SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

Part 1 and 2 here
We pull up in front of Sport’s apartment since he’s first on the logical stop on our drop people off program. As I wrote before, my cell battery died in the car, so even if he’s tried to text me, I have no way of retrieving, reading or responding to such a message. I announced to the car in general:

“Oh, I though I charged my phone but my battery just died,” in an effort to make him aware of the fact that I had no cell battery and was therefore inaccessible / unable to respond via text, if he had tried to contact me that way since our kiss two hours before. Jeez, this situation was getting overly complicated. And jeez, I felt like a huge creep as I feigned this pre-meditated announcement in the car just as a way to communicate with him. Of course, he’s sitting the front seat this entire time, rendering him completely unreadable. Great.

When we jolt to a halt in front of his midtown apartment he hops out casually and gets his things from the trunk. We’re in an SUV so I subtly whip around to wave bye, secretly waiting for him to send me some kind of signal (hating myself for wanting this not-at-all appropriate tryst to perversely continue).

“A signal like what, Summer?” I ask myself. What am I expecting him to do? Shoot up a smoke signal? Mouthing something I should lip read? We’re surrounded by our friends and he’s supposed to be exiting the car (as traffic honks around us) as quickly as possible.

Then I wonder, should I make an excuse to get off here too? Should I take the reigns? Like, “Oh, I’ll hop out here too. It’s right near that organic market I like.” Or, “I’m going to my friend’s house in this area.”

Then he and I could wait for the car to pull away and talk. And maybe…

I shudder at the thought of him and I making out again.

But what if he doesn’t want to talk? Or he’s already realized this is a huge mistake (which it is). I make an excuse to get out of the car too and look like a huge idiot.

Oddly, I’m finding myself relaxed enough to enjoy the stress of the situation because it’s still so bizarre it’s comical. Being a coward, I stay put and stay silent. I’ve never been a make-the-first-move kind of girl. But then as he slams the car’s trunk down, he winks at me.

A wink which could mean anything since Sport’s handsome enough to pull off recreational winking. He winked at me all the time when I was nothing more than his younger best friend’s even younger girlfriend. So the wink, in terms of dissecting what happens next in this entire situation, is an enigma. It helps not at all.

Our friend who’s driving gets tired of doing drop-offs (I don’t blame him) so dumps the rest of us that live downtown at my friend Cristina’s house in SoHo.

“Wanna come up for a minute?” she asks. “We could get food. Go to that restaurant with the cute bartender you like?”

I have a thing for bartenders in the city – I have a few that I have extremely innocent crushes on at different places. This is because bartenders are safely unavailable. They’re always working when you’re out enjoying yourself, meaning you never actually have to take things to the level of an actual date. That coupled the fact that there’s a bar between you, means you also never even have to kiss. The result is weeks of innocent flirtation without anything ever having to happen, and if you’re lucky, free drinks. For me, right now, admitting that I’m looking for ‘summer love’ is still scary. I’m much more comfortable with these friendly G-rated types of relationships (otherwise I seem to be in really serious relationships, on the soccer-mom track, too soon). I’m the athletic girl, not the girly-girl. When I put on make up, I still feel like a clown, and worry some gazelle-type model chick is going to put her hand on mine with a pity-filled voice saying, “Hun, the color of mascara you’re using is totally WRONG.”

I try to refocus and think about what I should do next.

“Sure, I’ll come up for a sec,” I tell Cristina, even though I have no intention of going to dinner. Who needs to ogle a bartender from a far when I just kissed our hot, older friend Sport? I do however; want to plug in my phone.

When did I become so manipulative?

We get into Cristina’s apartment. She’s chatting away while I pretend to listen and search like a wild woman for the nearest outlet and jab my phone charger in it as quickly as possible.

“So. Dinner?” She says casually.

My phone turns on. Nothing. No texts. No voicemail. Sport hasn’t contacted me.

This is good news in that, yes, I agree we need to put the breaks on any possibility of romance. With our back-story, it could just never happen. If it did it could never go public. Stress, stress and more stress.

Yet it’s bad news in the sense that the crazy adrenaline I’d been high on all day long just died. It was so powerful it was starting to feel like a new state of being. A more exciting life. Translating to me as a more exciting person.

“Yeah,” I exhaled heavily, putting down my phone. “Dinner sounds good.”

In that instant, my phone buzzes and I lift it to see a text from him, the simple one liner reads:

“Are you home yet?”

Suddenly, I’m back on the adrenaline train.