The Dell guy was the first guy I dated after my divorce that I really fell head over heels for. I met him on one of those dating websites. He found my photo and sent me a message, I sent him one back, so on and so forth. That was back in the day when my profile was all roses and daisies...."I am looking for the right guy to complete me, the one that will accept for who I am..." Blah blah blah.
I remember the first night I spoke to him on the phone, he asked to meet me at a bar in North Austin. He texted me right before the date to ask me what my last name was. I told him and he said very plainly..."it's nice to meet you Sarah _____" I thought that was really sweet. The guy wanted to know my last name before he met me. I was excited about the date, but was not sure what to expect. I still remember sitting at the bar, looking at the door going "that's not him, no that's not him, GOD PLEASE DON'T LET THAT BE HIM." It is a ritual that I would become very familiar with over the next few years of waiting for my dates to arrive.
But, he walked in the door, and I shit you not, he took my breath away. Just like in the movies, I saw him walk in and a song playing in the background starts. He hands his id to the bouncer, and then looks up at me and smiles in a shy way. He was so hot!!! I was like...JACKPOT!!! Merry Christmas Sarah. We sat and talked the entire night at the bar. He was funny, laughed at all my jokes and we just clicked. He flirted with me, smiled at me, made me feel like I was the only girl in the room. He looked accross the bar and motions to a table in the corner, a quaint dark little table in the corner. I grab my coat and practically knock over the anorexic cocktail waitress on my way to the table. We snuggle in the corner and he holds my hand. He kisses my cheek when I talk and again...we just clicked.
Ms. aneroxia of the month club stops by and asks us if we want another drink. He glances over at me and squeezes my hand. "wanna go somewhere else?"
I smile like a cheschire cat, are you kidding me? Is the Pope Catholic?
"uh, yeah, sure" I say, very cool and calm and collected. "Let me run to the bathroom first." I hightail it to the bathroom, check my makeup, check my breath, check my everything. Look in the mirror, turn sideways, suck it in, look at my ass, reach in, pull one boob up at a time so that they appear to be more perky in my push up bra, mess up my hair a bit, put on more lip gloss, swallow fourteen altoids...we are good to go.
I walk out the bathroom door and glance over at all the people in the bar. Ha...these people have to sit here and wait to meet someone and I have this guy waiting to take me to his house right over there. You see him ladies? He is the hot guy in the corner waiting for ME to come out of the bathroom. Look out blondie, don't even think of setting your sights on him, he is with ME. I walk over to him with a strut that I am sure is rediculous. My bud light infused buzz making me a bit crooked in my bee line over to him, but none the less, I am sexy. I toss my hair over my shoulder as I give him my best, sultry look. He smiles.
Yeah, I still got it.
We get outside, and he looks at me and says "you know I live right around the corner and I have a full bar." Magic words as far as I am concerned. I follow him to his house which happened to be about three miles away.
Right around the block my ass.
As we pulled onto the expressway and entered a new time zone, I followed him through his neighborhood. In the back of my head I can hear my mother saying "Sarah, what are you doing, you don't even know this guy, just be careful."
The narrator from dateline NBC comes into my thoughts "what started out as a search for love, ended in a search....for a missing person."
I followed him into the driveway and take one more glance at my reflection in the mirror. Deep breath, time to go in.
His house is much like any other guys house. Though I don't understand the white carpeting....yes WHITE. Not off white, not tan not nude not puddy....WHITE. I quickly take my hooker boots off and fear for the smell of my feet to waif through the house. "Do you want a drink?" He asks me. He is standing behind the bar and I slowly make my way over to him. "Sure".
There is a mirror on the wall opposite of us, and I catch a glimpse at our reflection. We look good together. We match....He smiles at me and leans in to kiss me. I am hooked. He wraps his arms around my waist and I lock my fingers around his neck. We are kissing very sweetly and passionately. He is moving his hands down my back and I am envisioning what our Christmas card will look like. Do we say "Season's greetings from Dell guy and Sarah" or "Happy Holidays from the happy family" He is starting to unbutton my shirt and I am picking out shirt colors for our family to wear on the card. Red shirts and jeans? Black pants and green sweaters? Should there be a fire place in the background? Somewhere there has to be a puppy with a big red bow around his neck.
