The Shy Boy

The shy boy is writing an advertisement which he will put in the newspaper. He will write in the personal column. He has been thinking about a girl and about the advertisement for a long time. When he'd met her she'd come away from her seventeenth-birthday lunch she'd said; now she was out looking for a badge. 

Would she read the personal column? He always read it. Worried, he stroked his first, soft, infant moustache with his damp thumb. She had been sitting on a bench, opposite him, in the park, then had come over to his own bench and asked the time and looked into his eyes, interested in him or so he'd thought; she'd said she was supposed to meet someone who was late now - she'd looked up and down the path to show him her frustration - and she'd touched his arm then pushed him away playfully. He'd tried to make her talk (he'd read somewhere that people like you to make them talk about themselves) and she'd stayed for half an hour, then finally before she'd left, she accepted from him a badge which had been attached to the lapel of his blazer, allowing him to pin it on her breast. The girl had been in his mind at some point in every hour of every day for seven months now. Today he will at last risk rejection, find her, and ask her to be his partner in life.

The naked girl, her lover having given his final pant and dropped away from her sliding off her flank, straight away picks up the newspaper and, after yawning and blowing out her cheeks, suddenly arches her belly and hoots with laughter which makes the boy at her feet, start. She sits up and flourishes the advertisement above her head. She'll scamper across the road and tell her best friend about the dull boy who'd wanted her in the park, just as soon as she can get a long T-shirt on.