Olivia found herself thinking about Blake on and off all day. She felt too shy to see him that evening. She walked the long way around to her train station and then fantasized about him that night. Not so much sexually, although she had seen a bulge in his pants and, normally, Olivia didn’t notice that. She wondered most of that evening what Blake would be like cleaned up. She’d always been intrigued with the whole makeover concept, but she never thought about applying it to a guy. It was the woman in those old movies, who removed her glasses and shook out her hair and was transformed from spinster to sexpot. It was females in the magazines who sat for the before-and-after shots. But Olivia imagined scrubbing Blake clean, donning him in fresh flannel and denim, combing his streaky hair.

She woke the next morning trying “Ollie” on for name. She liked it. She’d been a little put off when he first said it, but it was growing on her. She’d never had a nickname before. She attempted “Livy” for a brief time in high school, but it didn’t take. Her friends kept calling her by her full name – “Oh-Livia” when they paged or lulled her, just like her mom – and she kept feeling frowsty for it. “Ollie” seemed capricious to her. Whimsical. Comfortable/goofy. She rolled the syllables around her mouth while she brushed her teeth. She said it out loud while she watched two squirrels chasing around the trunk of the oak tree outside. She shouted it, and the closest squirrel sat up and bulged his berry eyes at her, spine like a question mark, tail like a bottlebrush.

Blake was looking for her when she hit the sidewalk that morning. “Hello Ollie” he said with a smile. And “hi Blake” she returned. “Take me home tonight?” He asked it without assumption or insult. She was startled but she stopped. “What?”

He hesitated. He looked in her face, considered something, mumbled, blushed, and smiled. Before she thought her words through she told him she’d be back at lunch.

“I can bring food,” she said. “What do you eat?”

“Anything.”

“Not vegetarian…?”

“You know the saying: beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Okay then, Blake. I’ll see you around noon.”

She continued up the crowded sidewalk to her office building. She was surrounded by pedestrians wearing electronics, but she was as unaware of her environment as any of them. She moved inattentively amid a sea of headphoned folk, into intersections crowded with cars driven by people on radios or cellphones, but Olivia saw only the inside of her forehead, where visions of cuddles and conversations danced in place of the morning sun.

For lunch she bought portobello mushroom sandwiches, with mozzarella and pesto on focaccia. She didn’t intend to seem fancy, but it was the only tasty item at the Italian coffee bar outside her office. She added bottled water and a big cookie. She walked with the food and her nervous excitement to Blake’s corner.

He put away his cup and they sat on the wall overlooking the hackysackers. An adolescent Dalmatian interfered with the game and had to be leashed to a small tree. Ollie learned that Blake was in fact a bike messenger. He’d been clipped by a bus two months earlier, and he broke his knee. Bike messenger jobs didn’t come with benefits. Blake had no health insurance. His meager savings had gone to the doctors, he’d lost his rented room, and he couldn’t work until he healed. He was an aspiring metal sculptor without a studio, three years younger than her thirty-one.