Linda’s lack of commitment was starting to get on my nerves. After rescheduling two dates and being late to all of them, we had agreed to meet tonight. After messaging her earlier in the day and hearing nothing, I was ready to throw in the towel. I have always valued punctuality and loyalty to promise as a matter of integrity. Simple ethics. If you take the initiative to say you’re going to do something, follow through with it. If you can’t, recognize that and own up to it.

What’s strange is that Linda seemed genuinely interested in me. We shared thoroughly enjoyable phone conversations and she always seemed reluctant to get off the phone. I didn’t understand it. Linda was just liberated from the constraints of time and task.

I recognized the resulting trend and decided, despite her seemingly genuine interest, not to take any commitment of hers too seriously. Not to take anything at all of hers too seriously. In the same vein, Linda was undeniably raw, unadulterated good times. So when she called an hour later and invited me to her friends’ home in El Segundo, I accepted and took my time getting there.

Linda’s friends’ had offered her carte blanche on the conditions of her stay at their home. Tara and Landon, the home’s happily married owners, were as laid back as anyone could imagine. Landon spoke in a humble monotone and always seemed to have a Sierra Nevada IPA in his left hand. Tara was perpetually curled up on one love seat or another, clouded in a haze of marijuana smoke. It was undergraduate off-campus housing with a splash of the bourgeoisie.

It hardly felt like a date. Linda had prepared for us a plate of freshly cooked salmon and baked potato. We shared our meal in the company of Landon and Tara, with Linda’s dog, The Office Hobo, occupying the space between us. The other three were engaged in a rousing conversation about the television show Off Their Rockers, a kind of elderly Candid Camera comedy series hosted by Betty White. Not having heard of the show–and in fact not having watched much television at all over the past decade–I found myself drifting away in thought, daydreaming about spending the coming Saturday and Sunday in the San Gabriel Mountains free from phone service and conversations about modern television.

I want you to feign interest in my show.

Linda and I weren’t drinking but once the final episode of Betty was over, the night seemed to devolve into silliness in short order. Linda and I started kicking a soccer ball around in the backyard. A former U.S. Women’s National Team candidate, Linda was a baller. I’ve got plenty of experience myself, having played the sport consistently since I was 5. Going at her one-on-one, she blocked my first advance. Then she ousted a second chance, defending me cleanly after a few step-overs. Recognizing her talent, I tried the slickest trick in the book. The rabona. A misdirection move, taking the opposite leg behind the back for a forward kick.

The rabona, executed almost as well as my pre-inebriation version.

It worked. Linda was a talented athlete, but I was infinitely more stubborn. It was like two elementary students on the field at P.E. trying to one-up each other. It was an unusual method of courtship and it seemed to be working wonderfully.

After moving our soccer scrimmage to the front yard, we stripped to our bathing suits and dove into Tara and Donovan’s pool before scurrying inside to take a warm shower. Squeezing our shivering bodies into an extremely humble, submarine-like stand-up shower, we began to soap the chlorine off our bodies and start making out. It was hardly a scene out of Chocolat, one of us letting out a periodic yelp when her back would touch the frigid shower wall or barking a cease-and-desist order when the other would direct the hot water into the eyes of the other at point blank range. But it was significantly more appealing than showering with the Rotary Club crowd at the Y.

Making it work…

This time when Linda invited me to stay the night, I accepted.

Moving our evening into the bedroom did not make the night any more romantic. Linda was not a seductress in the least, and I couldn’t take myself seriously enough around her to muster any kind of suave myself. So we opted for the evil step-sister of seduction: mischief. She would poke around for a ticklish spot on my side and I would try to convince her that I was born with 9 fingers. The mood became so playful that I thought we’d fall asleep without exchanging more than a couple of dirty jokes.

Linda soon turned off the ceiling light and struck a restful, prostrate pose on the bed, announcing that she “was out of energy” from the day–she could’ve fooled me, the woman was like a Mexican jumping bean, even when she was tired. When moved on her side, closed her eyes, and was silent for 30 seconds, I figured the night was through. The mischief had failed me.

A series of thoughts ran through my head in those moments. Disappointment. Regret. Inevitability. Confusion. A man is conditioned to act in a way that encourages members of the opposite sex throw caution to the wind and seek relations with them. I have never considered myself a philanderer, but when I end up making out in the shower with a woman whom I am courting, I am made to believe that being led to the woman’s bed will result in more excitement than supervising her REM cycle. This is an ideal time for one to consider his own faults (“Should I not have implemented the rabona during our one-on-one drills?”) or the very foundation of the connection in the first place (“Maybe her squirting me in the face with hot bathwater during make-out does mean we’re just friends.”). I wondered if our night was less fun than it was foolish. Or if in pandering to her more whimsical nature, I’d lost my own sex appeal.

Just as I had lost myself in thought over how the evening had ended so abruptly, Linda spoke up.

“Are you sleeping?”

“Yes, I’m dreaming about kicking your ass in soccer.”

“Yes, that’s definitely a dream then,” she said, turning towards me.

We bantered for a moment about the evening and different reasons why we were better than the other person at any given task.

“It sounds like you really think you’re better than me,” I said.

“I do,” she quipped. “Except someone is living in a dreamland about being hot shit.”

“Oh you think so?”

“I do. I do think so”

“What are you gonna do about it?”

“I don’t know, maybe I’m gonna make out with you.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

And so it was. It started as a slobbering kiss, performed in jest to punctuate a mock adolescent argument. Only this time, there was no cold shower wall or hot rush of water in the eyes to stop us. We were like the coils of a slinky crashing down a stairway, as unlikely as it is certain, speeding hastily but smoothly past each step with no regard for the surroundings. Rare and beautiful. And beyond anything I could have ever anticipated.

It was the tenth day of my journey and I was beginning to wonder if I was just treating this period as one big party.

– TOH