See Dot Smile

Baby Bear

I'm not embarrassed to share all this with Bud. I'm just not shy around him. I don't know if that's good or bad, but once I'm done dumping my psyche in his lap, I feel better.

* * * * *

When we get to the diner, Bud comes around to my door and lets me out. He offers me a hug, wordlessly. I hesitate, worried that a hug might be crossing the line into date territory, but I can't help being drawn in by the heat radiating from inside his coat.

I slide my arms around the toasty fibers of his sweater and surrender against him. He doesn't squeeze me. He just closes his coat around me and lets me take what I need from inside. And I really needed this. This kindness, this warmth. 

Bud is so warm. I swear he must have a basal body temperature of a hundred and one degrees.

"Okay," he says, tapping out of our embrace before I do. "Let's go eat our feelings and deal with these voicemails from Joshua."

The diner is mobbed, and it doesn't take long to discover why this is Bud's favorite place to go for pancakes.

"Oohhh, is that my Baby Bud? Come here and let me kiss you, sweetheart." A woman with gray hair pulled up in a tight bun with pencils stuck in it comes to greet us, ignoring the half dozen people ahead of us in line. She plants a massive kiss on Bud's cheek, turning him almost as red as her now smudged lipstick. She rubs her thumb over the stain on his cheek but only manages to spread the color around more. I want her to kiss the other side to even things out.

"Hi, Mae Mae. Happy New Year." Bud smiles at her.

"Wait right here, I'm going to get you a table." She half whispers it, but it's still loud enough to annoy the people we're about to cut in line.

"Baby Bud?" I ask. "Can I call you that, too?"

"No," he says, blushing like a madman. "And you also can't call me--"

"SUGAR BEAR! OH, MY GAWD!" Another fifty something waitress, this one with jet black, clearly dyed, hair and whitened teeth appears from the busy dining room to fawn over Bud. "Tina, look who's here!" she hollers behind her into the din.

"I'm serving coffee!!" A disembodied voice calls back.

"Put the coffee down and come say hi to Sugar Bear before I eat him myself." White toothed waitress slinks up to Bud and gives him a bosom heavy side hug, which she maintains long enough for Tina to arrive and claim the other side.

I hate to admit this, but I'm getting a little jealous. And a little ticked off that neither of these handsy waitresses has acknowledged my presence next to Baby Bear.

Mae Mae returns and shoos them away. She winks at me, knowingly, and then leads us to a table at the back of the diner to the unanimous cry of "foul" from the folks waiting ahead of us. Apparently, they aren't privy to Bud's influence at Mae Mae's Place.

"Coffee, lovers?" Mae Mae asks as we slide into our cozy little booth by the window.

"Yes, please," Bud says. "And we're just friends, Mae Mae."

"Sure." She winks at me again, this time more deliberately. "Like me and the cook are friends." She cackles at her own joke and heads to the coffee maker to collect a pot.

When I turn to Bud, he has his face buried in the one-page, laminated menu, which he already has memorized based on his reception here. I can tell from the part in his hair that he's blushing. I reach over and tug at a strand of his dark blonde locks. He starts laughing. "I'm sorry," he says. "They're not usually that obnoxious. I just haven't been here in a long time. I swear I didn't bring you here to show off my harem of diner waitresses."