…starters
From the distance I have been observing him, and with little less than a few minutes to take in his entire persona (and usually when I am trying to focus on work) I never had the chance to truly appreciate D&G before our dinner on Friday. So while in my mind he had become Adonis like; perfect skin, perfect teeth, exquisite style and hair, piercing eyes, HUGWORTHY torso, SQUEEZWORTHY biceps and thighs so powerful you could crack eggs between them the wrong way around…Michelangelo’s David with a smattering more YES-please and better dress sense.
Closer up D&G is less than perfect.
His skin is a little more weather beaten (turns out he likes to sail and owns a yacht. I’ll get to that). His eyes are less blue and a little more grey. His wardrobe that evening was less tailored (he wears a shirt and suit at work, the only man that does), and that evening he wore a striped summer sweater, grey and black, a dark brown shirt underneath and a pair of expensive looking jeans. This is the man that clowns in a duck costume, why did I envisage he would be the same smart and put together soul in the evenings?
Though my eyes spent longer on the shiny cutlery than him, my psychiatrist knows why (I’m a closet klepto). I took snapshots of parts of him in my head, but never looked at him as a whole. As I looked up from the tableware, across the view of the London skyline, skirted my eyes over the eaves of the restaurant and other guests, I caught the crinkle of skin in the corner of his eye (he is a little older than I thought) and the slight crookedness of his bottom lip, the fact that he has one ear pierced but I have never seen him wearing an earring, he had his hair cut since I last saw him (Today? For me?) and that I think he was wearing a little makeup under his eyes. Nevertheless he was no less stunning. Not the slightest bit less hot to look at, which is why I couldn’t look at him all in one go, I thought I might faint, and I like eating at the Oxo, I wanted to make it to the third course.
He let me bluster through the first thirty minutes, after I had got over my soul crushing mute-iny nervous and desperate conversation took over. I must have told him all my innermost secrets in that thirty minutes, and he just looked on in wonder and tried to pick us a bottle of wine (the final choice was a Bordeaux; Château Montrose, Deuxième Cru).
The salt and pepper shakers were so goddamn cool!
So goddamn fucking cool that I wanted to melt them with my stare. Why could we not have gone somewhere a little less cool, somewhere a little more clunking and normal, or abnormal, does he think I’m one of those women like Claire who thrives on being on top of the latest trend (okay I know Oxo isn’t the latest trend, but it’s still a place she hangs out I’m sure); is he one of them, is that why were we there?
Okay so I was dwelling, my cheeks were flushed, and the server who had by this point been summoned over was looking at me expectantly to order. I set down the shakers which I had been absentmindedly playing with (date wasn’t going really that well so far) and ordered the first thing on the menu I could see.
When she had gone D&G asked me what was wrong. God that voice, creamy, deep, American; it made me miss my Dad (Yes, and my psych would have something to say about that too I’m sure).
I wasn’t about to tell him I should have been in the arms of my partner that moment, but that we’d had a fight, and now…yah yah yah. God how pathetic would that have been.
But what I actually did say wasn’t all that better, I just locked on his eyes for the first time that evening.
“You clown?” I asked, letting myself be ironic. He didn’t even blink.
“I don’t want to talk about that.” He said, hell he loves his own little mysteries. (And in truth that one’s killing me).
“I bet there’s loads of things you like people to know about but never explain,” I guessed, “Like I bet you smoke a pipe, or collect action figures, or…I don’t know…speak Polish or something.”
“Cantonese.” He added. “Like I said, I don’t want to talk about me. I’m playing hard to get.” Seriously he said that. I think I lost all control of my pants right then. They would have gone out on the top of my emptied starter plate if I could have slipped them off without him noticing.
“Hard to get?” I laughed.
He just smiled, god he loved himself a bit much right then. As my little brother says when we MSN, “meh”, because so did I. Love him. A bit. Right then.
“Why?”
“Because that’s what you’ve been doing to me for weeks now. It’s time you had a bit of your own medicine.” He grinned as we got our main course, I had completely forgotten what I had ordered, in fact I had completely forgotten how to use most of the extremities of my body right about that moment.
“I hadn’t even noticed.” I said, really I thought I had been too full on with my flirtation, then again, I remembered, I do HAVE a partner, even if he has gone and made an idiot out of himself, and called me condescending, and whined because I have to be nice to other people apart from him and screwed one of my oldest…
“There you go again. Being all coy.” He said.
COY!
I SHIT YOU NOT! ME! COY? WTF.
“I’ve got a lot of stuff on my mind. Work, you know.” I’m a terrible liar.
He’s so amazingly cocksure he leant forward and straight up took my hand.
“Can we get over the flirtation and just admit that we both want to screw each other’s brains out?” He asked. “I mean it’s fun and all but I’m not a patient person.”
I mean, come on… what would you do?
