Old Boys' Reunion

ordered coffee, that was the easy bit. We sat in the Cafe Europa overlooking the plaza. Years had past since I'd last seen Steve, or Stef, as she now liked to be called. However the slim blond who sat across from me then looked only a couple of years older than the burly youth I had known at Public School.

Stef stirred her coffee slowly, letting the dash of cream curl towards the centre. I sipped mine slowly. It was only by chance that we had met again, after all those years, and oddly enough if it wasn't for our shared memories, Stef and I might well have been strangers.

We talked in Unispeek, a language not invented when we had met last, and the Cafe Europa, was not built then either. In fact before the aliens visited, Space City was little more than a Cosmonaut training centre, somewhere in what used to be the Soviet Union. Stef was an engineer there, I was just a tourist.

All the time we talked, I marvelled at the change in Stef. The nose was the same, as was the windblown fair hair. The rest, well, subtly different. Of all people, I didn't expect Steve to have a conversion.

Stef as usual was more interested in the change in me. I showed my years more than she did. She wanted to know what had happened to that womanising young man I had been. My only line of response was to declare that for all my talk, I had always been a failure with the opposite sex. Stef smiled. Evasive I had always been, and evasive I still was.

Time, as always in situations like this, flew like a speeding train, and Stef found herself needing to return to work. Before we left, I suggested we meet again before I flew out of the country, while Stef made an old school joke, that brought us both to fits of laughter.

We laughed loudly, gigglyling like the two women we were.