There are few human interactions that are hard to dissect, you know? Like those occurring say on the bus between two young LOVERS, the way they make it so the female sits and the male stands in the aisle over her STRADDLING HER even and leans in when he has to talk or listen. It’s like leave us alone we’re sexually exclusive and turn each other on so much more than you could ever imagine.

Ok, but then there’s the dynamic –– oft seen but nary scrutinized –– between two college athletes of opposite sex. The way they sit –– across from each other at the square table, so a few SQUARE feet of flat extends between their two inwardly arcing spines as they lean over not to exchange FLIRTATIOUS VIGNETTES but rather to delve positively wallop whoooosh their faces into whatever it is they selected to eat today, this afternoon, before today’s practice and after this morning’s TEAM BREAKFAST SPRINTS, in the university dining hall.

Image courtesy kansascitysportandsocialclub.com

She has an ass for days, big fleshy thighs that would make Isadora Duncan herself blush, if the athlete knew who Duncan was and if Duncan, of course, wasn’t deader than shuffleboard. But whatever, so she’s wearing obviously GYM shorts, right, rolled at the hem, right hiked up and stretched right slung across two dorsal fin-like iliac crests, right slinking under weatherworn abdomen skin the texture of dolphinhide. Her t-shirt reminds her of her hometown, it’s emblazoned with cracking screenprint logos of her uncle’s tow truck company or her sister’s best friend’s mother’s alma mater or whatever, it’s BIG too like all of this girl, right, BIG. Its neckline which once was a nice snappy ribbed ringer is right now all sagging and the shoulder seems flop elboward and the whole thing suggests the flurry of whip-ons and whip-offs its been through. Meaty wrists waylay indelicate fingers which point when the girl is standing motionless hands beside her which she never is to her bruised-up ankles, muddied bobbysox which no one calls them that anymore and tried and true New Balances, which are a whole ‘nother story altogether.

Hair in a ponytail, of course –– it came like that. Little spikes of it fall in front of her redflushed face.

Which is plain.

He has a fast-talking know-it-all kind of spit, nuanced with an urban New England patois, quite boorishly falling out of his mouth and all over his university-logo tee as he chews salad greens and stuffs his belabored gullet with bread wads. Working fries into there, somewhere right between the left side of the tongue and the left molars, right, his thick neck right rooted in broad shoulders, his incredible INCREDIBLE sweatpants bowed out at the pockets and ballooning down to lower calf area where they scrunch into elasticized anklets –– irony –– and his feet fall into socks which have been stuffed into rubber shower sandals and on his head, a hat. A hat. At the dinnertable.

They talk about whatshisname’s failure to show up for practice and how whatshername got caught drinking and coach was sososososooooo pissed, like, right, and how God Jesus did we ever sprint for whatshisface’s mistake last week, ran so hard I threw right up right into the pitch. And how they really love this warm weather because now at dawn practices instead of sickly shivering as the bile cliimmmbs their gullets, they now sweat sweat sweat all the little pinpricks of pores right bleeding sweat right sweating salty skinslime, the parts of the elbows and knees that bend? Now sticking at sunrise.

Not unlike they would sweat

If they

The two

Would–––

Well it’s clear they want to. But do they? Want to? Want to go to first second third base, little penetration of the defensive line behind the bleachers at Nickerson Field, little three-point shot in the back of the locker room, little marathon sprint in the dark, get the heart rate right racing –– dinner and a (halftime) show? To score?

But!!!!!!!

But she just has to talk gruff like that keep her hair pulled back like that right one of the guys like that god forbid a little chapstick, but sometimes, the way she tips her head––

But he just has to think of her as a sis, you know, an amigo, a she-bro, any girl with a snarl like that right a throw pass score sprint like that legs like that ass like the convex whip of a fork’s bend, not a dainty eyelash in sight, right, he can’t, and she’s not even––

Well anyway, sometimes just a high-five will do. A high-five caught between four right narrowed eyes, charmed as a couple of locker-leaning whitewashed high school varsity champions –– but then, you know, the right screeching siren of a right wetted whistle and, well, that’s that.

Image courtesy zchache.com

• Coffee Break