This strange little arrangement of ours which stops short of becoming a real committed and scary relationship but with many of the benefits of. Together we’ve agreed on the term “friends with benefits” (for lack of a better one) with possibly an overemphasis on friendship than benefits. Although I would say that getting to be little spoon is definitely a lovely benefit along with the odd spontaneous rendezvous and fits of midnight passion. We pledge our adoration of one another frequently like two grade six girls in the school yard. “Our friendship is the most important thing. I would do anything for you. I’ll always have your back. Etc.”
It was after a recent tinder date this was actually put to the test.
One afternoon, out of boredom, I reactivated my tinder account. Mostly I did this for my friend Hailey who finds the concept amusing but doesn’t want to be personally associated with it. Tinder appeals to me. I tried to describe it to an aunt, a baby boomer, that it’s like looking through a catalogue of men who could potentially be your future husband without having to leave your house. This appeals to me. I am a big fan of anything you can do while still watching TV.
Generally it leads nowhere. If I find anything of interest I screencap and send it to Hailey, we have a laugh, wash, repeat. Somehow I got to chatting with a guy called G about food. I feel like all my conversations on tinder are either about food or travel. Never sex. Maybe because sex is already implied as a distant possibility so it seems pretty redundant to talk about it. Let’s just say, I still haven’t reached the milestones of “first dick pic”, “first facebook stalker”, “first abusive misogynist rant” etc. And I won’t say “yet” because I’ve already de-activated my account.
So after chatting with G for about a week about food, books, our work, MKR, our backgrounds, and all the other essentials we decided to meet up for a burger and low-key drink in Brighton. I was pleasantly surprised. Both with G and the burger. And afterwards we headed someplace else for a drink and talked like we’d known each other our whole lives about everything and anything. 6+ (I lost count) drinks later with the bar about to shut I decided it was probably time for me to go home. I wished G farewell, thanked him for a lovely evening, and hopped in a cab.
$10 into my trip at 1am I realised I only had $20 on me and couldn’t find my credit card ANYWHERE. Fuck. Fuuuuuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I explained the situation to the driver and told him I was just going to phone a friend who lived nearby and maybe he could drop me off there. I called P. He wasn’t at home.
P: Get out of the cab. Wherever you are, i’ll come get you!
Me: Are you serious? You can’t do that. I’ll just come to where you are!
The driver ended up dropping me off on Carlisle Street where he said i’d probably be fine. Less than 5 minutes later P arrived - my knight in shining armour - to rescue me. He had left his night out with “the boys” to come get me. He had definitely put his money where his mouth is. Like the friend he is he took care of me for the rest of the night even though it meant stopping at a random park in Port Melbourne to admire the stars on a cloudless night which resulted in me breaking out in a rash from laying on the grass.
A week later. I was out shopping in the city and wanted to get P a small token of appreciation to thank him for getting me out of an uncomfortable situation (the thought of travelling all the way home and realising my card was actually lost-lost still makes me ill.)
P credits the film American Psycho for turning him onto facials and men’s beauty treatments and says he’s never had such good skin or enviable physique since Patrick Bateman became the posterboy for men of his generation. (Of course he seems to have overlooked the fact Ellis wrote American Psycho as a takedown of white male corporate yuppie culture, and instead he uses the damn thing as a guidebook to life - especially the GQ passages and the business card scene as inspiration for his own.) So I thought it would be right up his alley to buy him a giftbox of indulgent body treatment products. Massage oil, body lotion, and whatever else the male sales assistant upsold me.
But here’s where things get awkward. I am actually embarrassingly head over heels in love with P. Thankfully I don’t think he is 100% aware of this. I do my very best not to come across as “That Girl”. That crazy, obsessed, clingy, already-scrapbooking-our-future-wedding-girl. That said, I have my moments, I’m human after all, but I like to think I do a good job of not declaring my undying love for him every time I see him and coming off like a crazypants so well done me.
I had some time to myself one afternoon to drop off the gift personally. Somehow I always manage to forget which townhouse P lives in because one looks identical to the other. All I was meant to do was slip behind the gate and leave the plain cardboard box spritzed with some masculine scent (birch, moss, alpine mist, essence of stag etc) with its accompanying card at the front door and go as I knew P wouldn’t be getting home from the office until about 2 in the morning.
As I bent down to leave the box I saw what was, basically, a bird that’d had its wing and head ripped off lying on the doormat. Just my fucking luck, I thought. What the hell am I going to do now? He can’t come home and find a cardboard box with a dead bird in pieces next to it. What will he think?! I actually contemplated picking up the pieces of dead bird with my bare hands and flinging them over the fence just so my surprise token of gratitude wasn’t ruined. I thought about this for a bit, weighed up my options, turned around got momentarily distracted by the lovely potted plants that were at the entrance in some very nice oversized pots. Then I realised … wait. P doesn’t have pot plants …
I was at the wrong house!
Ohhh. Thank. God.
I left the bits of dead bird on the doormat where I found them, went next door, dropped off the stupid bloody gift box, and left quick sticks.
Turns out his housemate was working at home that day and saw the whole calamity. So much for not appearing crazy.
No comments:
Post a Comment