Charming, but single

Note: This post is long and I am quickly becoming “That Girl” who drools about the guy she’s dating in detail everyday. (Seriously, try having a non-Nurse-related conversation with me. I dare you.)

Saturday I came to the realization that I needed something in the way of a sign that The Nurse wanted to date me. As I was re-reading the letter I’d never send to him, the things I’d never say to him, the words I wanted too much to be able to have him read, my text message notification went off.

We’d been having one of our texting sessions. He’d messaged me late Friday when I was already fast asleep after eating too much pizza and discussing life over Scrabble with The Banker. I’d returned the text on Saturday and that had started it. Me with the questions, him with the short one word texts. We’d just gotten to the, “Do you have plans for tonight?” stage and I was sure that his response would be the sign I was needing at that moment. That he would get it. That he would respond coyly with something like, “I plan to take you to dinner if you’ll have me. And then I’ll cancel my Match.com membership and be yours yours yours.” And then maybe he’d sign it “L8tr.” And I’d want to strangle him for being so lame.

Back in reality, I checked my messages.

“No,” he wrote back.

I felt a wave of disgust come over my body and I slammed my cell phone down hard on the table in the coffee shop. So hard that a woman three tables over noticed and looked up. And I tucked my head down and pretended to work on my computer, fuming that he’d been so obtuse as to not ask me out. Not wanting to think that this was the sign I’d asked for, because if it was, I wanted a do over.

I plotted my next move. After a few minutes I gave in and texted that if he wanted to hang out he should let me know, because I am the lame one. And he immediately texted back that he did want to hang out and moved to make plans. So I felt slightly better, but not totally sexy and desirable. How was I dating The Guy Who Doesn’t Call? When I am with him, he is The Guy Who Can’t Keep His Hands Off Of Me.

A few hours later I was pacing in my living room, fully made up and anxious because he was late. He showed up and we quickly kissed hello before jetting off to the show. I felt like part of a couple as he grabbed my leg and held my hand tight. And partway through he leaned over and gave me a quick peck on the lips and when the movie ended we waited until the theater cleared while we talked and he leaned over to kiss me again and jokingly suggest an alternate activity for an empty theater.

I slapped away his hand and pulled him to his feet. And we headed out to his car, teasing and pinching and giggling like all of those couples that I usually hate because they seem oblivious to the fact that other people have to witness their overt PDAs and incessant laughter.

He was in the mood for Thai, but we knew nowhere to get that at 10 p.m., so we picked up the ingredients to spice up a boxed Pad Thai dinner and some really dark beer. We knocked back two beers while I cooked. We had two cutting boards in tandem – he chopped flat leaf parsley because we didn’t have cilantro and juicied a fresh lime like a pro. And I served us two plates of Pad Thai that I don’t think he loved – but he ate it like a good boy. He took a quick call from a female friend and then turned his attention back to me.

We discussed going out for some drinks and cuddled on my love seat. He hopped up to grab another beer for us to share and laughed at the prevalence of Miller Lite cans in my fridge. I explained that they belonged to a friend and he was quick on his feet, “A friend? He likes Miller Lite?”

“It’s a she. Not a date.”

And I straddled his lap and we kissed.

“So, you didn’t have a date over here drinking Miller Lite?”

“No.” And I took his bottom lip between mine and held his head between my hands.

“You been going out with anyone?” he asked.

I should have lied. I should have said yes. I should have told him about The Drunk Lawyer who keeps calling or just made someone up. But I said no instead.

“And how many people are you seeing?” I needed to know.

“I’ve been going out with women. Like, getting coffee or a drink.”

I pulled back.

“But that doesn’t mean I’m dating them,” he said. “I’m just going out.”

He pulled my face to his to reassure me.

“And my friend who called earlier is not one of them. Just a friend, so you know.”

“I didn’t think you’d be so bold as to take a call from another woman you were dating while you were at my house,” I said.

He laughed.

“I don’t think bold has anything to do with it,” he said. “It just wouldn’t be fair. To you or her.”

A little piece of me seized up inside. I should have said that I wanted him to see just me. That I wanted him to not date around, that I liked him, that I wanted him just for me. But I just let that little piece of me hurt inside. This was our sixth date and I was unsure that I could share this man, who was really starting to pull at my heartstrings a touch, who was sitting with me on a Saturday night eating dinner and cuddling and being so boyfriendly.

