Don’t tease me, bro

Many individuals have adapted (or are hard-wired) to a behavior which garners the benefits of a slow, simmering courtship. For them, attraction runs deep and stews quietly months –years, even– before pheromonal silence is broken with a longer hug than expected, tenderer touch, or kiss. While my the pragmatic side of my loins frowns upon this behavior, the Guantanamo Bay where my heart used to be can certainly appreciate it.

And so, a new era begins. I had been spending a bit of time with this… fellow. For now, we can call him a friend. For a little while, there was a “maybe” back there.

If I had my std-free druthers, I would have stuck my tongue in this man’s mouth long ago. My overall contentment is fueled by eating when I’m hungry, drinking when I’m thirsty, stopping when I’m tired, and loving when I’m grateful. Also, feminist re-education has scrubbed away any coyness that probably didn’t exist in the first place from my relations with men. I was a maker of first moves.

Post-herpes, I am a maker of excuses. There are fuzzy memories of intimate alone quality time with the opposite sex; memories of widened-pupil stares, close whispers and a light touching of the knee, face sucking. You can fill in those blanks with the neutered stumblings of a woman with an unsavory secret. At a number of moments I’ve found myself in one of these choose-your-own-adventure type situations, the most recent of which went something like this:

Unidentified Male, at pause from grilling meat over an outdoor gas bbq. Rough hands from much manual labor, and now at close stance with our hero: “This part– (he clasps my shoulder with a large, calloused paw, and moves his thumb across the design) –is the best part of your tattoo.”

Our hero, one arm akimbo and the other hand holding a cocktail, stands slightly contrapposto in a sundress. She smiles and says:

Old option 1: “Next time you touch me like that you’d better be prepared to stick your tongue in my mouth.”

Old option 2: “You’re not supposed to stand this close, honey. It might give people the wrong idea.”

Old option 3: Eat face.

What actually happened: Some clumsy bullshit.

I may have laughed and agreed that I liked my tattoo as well, or asked about something laying around in his backyard, or instigated any other number of non-threatening conversation starters. The point here is that I’m basically a eunuch now, and have no business wearing perfume and waving my breasts around like Gavroche at the barricades.

Sorta. I think the Unidentified Male and I eventually grew tired of each other’s dances; I, detaching and sabotaging intimacy by assumption that he’d rather focus his time on brooding about his divorce (true story) and he, probably working on the assumption that he doesn’t meet certain specifications, and I don’t have herpes (the first somewhat untrue and the second very untrue.) Anyway, that’s how it goes until I can get my mind together and find peace with just keeping gents at a non-boning distance.

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