redirection .. right through my face

She surprised me with her answer. She said she was there looking for me. Instead of being insulted that she was looking for me in the refuse of Ar I accepted that as logical and got all wrapped up in trying to understand why she was looking for me in the first place. Fifteen and a half things formed on my tongue to say, but it was the seventeenth impulse that took root after eating the poor weakened sixteenth child of my assumptions and I finally got all of it boiled down into one profound universe-encompassing question ... "Me?"

She brushed over the most important thing in the universe like it was any other mortal question. "Yes I was looking for you, you told me to find you."

oh .. right

I used stomach and thigh muscles to pull myself back up and I grasped the bars while I worked my boots loose .. hanging for a moment before I let go to drop to the ground beside her. At this point since she was not jumping on the universal question bandwagon for me I decided to ask it a little differently. "Why did you want to find me?"

"I wanted to see if you had eaten today."

huh

I was distracted by the candy store of cuts on her fingers and thumb. So distracted that it took me a moment to realize that the two guys intent on collections were once again hot on my trail. Couple of trained sleens. So distracted I told her I would eat something with her. What a crock of shit that was .. where exactly was I going to sit and eat with a high caste woman like her? Had she packed a picnic lunch in those robes of concealment? Were we going to spread a little checkered tablecloth on the offal of Ar and drink tea from rose printed cups? But at the moment it seemed logical to get her away from the immediate area. Only it became even more obvious that there was no way she was going to be able to keep up with me. I started looking up .. up to my escape routes. But I couldn't leave her. That left only one thing to do. I told her to keep going and not look back until she was back where she belonged. And then I turned around to head back the very way I had come to meet what I had been so good at avoiding before. This was going to hurt. It was going to hurt a lot.

Women.