Ok, y’all get ready for some seriously long and whiney shit. Summer fling 2011 all came crumbling down today. First things first, a song to get you in the mood:
Listen to that while we continue. This is going to be the story of my summer’s interoffice romance gone wrong. It’s been a seriously heavy source of pain and angst for me CONTINUOUSLY since June and it’s either entered a new, higher level of painful shit eating, or it’s about to finally terminate forever. I don’t know where to start and I don’t want to leave anything out, but I’m not perfect, so here goes.
We have a sister company that does a certain part of the work we do on every project. We’re in direct contact with them every day, and the bosses/owners are best friends and all that shit. Ok, a “really hot” girl works at this place. The quotes are to indicate that all the dudes in the office and the peripheral dudes that come in and out as producers or what-not have major hard-ons for this girl. At one point she had a boyfriend. At the same point I had a girlfriend. We both ceased having significant others at the same time. Her story is fairly interesting, but I’m not so sure it’s relevant to this catharsis. We both had to live with out exes for a while post-breakup.
Her company had a party one night and I went, along with all of my coworkers. I think she and I had begun to ichat a little more intensely than regular work colleagues would up to this point, too. There had been flirting. But I was more or less ignored by her at this party, which was fine because I was chatted up by a very cute half black half korean girl, who i subsequently never called. I wasn’t ready to date yet. Ok, so the party winds down and the bosses start talking about heading to a strip club. They also invite her to come. I think it’s all a big joke but it’s totally not. Totally and completely not a joke. When she arrives at the club we’re already a few drinks in and a few dollars poorer. Coming back from the bathroom at one point I see the girl putting a dollar in a stripper’s g-string and getting groped with a smile on her face. Major turn on, and extremely unexpected, like I had walked in on something I wasn’t intended to see. She and I talk for a while and she tells me about the terrible fight she’s just had with her ex and how she’s going to have to sleep at work. I tell her she can crash at my place because MY ex is out of town at the moment and there’s an air mattress. One of the clients who happens to be best friends buddy buddy with her overhears and takes note. He’s married but doesn’t wear his ring. He also takes the office ladies out drinking regularly without wifey.
Anyway she refuses, etc, etc. But somehow over the next few days she lets me know that she had actually been very into our conversation, and that she would want to get a drink. This is where the retelling starts to hurt a little, and I think I can stop with the robotic announcement of the story’s bullet points now. So I’m pretty sure she’d gotten my phone number by now and she’s making noises about how forward she’s been in telling me she wants to go out for drinks. And at this point I’m genuinely getting the impression that she’s fairly old fashioned – slash – inexperienced. She had been with this boyfriend 7 years, since the tender age of maybe 19. This put her firmly in 26 and in my mind as a sort of quasi virgin with weak emotional defenses and little experience in the bedroom. Someone to be gentle with and protective of. WOW, was that the wrong impression to have formed. In fact at one point further on she would emphasize that there had been an understanding in her relationship that when he went on tour (in a band, of course), he would do what he wanted and so would she. Rest assured, she told me, she’s had much experience. Hmm. That was a red flag I failed to take seriously, now wasn’t it?
Ok, so we continue our internet chatting during work hours that lasts all day, and I’m having a good time. Meanwhile my ex had returned “home” and was getting ready to move out for good. Very sad shit. So the weekend in which she is to move out arrives and everything’s shitty with us. I kept hoping to be able to have a lovely closure thing happen, and instead we kept spoiling it, and she’s sleeping on her couch and being super excited about leaving. This is the end of May. Wow. wow. On saturday the girl invites me to come to some event she’s going to be at that’s much closer to my place than her apartment. I’m excited, but she says she’s there with her boss, and after I look it up I see it’s also got a cover and is fairly stupid, so I do the social equivalent of just putting the tip in: I tell her I’m going to be at a bar near there and welcome her to a drink if she leaves the event early.
She does leave the event. She does come to my bar for a drink. We do end up making out, and she does grab my cock through my pants outside the bar and breathlessly ask me to come home with her. It’s the day before my ex moves out. I tell her that i can’t, and I explain why and she understands. But of course we make out a while longer and she asks a few more times. It’s interesting to find yourself in this type of moment as an aged and wizened adult of 34 (35th birthday came soon after). I remember doing the math in my head. It involved consciously balancing the sure thing of the moment with the wrongness of not coming home the night before the ex moves out of my life for good. I knew that either choice (go with girl or go home) was a mistake. In fact I’ve found myself more and more in situations where I’m forced to make a choice between two shitty outcomes. I’d like to be able to pick a good one every now and then.
I returned home to a shitty and sad night, sure that I had been forced to forever miss the opportunity of sleeping with the girl. I also felt pretty great about doing the good guy thing, despite my disappointment. It would be the last time for a long time that I would make the right choice in this budding romance. I’ll continue this story tomorrow. Teaser: today, 5 months later, she yelled at me and hung up in my face, blaming me for everything that has gone wrong between us while simultaneously denying that anything had gone wrong AND that there was an “us” to begin with. Lovely.
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