And then…

And then…

Honestly, it wouldn’t do to try to recount it, because she remembered almost nothing of what followed.

She saw him, and it was as if, after twenty-five years of life, her heart finally began to beat.

Hugh Woodson had never been the most admired boy at school. He had never been the most handsome, or the most athletic. He had never been the cleverest, or the snobbiest, or the most foolish. What he had been, and what he had been all of his life, was the most well liked.

People liked him. They always had. He supposed it was because he liked most everybody in return. His mother swore he’d emerged from the womb smiling. She said so with great frequency, although Hugh suspected she did so only to give her father the lead-in for: “Oh, Gertrude, you know it was just gas.”

Which never failed to set the both of them into fits of giggles.

It was a testament to Hugh’s love for them both, and his general ease with himself, that he usually laughed as well.

Nonetheless, for all his likeability, he’d never seemed to attract the females. They adored him, of course, and confided their most desperate secrets, but they always did so in a way that led Hugh to believe he was viewed as a jolly, dependable sort of creature.

The worst part of it was that every woman of his acquaintance was absolutely positive that she knew the perfect woman for him, or if not, then she was quite sure that a perfect woman did indeed exist.

That no woman ever thought herself the perfect woman had not gone unnoticed. Well, by Hugh, at least. Everyone else was oblivious.

But he carried on, because there could be no point in doing otherwise. And as he had always suspected that women were the cleverer sex, he still held out hope that the perfect woman was indeed out there.