To begin, Allison had a particularly maddening, though thoroughly understandable way of talking around the issue without stating what she felt outright. There was appeal; there was mutual desire, but I think she was trying yet again to talk herself out of it. Women often self-sabotage this way, for reasons I have never been able to fully understand. This is so often the pattern, the modus operandi for many young women. I've never thought it was fair to either party.
In part, her distance from me was purely strategic and practical--she knew I was "forbidden fruit." I was theoretically taken but had curiously lavished her with the kind of male attention she wasn't used to receiving. Allison wasn't quite sure how to take it. She enjoyed it, clearly, but it never made her smile or flush with pleasure. At times, she could be a suspicious, heavily critical woman, emoting the bitterness of the unwanted and long passed over.
We'd reached a point where we text messaged multiple times during the day, in a manner that I was sure connoted a mere friendship, though I received mixed messages all the time. Were we more than friends? Her ways were always inscrutable. She'd begun by suggested we meet for drinks.
Since I'm a teetotaler, that wasn't an option, but I opted for a nice safe choice downtown. We ate and talked for a long while at a good old fashioned American comfort food restaurant that wouldn't have strained her pocketbook or mine. And there we began to converse and to really get to know one another. That was how things really got going.
As we strode down city streets, she mentioned a competition she'd been in before, years earlier. It'd had something to do with dating, some low rent version of that 90's MTV show "Singled Out", which introduced the world to Jenny McCarthy. A random male had the option of selecting from any number of available women, and though she was sure he was out of her league and would surely pick someone else, he'd amazingly opted for her, instead. It wasn't difficult to discern what she meant in bringing up the anecdote. How I could possibly be interested in her? How could anyone be interested in her?
Quite easily, in fact. Granted, she was not a beauty. Maybe she held onto a few more pounds than most women did, but that didn't discourage me. It was her brain I was interested in, more than anything else. We lived in a city where brainy people congregated, and it seemed like everyone wore eyeglasses. The only thing that embarrassed me a little about her is that she found underwear utterly optional, which I know in the proper context might have been a turn on, but in this situation, it was a liability.
She wore loose-fitting jeans out of a kind of stubborn defiance to the world, which meant she regularly exposed her ass crack to the entire world when she bent over. Hers was a particularly broad derriere and the crack itself was quite prominent. I managed to ignore it for the most part and wondered why she never bothered to change her ways. Some men would have found it gross and off-putting. Indeed, I think more than a few had. A part of me wanted to point it out to her but was too polite. I looked up to anyone that willing to be uncompromising. Maybe if we became regular sexual partners, I could request that she make a few mild cosmetic changes.
And she was certainly opinionated, too. Hers was a particularly caustic sort of attitude, even spiteful at times. She didn't suffer fools gladly, and yet there was a humanizing kind of benevolence to her attitude as well. She clearly meant well but it was obvious the world disappointed her from time to time. I knew meant felt well and our physical and text exchanges were inevitably full of complaints about the outside world. It's nice to have someone with whom to commiserate. It's nice to have someone to be your frustration outlet, a person, as the Brits put it, to moan to a little. No harm there.
My girlfriend at the time was far too emotionally even-tempered to be this world-weary and caustic. So Allison served as the counter-weight to what I wasn't getting at home. My girlfriend was a sweet soul, but at the same time very emotionally stunted. And she was increasingly an absentee figure in my life. Allison had become an important part of my life. I was intrigued. Could I really take Allison to bed? I definitely decided to try.
We decided to meet for drinks again. I nursed club soda while she slowly consumed some kind of mixed concoction. Forgive me for my ignorance. I don't know much about alcohol. And the more she drank, the sillier she got. Eventually she started trying to teach me rudimentary Russian, acting goofy and surprisingly high-spirited. We stared each other directly in the eyes.
The two of us leaned in for a kiss at the same instant. I saw desire well up in her eyes, followed immediately by guilt. "No need for that, baby," I said, soothingly, with great emphasis. She was clearly shocked and flustered from the experience, unsure of what to say. This was a brand-new response. Her guard was down, along with her defenses.
I was very direct with her. "My girlfriend is out of town. She stays out of town for days at a time now. It's obvious we both want each other. You're here now with me and it's patently clear that these feelings are mutual."
