The mistake, I think, was forgetting where I was. The times have been encouraging my discipline to slip, and frankly, I'm just glad it wasn't worse.

I had been writing, for this place, while seated in a favorite table in that place I go. The coffee shop was packed - a special event that night - and I had guarded that spot for many hours. I needed to be in a crowd while being alone with my thoughts, and gazing out their window filled the bill.

That place I go - it sells coffee, so eventually I had to take a break. When potty time came, I simply wandered through the crowd without bothering to lock the screen on my laptop. I have worked in many places where that fault would get me fired - keeping info safe is part of what I do. That place I go, for good or ill, feels too much like a home, and lost in thought I let that discipline slide.

I'd returned and been reseated, long enough to type three words, when I saw him standing by my table and looked up. A good enough guy, I recognized him from among the milling crowd; he's also there a lot, and if the girls let him stay another few months, I'll probably learn his name. He'd been sitting at the sidewalk table having a cigarette earlier, and now he was standing twinkling his eyes at me.

"Lonely Couples By Design?" he said, quietly, pronouncing the italics, and smiled at me a conspiratorial smile.

I blinked a few times, realizing my discipline had failed, and that the wavy plate glass window worked just as indifferently well from his side of it as mine. With night falling, the web page on which I'm typing must have glimmered brightly on my screen. That seemed to have caught his eye, made him curious enough to misread the name at the top.

"Uhh... Loosely Coupled, actually, it's a technical..."

"Aw man, don't worry about it, we all do something, you know?" A small smile crossed his face, shifting greying stubble much like mine.

I opened my mouth again to correct him, and then paused a second for thought. I chuckled just a little, shook my head, and just said "Yeah." He grinned with mischief as he walked away, wending his way through the crowd to get back outside to his table. Took me half an hour to lose my smile.

I think we're brothers now.