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I have the most incredible ability to make myself sound and look like a total nitwit when confronted with a man. That might explain why I’ve never heard the words, “Would you like to have dinner with me on Friday night?”
Yes, I’ve been married, and I have two children from that union, but the father of said children never asked me out. I skipped school one day and, bang, we became a couple. Come to think of it, he never proposed to me either. We walked into a jewelry store, bought rings, wore them out and then, bang, we were married. About a minute later – yep you guessed it – bang, we divorced.
Single and back on the market again the male species’ radar tuned into my airwaves. One afternoon a guy dropped by my office and casually asked me where my favorite watering hole was.
“Fontana Lake,” I answered. When the silence coming from his direction began to howl, I looked up from the contract I was working on and repeated, “Fontana Lake. It’s where I like to swim.”
He had this confused and slightly amused smile on his face, as if he couldn’t quite figure out if I were serious or not. “No. Where do you like to go out for drinks?” he asked.
At that moment I would have given up a million dollar winning lottery ticket to be able to wiggle my nose like Samantha and poof into a sheet of Saran Wrap and then toss myself on an open blaze, so I could shrink into nothing. Instead, I stumbled through a reply. “I…um…err…don’t drink.”
He left my office shaking his head with that same confused look, minus the smile. You can bet your seat tickets on the first leisure trip to the moon that I’ll never hear any sentences from him that start with “Would you like to…”
But the one that takes the cake, wins the Olympic Gold Medal, as well as the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes is the kisses incident.
The college I work for has one heck of a good-looking EMT instructor. His smile alone could make a lady corpse jump for joy in the medical student’s morgue, and those dark eyes of his has ’em fainting in the halls. When he told me about the time he got caught naked while eating whipped cream from a can in a McDonald’s restaurant, they had to scoop me up and toss me in the morgue’s freezer to solidify me into one piece again. (No, he didn’t actually get caught anywhere naked, at least not anywhere he’d confess to me. He was joking.)
Though I have a boyfriend (who has never officially asked me out either) who I’m very happy with, I’ll admit I still get a little flustered when the EMT instructor arrives, and I end up knocking a canister of pencils off my desk, or dumping my inbox, scattering paperwork all over the floor.
One evening, he walked in with a stack of paper and said, “I need fourteen copies of these, and I just have to steal a kiss from you.”
My heart slammed to a stop against my breastbone. Heat rushed to my face, my ears started roaring, and I dang near fainted. I opened my mouth to speak, but my tongue lay there like a lump of cement, and a strangled grunt, coming from the back of my throat, was the best I could articulate.
Finally I got brave enough to look up at him and was mortified to see him reaching toward the bowl of Hershey Kisses on my desk.
The air whooshed out of my lungs loud enough to startle him. “Oh! Those kisses. Yeah, have all those you want.” Ugh, that right there explains a lifetime of solo Friday nights.
