After saying good-bye, Mel watched Paul walk down the hall to his apartment for just a moment before turning the knob and slipping quietly into her own apartment. She routinely walked to her bedroom, put on comfortable clothes and went to sit on her balcony in the cool evening air.
On her way out she grabbed the pack of Camel's tucked into a vase of fake sunflowers. She rarely smoked anymore. It had been something she had picked up in college but she knew her parents would not approve of her polluting her lungs so she had all but stopped when she moved back home. However, now that she was living on her own, she thought it was okay to sneak a cigarette every once in a while.
Lounging in a patio chair she placed the small stick between her lips and lit it. That first puff was always the best. She sat reflecting on the evening for a while. She wasn't sure what had possessed her to accept the dinner invitation from a man that she had just met. And who was it that he knew at The Collective? That was something she was so curious about. Her mind lingered on that for some time, trying to figure out who he knew and how he knew them. Many of them grew up around here, maybe from childhood or a family friend. But why did he react that way when she questioned it? It was a mystery to her. She didn't know all these girls' stories well enough to be able to guess where they could have met. She didn't remember a guy named Paul coming up in any of their conversations, so maybe he was long since forgotten by the girl and he was still hanging on to something from a time long past.
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