinner cruise.

I was seventeen, and she looked around my age. When the last slow song played — “Nothing Broken But My Heart” by Céline Dion — the wind blew past and led my eyes to her, fluttering her shoulder-length hair against her bare shoulders. The blue of her cocktail dress, pale as white in the waxing twilight, made her my Cinderella. I took a breathless step, and another. Face to face, I saw her eyes — they were hazel, the eyes of the beautiful stranger.

Wordlessly, we closed our distance. The wafting scents of shampoo and perfume sent a shiver down my spine. The delicate lady in lace-up heels kept her head down, and hid her flushed face in my neck. Anyone who saw us surely thought we were young lovers. I looked up at the lights of Montreal against the sky, and pulled her closer as the wind picked up. The chilly breeze, her warm body — how I froze from a graze, how I burned from a glance!

The music stopped, and the love of my dreams brought her face to mine, to plant a kiss or say a sweet nothing. Her lips chose neither as she stepped back and beamed a smile that said everything.