A job like mine, you will have no trouble talking to people. Or should I say it other way around? To get a job like mine, you need to talk to a lot of people. Whatever, whether the trait came naturally or it was acquired, it didn't matter then. Not then. It was as if there was a thin veil between us. We were sharing the same atmosphere, breathing the same, smoke laden air and drinking in the same sound, the buzz and the murmur that people create in the background. It was soon pushed out, as if someone turned the sound control knob slowly. Sound faded away, like that of an audience who falls into a respectful silence, waiting for the show-perhaps the most grand-to start. All I could hear was my (suddenly) hoarse breathing and my heartbeat. It wasn't those times when I could just confidently walk up to a girl and start up a conversation, just like that. It wasn't like that. It just wasn't.

Most people were on the dance floor now. It's funny how people just pair up, or at least stay on the dance floor once the music starts - and I bet these people are not even close. I never turned down a drink nor do I hate it, but I always held contempt for people who cannot learn to appreciate the taste or control themselves well enough to stay dignified, as their clothes suggested. Wonders of alcohol. It can really do many things, can't it?

Perhaps alcohol was what pushed me onwards that night. What can I say? I must have fallen into that degrading category myself. At the same time, an air of rejection pushed me away, drawing an invisible line across the space between me and that Sophia or whatever she was. She was hospitable enough, as any host should, answering her friends and politely turning down proposals to dance(that came with much lavish bravado and flowery words that almost brought bile up to my mouth), but what as I silently watched her with a glass of water I noticed something different that others didn't seem to notice. She was fragile.

She was like glass, even with all her bravado and jokes that could make a room full of senile old people fill with laughter, she kept to herself, silently nursing her wound-or should I say 'crack'?- willing it to heal, so that she could become whole again. To be that beauty once again. She wasn't the world's most stunning beauty, but under that smoky lighting, humdrums of the bar and glints of light bouncing off the shiny glasses polished again and again by Jacques she looked beautiful. Not the beauty of a finished sculpture or a magnificent building that took centuries to build, but the fragile beauty of an injured princess, in distress - like the beauty of a broken glass shattered across a red velvet. Perhaps it evoked the cave man instinct in me - the cavalier spirit which brings a man to protect a girl in distress - it propelled me to push against her invisible boundaries and go through.

"This is your party isn't it? I'm guessing you are the hostess."

Slipping off my seat and casually walking towards her I could see her wince and tense, like an wounded animal deciding on flight or fight instinct. Standing behind her, diagonal away from her view as she purposefully moved her eyes away from me once she noticed me coming, nobody will ever know how hard it was to bring up those two sentences to my mouth. She turned around, looking at me she just answered curtly.

"Yes, and you are the singer."

If you look from outside, then you'll know that she is pushing me away. But inside, she looked like someone who needs help. Someone to protect her. Except that she's been hurt, and she's been down that alley before - she was too afraid to make the same mistake. The look on her face betrayed her actions, her intentions. I almost reached out to her, to hold her hand, touch her cheek, gently caress her hair and tell her it's okay -

- but we all know that if I were to do that, then I'd just be a pervert yes? I held my hand back, waiting, just waiting...for something, some word, some action to let me speak and know her a bit more. To find out why she wears that broken expression.....and perhaps, just perhaps, to repair her.