We stopped talking and concentrated on kissing.

Later we went to The Bar and ordered up a round of drinks. I met a blur of every bar regular The Nurse knew. He was surveying the crowd and his eyes landed on a woman across the bar.

“Who ya looking at?” At this point I was tipsy and he was driving.

“No one,” he said. “I thought I recognized a girl.”

“Oh, is another one of your girlfriends here?” I teased and leaned in to kiss him.

“I don’t normally bring women here. It took me three dates to get you here.”

He looked at me with intensity. Was this his way of saying that of his harem of Match.com ladies, I was somehow special?

“And, yes, I remember things like how many dates it took to bring someone to my bar.”

It was kind of sweet.

As the night wore on, I became solely focused on how much I liked The Nurse and how much he seemed to like me and put the thoughts of his dating ways away. We sang along to songs by Weezer at the Cake cover of “I Will Survive.” And we settled into bar stools because my feet hurt. I butchered the words to everything that played and he seemed to dig it. He told me that his friend I’d met a few weeks ago had excitedly asked where I was on Friday night. We were both pleased by this and I went over to his stool.

“You’re too far away over here,” I pouted, drunk from the beer and the boy.

And, like some sort of hysterical punctuation mark, “Let’s Get It On” blared over the speakers.

“Oooooh, I loved this song,” I exclaimed. I was shaky on my feet in my favorite bronze sandals, which he’d called “not real shoes” as I’d squealed when we’d cut through damp grass in the parking lot. I leaned into him, grabbing the arms of the wooden barstool where he sat and my lips touched his.

“I can feel it nooooow, baby,” I serenaded him. “Tryin’ to hold back these feelings for so loooong.”

He just laughed at how un Marvin Gaye I was.

“I can see you like this song,” he chuckled, kissing my cheek.

I grabbed his hand. “Come on come on come on,” I twisted my body at the hips.

He was confused. “You want to go now? Shouldn’t we pay the tab?”

I smiled and twirled in a circle underneath our grasped hands, my eyes blazing and my smile beaming.

“I see,” he grinned and stood up, pulling me close to him to dance. And he twirled me around twice and I almost fell over several times. Steadying myself, I took his face in my hands and kissed him softly.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

And we did.

Seriously.

I do want you to like me. Because I am really starting to like you a lot. And I think we could have a lot of fun together.

I like that you are completely relaxed around me and I like that I feel fairly relaxed around you – to be honest, I’m unable to completely relax around any man, because I always have my guard slightly raised because my emotions alternate between fear of rejection and worry that I’m doing the wrong thing and that my thighs are too big and that this is too much cleavage and that you are going to notice how my over confidence goes away when you look at me like that and I just feel my insides slowly melt and I think that if you knew that I was starting to care you might worry that I was going to become needy and that I was going to crowd you.

And if I could change that I let the physical aspect of this escalate so quickly, I would. But I can’t and I don’t think losing sleep over it is really going to make it better. Frankly, I don’t really regret it all that much.

I like that you kiss me in public when I see you. I like big smile that spreads across your face when I walk up. It makes me feel special and wanted and sexy and all of those things are very important to me. I love when you wrap your arm around me and when I am with you I know that you are focused on me and only me and that isn’t something I am used to and I never thought it would feel this good and, to be honest, that scares me more than anything else.

I feel like I have to pry things out of you. And you never make plans in advance, or at least not with me. And it feels very undignified for me to constantly try to pin you down – your kiss says you want me, your behavior makes me wonder. Do you find your desire for me at the bottom of a bottle of beer? I can’t change that, but I surely want to know. Because I’ll be alone for forever before settling for that, my friend.

Dating at this age is hard. When I was 16 and I liked a guy, I wondered if he’d ask me to a football game or to be his date to a formal. Ten years later, I think, “His job is stable and that would be a good basis for raising a family.” And I try to go into these things with my heart and not my ovaries, but we’re not juniors in high school anymore. And I wish I could go back to those days when a corsage was all I needed, but I am a realist. And I am not going to pretend to be content being anyone’s plaything, arm candy or convenience.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this and maybe I’m rewarding your non-planning lifestyle by continuing to see you. Maybe I’m just conditioned to be fearful because I wear previous letdowns close to my heart. And I will never forget them and that isn’t your fault, but if you could just try to reassure me or send me some sort of sign that this real and not something I’ve imagined, then maybe I would just let go and freefall and dive into your arms and tell my mom about you and introduce you to my friends and not worry about looking like a fool. Yet again.

