A day or so after the FUCKING MARK Debacle, I hopped on a plane down to Florida for a 5-day vacation of relaxation in my grandparent’s big house with a pool in their gated community. Even though Grandma sometimes treats my visits as a live action j-date, I usually manage to avoid all attempts at set-ups with her friends’ grandsons.
I avoided it this time around by running into an old friend from high school, Ethan (who was actually best friends with my high school boyfriend), at the clubhouse over breakfast one morning in said gated community. He asked if I wanted to get a drink with him one night. I happily obliged, excited to be around someone who wasn’t of retirement age. And Ethan and I had a significant amount of catching up to do (although in a side note I should mention that we ran into each other on the LIRR when we were both going home for the Jewish holidays in September).
My last night in Florida, we decide to go out for drinks. He had his sister pick me up and drive us out to a bar. We sat and talked and drank at that first bar for over an hour. We had a great talk. Mostly about our careers, and our life goals, and where we want to go from here. He insisted on paying for the drinks. Then we walked across the street to another bar. Again, he insisted on treating me to drinks. When we sat down, a drunken bar-goer came over to us and started chatting us up. We told him we were married. We had a strange and semi-heated exchange with him until one of his more sober friends pulled him away. We talked about books, our mutual love of historical fiction, politics, art, food—it was great! He called a cab for us and on the ride back to our grandmothers’ houses, he suggested that we stop at his grandmother’s house, he’ll grab a bottle of wine and we’ll take the golf cart to the clubhouse to sit by the pool and drink wine. I agreed. And he wouldn’t even let me pay for the cab.
The plan goes off without a hitch and we find ourselves sitting on the edge of the pool with our feet in the water, drinking wine and looking up at the stars. We got into a faux-argument about which constellation was actually Orion. We talked about the snow in New York (we both love it and were sad that we missed the blizzard!) and he suggested that for our next date we have a picnic in the snow in Central Park. I replied with “Was this a date?” To which he replied “Do you want it to be a date?” I think I mumbled something unintelligible.
At this point you might be saying to yourself “He’s perfect! He’s attentive! He’s romantic! He’s smart! He’s funny! He’s interesting! What’s the problem?” Well, yes, he is all of these things, but he’s also not very attractive. At least not to me. But I have fun with him. And I want to keep hanging out, I’m just not sure that I want him to kiss me.
He’s texted me a few times since he’s been away (he’s still in Florida) and suggested that he wants to meet for drinks when he gets back into NYC on Wednesday night. Does that seem like a date?
