2007
I won a date with a guy in New York City as part of a Charity Date Auction. He was incredibly attractive with sandy-brown hair, warm brown eyes and a very nice body. Date Auction Guy was an artist, had lived in Africa and had a different vibe (part-intellectual and part-hipster) than the guys I normally dated.
We met, hugged and started off our night with a drink at an Irish pub. Then he guided me through my first Pho experience in Chinatown. Next we headed to a bar with a private table in what used to be a trash chute. The table was surprisingly intimate despite the graffiti on the walls and the plastic “sky light” or entrance to the chute above us. We ended the night at a Swedish bar — still in Chinatown, where we listened to music and Date Auction Guy leaned in for our first kiss.
Everything felt easy and fun with him. He got me to try a lot of new places in a neighborhood (Chinatown) that I rarely visit. We went back to my place and messed around for a few more hours. (I did set some boundaries, though, and insisted that we wait to have sex until after we went out a second time. Making a charitable donation to a great cause for a date that leads to sex just seemed off to me.)
It was almost 6am when Date Auction Boy decided to leave. He invited me to spend the night at his place, but I was too tired to even get in the cab. I fell asleep with a smile on my face and giddy from our 12-hour date. He intrigued me enough to want to go out with him again in the very near future. I figured that I would see him when I was back up in NYC the following month.
The next afternoon, my friend, Ash, texted me that she was leaving work for a late lunch. I had barely eaten anything that day so I was more than happy to join her. I left the apartment in a tee shirt and shorts with minimal makeup to meet her.
At the cafe, I gave Ash the play-by-play of my evening with Date Auction Boy. She laughed out loud when I told her that he didn’t leave until after sunrise. As we were talking, Ash’s dog, Abernathy, jumped on me and started giving me kisses. (Her dog has a tendency to hump my boobs, but we are usually able to calm him down before it gets too out of hand.) Unfortunately, though, that didn’t happen this time.
I realized that my shirt was wet and wondered if Abernathy had gotten so excited that he went to the bathroom. I asked Ash,
“Did he just pee on me?”
“Umm…no…that’s not pee,” she replied.
“Eeewww! Gross!”
I tried to distract myself enough to finish our lunch. There wasn’t a lot of “junk” on my shirt, and I figured that I needed to eat something and could walk home to change clothes afterward. It didn’t seem like that big a deal so we went back to talking about last night.
“What did Date Auction Guy look like?” Ash inquired.
“Well,” I started to speak as I looked up. “Like that. OH MY GOD!!! That’s HIM!!!” I said in a combo scream-whisper.
Yes, in a city of 8 million people, I run into the guy I went out with the night before…who I wanted to go out with again…when I have doggie jizz on my shirt! What are the chances?
Date Auction Guy was meeting people only two tables away so he came by to say hello. I tried to make small talk and introduced him to Ash. That worked out okay initially or so I thought.
“Your face is really red,” he commented.
“Yeah. I’m just very surprised to see you.”
“What’s the dog’s name?” He kept petting the dog for a bit and then said, “What did you girls do to him? He looks exhausted!”
If my face was really red before, then it was a new shade of bright red by this point. We just sort of laughed off his comment and then he went over to his friends’ table. When Ash and I were done eating, I left the restaurant with my tail between my legs (or rather, my arms crossed in front of my shirt).
Date Auction Guy and I IM-ed the following week and I told him what happened. He was both amused and disgusted, which seemed appropriate. Soon after, he started dating a girl seriously and I fell for Lawyer Boy. Well, we’ll always have the trash chute bar and the café with my doggie love potion shirt. It’s not Paris, but it sure was memorable!