That is what I really want to do. It’s what I’ve wanted for a long, long time. I just need a sign.

From you.

For more than a week I have been getting a lot of random calls on my cell phone from numbers I don’t recognize. As a proponent of call screening, I do not answer numbers I don’t recognize on my personal cell. And I have a longstanding policy against returning strange calls if someone doesn’t leave me a voicemail.

They come at odd times – like at 11 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. and then 2:30 a.m. on the weekends. And they’re not local calls.

Today, I got three during the day. And I was livid. So livid that I almost answered and yelled at the caller. But I was at work and I just wanted to leave and so I silenced the phone and finished up my e-mail and left. As I was about to make a phone call when I saw that a voicemail was there. The mystery caller had decided to reveal him or herself.

“Hi, [Charming],” said man who sounded kind of unsure of himself. “This is [Drunk Lawyer]. We met at [Bar in New Orleans] a few weeks ago and you said you would be coming into town again and, you know, I wanted to see when. Please return this call.”

Thankfully I had not left the parking spot or I think we would have had a dangerous situation on our hands. I cackled at the thought of me going to meet Drunk Lawyer in New Orleans for a night. This was the same Drunk Lawyer who was a terrible kisser and tried to unzip my pants in a bar. Who was not so cute and terribly dorky.

I immediately saved his number in my phone and scrolled back through my call history. He had been calling a lot, but this was his first message.

He was getting braver.

So I called one of my friends who’d been out that night.

“Oh! A boy called,” she said, always the Polyanna. “I don’t remember him. Was he cute?”

“That night he asked me to go see his Historic Courtyard, which I think was code for his penis,” I deadpanned. “And he was a bad kisser and he tried to unzip my pants in the bar.”

“Oh.” She was dejected.

“He’s been calling a lot,” I said. “A LOT.”

We discussed options for getting rid of him and his mass calling, ranging from saying I was married to faking my death to (and this one is my favorite) having a man answer the phone and yell, “Why are you calling my girlfriend! STALKER!”

In the end, we decided call screening was the most humane option.

One downside of online dating is that when you meet someone and you start dating them, there is still the possibility that you are still dating other people.

And both of you know it.

I haven’t been out with any other men since I began dating The Nurse. None of the men who have messaged me lately have been good prospects and I’ve neglected the process of messaging men myself.

Last night I was at a work function and The Nurse was celebrating passing a test he’d been studying for all week. We met up for a drink and ended the night at my place.

As we stood in my messy kitchen snacking, he commented on the dishes in the sink.

“I cooked last night and didn’t do them.”

“So you cooked?”

“Yep, tofu stir fry with noodles and mushrooms.”

“Oooooh,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“What?” I leaned into him and tugged on his untucked shirt.

“You don’t have any left?”

“No, I didn’t make that much.”

“You had a date over here,” he teased, wrapping an arm around my waist.

“No, I didn’t make that much.” I twisted from his grasp and began clearing the counter.

He picked up an empty popcorn bag and shook it.

“You DID have a date over here,” he said, waving the bag like evidence.

“Nope, just ate popcorn for dinner one night.”

“It’s okay if you had another man over here. You can date.”

I just rolled my eyes.

We snuggled in bed later and he started giggling. I inquired as to his laughter. He told me about a scene in “My Super Ex Girlfriend,” which he’d seen that night, in which Luke Wilson’s girlfriend breaks the bed during sex.

“We thought that was really funny.”

My ears perked up at the “we.”

“You don’t strike me as the ‘My Super Ex Girlfriend’ type,” I said, fishing for information about this “we” of which he spoke.

“It was cute. We enjoyed it.”

Again with the “we.”

I didn’t ask who he’d seen the movie with because I didn’t want to be the jealous type. But as I fell asleep, I just had to wonder — Who’s dating other people now?