Fox Crossing
I recently crossed paths with a fox on my mountain bike trail. It reminded me of another time—many moons ago—when I crossed paths with a whole other breed of fox, my man John Capone. He was and is the RRrrraarhhhhh kind of breed:
“The summer following my freshman year, I was at a church camp in Wichita, Kansas, and was walking alone, crossing a field. I spotted someone coming in my direction, also alone. As this person got closer, I could see he was in fact what I would call a stone-cold fox. As in babe. As in Holy crap, you’re cute. As he got closer, and our eyes locked, his pace quickened. Surely this meant something good.
He did not stop; he did not smile; he did not say anything at all. His apparent state of underwhelm starkly contrasted with my instantaneous, besotted rapture. Still, I was a goner.
Other boys came and went in my dating life, but there was no one I did not compare to my chance encounter on that Kansas field with this new Captain Fantastic. I got to know his family through the years, and I flirted. Hard. He even flirted back, but he never took it to the next level, and since I still had that shy, quiet voice, that was that. And my unrequited crush remained.
Six years after Kansas, something changed: he saw me. He saw that I truly existed, and that I had been right in front of him all along.”—Excerpt from “Crush” chapter in The Little Love That Could, by Pamela Capone
