He had known her for years and been dating her for weeks but as he dropped her off at her front door, he realized he still wasn’t going to get to first base with her.
The dates had been pleasant and the chemistry seemed to be working… but still nothing intimate at the end of the night.
Frustrated, he headed to a local bar and just happened to run into one of her old boyfriends. At first, he was a bit hesitant to approach the guy but after a few beers, he worked up the courage.
“I’m dating Amber now…” he began.
“And you’re not getting anywhere,” the other guy finished his sentence and laughed.
“So it’s not just me?” He was so relieved.
The other guy continued to chuckle. “Nope.”
“So, she never puts out?”
Again with the chuckling. It’s not often you see grown men chuckle, but after a few beers and given the topic, it was understandable. Not excusable, but understandable. “Oh, she does…. boy oh boy, does she.”
“So, what am I doing wrong?” he asked, a little more urgently than intended. He wasn’t actually pleading, but he could see pleading from where he was standing.
“Sorry, dude, but I was sworn to secrecy.”
“Come on. Help a brother out,” he countered. That shows the desperate state that she’d put him in. He had actually called another man “brother” like the hipsters he abhorred. A quick moment of shame passed through him and then was gone. This was not the time for self-loathing.
“I can’t.” The guy then looked up at the stained bar ceiling as if trying to come up with a way around his current moral conundrum. Not entirely dissimilar to how you might be trying to imagine what stains resided up there and how they got there in the first place.
Sensing that a door might be opening a sliver, he prodded the guy gently; “No advice at all?”
“Well… without betraying her confidence, of course, what I would say to any guy who asked me for completely generic relationship advice is this: if you can get a look at the girl’s internet browser history, you’ll get to know what the flips her good girl/bad girl switch.”
He mulled it over. It seemed like solid advice.
“And another thing… it wouldn’t hurt to know who Paul Lawrie is.” More chuckling. Even the other patrons of the bar seemed to be getting annoyed at the gratuitous amount of chuckling going on.
“Thanks. I’ll look him up,” he said and made his exit.
The following Friday night, he arrived at her door twenty minutes earlier than he said he would, hoping to catch her before she was ready to depart.
It worked like a charm. She appeared at the door looking disheveled and only half dressed. She quickly excused herself and disappeared upstairs to finish getting ready.
He launched into action. He quickly found her laptop and was pleased to see it was already on and ready for inspection. He positioned the mouse over his objective, clicked it twice, and pulled up her browser history.
When he’d arrived home after his chat with her ex, he’d looked up Paul Lawrie and couldn’t understand how it could possibly help improve his situation. Mr. Lawrie was a golfer who seemed unremarkable except for one amazing day where he came back from being ten strokes down entering the final round to win the 1999 British Open.
Did that mean she was a fan of golf? Did she have a thing for golfers? Was it a balls-and-holes thing?
Her browser history didn’t seem to support that theory. Each night, it seemed she looked up a different sporting event. One night, it was the Plano East high school football team overcoming a 24-point deficit with three minutes left in the game, the next, a story about the 2013 America’s Cup. The one where Oracle Team USA were down 8-1 in the best-of-17 event only to come back and claim victory.
Frantically, he scrolled down further to see links to the Clinton LumberKings beating the Burlington Bees in extra innings after being down 17-1 in baseball and a recap of the 1954 World Cup final where Germany fought back after getting down 2-0 to Hungary to win their first World Cup victory.
What could all of that mean? How was it connected to her libido?
He heard her coming down the stairs so he quickly made his way back into the hallway to meet her. She was greeted by the picture of innocence.
“Sorry, I can’t find my shoes,” she said as she bustled past him and began hunting under the couch.
On her hands and knees. Ass up in the air. He heard trumpets.
“That’s it,” he thought to himself.
He smiled, cleared his throat, and took a deep breath.
“So,” he began, “I was playing chess earlier today and I lost my queen really early on. I ended up down like four pieces. It looked pretty bleak… but I ended up winning anyway.”
He saw her body stiffen ever so slightly though she remained motionless except for her breathing. Somehow, he just knew that her eyes were closed.
It was time.