We make our way to the bedroom and like hansel and gretel, our clothes leave a trail of breadcrumbs. I am in heaven. He is kissing me, and we are talking about how he loves to get on the trails and take three hours rides on his bike. I make a mental note to buy a bike the next day and imagine us racing the trails of north Austin together. We can eat cliff bars together and have those riding shoes that you clip into the pedals of your bike with. We would hang out on town lake together and stop and have a beer at Shady Grove after a long day of hitting the pavement.
Yeah, I don't jump the gun at all.
I decide not to overdo my welcome and begin the search for my clothes. He walks me to my car, just wearing flannel pants and a t-shirt. He kisses me before I go and tells me he will call me later. My car ride home is filled with more smiles and whoo hoos than a bachelorette party. I crawl into bed and fall asleep thinking "yeah, that's it."
Dell guy and I saw each other a lot over the next few weeks. We began to talk on a daily basis and spent anytime we could together. He had his kids every other weekend. All four of them. yep....that's right...four. But, it didn't bother me at all. My Christmas card just needed to be panoramic to fit the entire family.
We made a deal not to introduce our kids to each other because we wanted to protect them from anything we were unsure of.
That lasted one week.
The first weekend he had his kids, this is how it panned out.
"So, what cha doing tonight?"
"oh, not sure yet, what about you?"
"well, the kids and I were going to rent a movie"
"oh yeah, that sounds good, probably what Sam and I will do too."
"oh yeah, what movie?"
"not sure"
"we were going to rent where the wild things are, have you and Sam seen it?"
"oh no, we haven't."
"well....(enter long pause here) if you want, we will be watching it and ordering pizza tonight. I know you and I said that we wouldn't introduce the kids to each other yet but..."
"what time should we be over?"
and that was it.
I saw him with his kids a few times. And each time I walked into his house, I thought about how Sam and I would go from being a family of two, to becoming a family of seven. SEVEN!!! Can you even go into a restaurant and get a table for seven without the hostess sighing and watching some poor 14 year old kid shimmy a bunch of tables together. I mean, there would be fights on who would get to sit next to whom. I envisioned poor Sam sitting on an orange banquet chair with a paper place mat in front of him, sitting at the crack of the two tables that were pushed together going "mom, we were fine the way we were."
I snap back to reality and realize that I will do whatever it takes to be with this man. He is amazing and I just want to see where it is going to go. Of course it is normal for a girl to dream, but I was trying to be cool.
Our relationship continued for the next few months. I went over to his house one night and he told me he would be out on the back porch and just to come on in and meet him for a beer. We sat and talked and talked and talked. Out of nowhere, he starts to talk about a future. I try and sit still and not jump into telling him I already have written his name on my trapper keeper over and over and that I would not have to change my last name, just hypenate it. He tells me that he has been thinking about "us"...and where we would live if we decided to move in together someday. I am trying not to start balling and I look at his fingers and imagine what the wedding photos will look like. Will I wear a white dress? How big will the wedding be?
He is going on about how he is trying to figure out where the kids would go to school, how we could live central so that both of us could have a smaller commute.
"What do you think?"
What do I think? I am already paging through the honeymoon photo album, what do you think I think?
"yeah, I have thought of it too"
He smiles at me, leans over for a kiss and goes in for another beer.
I am about to explode inside and want to do cartwheels in the back yard. I decide instead to start thinking about how cute all our bikes will look in the garage. He comes back outside with a beer for both of us, holds my hand and kisses me again.
I have arrived. My search is over (at least for now) and I have found someone that is going to accept me for who I am. Package deal and all.
I fell so fast,...maybe that is why I didn't see the downward spiral begin.
As fast as it started, it ended. One week, he just stopped calling me. Every moment we could have been together he was tired or sick or one of the kids was sick. I started to get this feeling in the pit of my stomach.
One thing I will say...always trust that feeling. I WILL SAY IT AGAIN, ALWAYS TRUST THAT FEELING.
I called him one day and asked him what was going on. He said that he was just busy and tired and didn't feel well. I told him to be honest with me and tell me what he wanted to say. "I am a big girl, I can handle it. Just be honest with me."
I will remember it like it was yesterday.
"it's not you, it's me."
Like a broken record, those words just came at me like little razors. I set the phone down and put my head in my hands and cried like a little girl at a new kids on the block concert. "please don't go girl".
Ugh....how could he use that lame ass excuse? What are we 14?
It was over and I was back to square one.
Back to being Second time Single.
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/%22%3E%3Cimg alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br /><span xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type">second time single</span> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/%22%3ECreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.
