Lines
After my third drink I decide I will sleep with you if you ask.
My first two drinks are glasses of red wine, probably Malbec or Syrah, which are my go-to choices. They are comfortable yet sophisticated, known entities, perfect for a winter evening of conversation and catching up, which you and I meet to do a few times a year.
My third drink – the one that leads to my undeclared declaration – is bourbon, which you order for me when I tell you I’ve never tried it.
Initially, I demur. A sip of your bourbon is fine, I don’t need another drink, I have to work in the morning and you have to drive home. Somehow, while I am outlining all my reasons for not trying bourbon, my own glass arrives at the bar. I don’t recall your ordering it when our server places it in front of me. It is decorated with a black cherry speared on a red plastic toothpick, and it – and you – dares me to take it on.
Challenge accepted.
There is, I find, a familiar quality to this libation, even though it is a new addition to my drink repertoire. No – that’s not entirely true. The liquor is foreign, so I sip cautiously while you talk – about your job, your children, your theories on everything from politics to literature to music. I sip and listen and conclude that you are what is familiar, and I know I will forever associate this taste with you, and so, by the transitive property of alcohol – if there is such a thing – bourbon, too, is familiar.
That is when I decide that, should you ask, I will sleep with you – you who are simultaneously safe and dangerous, you who for years has made me laugh, you who flirts back with me as we debate and banter and teeter on the edge of an invisible line that we do not dare to cross.
This game we play – is it fun for you? I wonder but I don’t ask; I just assume it is, otherwise you wouldn’t keep engaging. It is for me. You look at me in a way that no one else does, in a way that would probably make me turn away if it were someone else, but it’s you, and so instead I’m pulled in. That safety and danger I mentioned? Both vie for my attention, attention I’m more than happy to give. You silently dare me to keep talking – that’s the danger – while you keep listening, and that’s the safety. The more I say, the less dangerous you seem, the more danger we could get into together.
This is what I am thinking as I sip the bourbon.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the fireplace, and in the instant I don’t recognize myself in the crowd at the bar. The woman I see is attractive, worldly, with wavy hair just messy enough to look effortlessly good. Her blush is enhanced by the fire and the bourbon, her blue eyes – my blue eyes – by the grey of her cashmere sweater. I am surprised, happily so, to see that I look the way I feel. Confident. Carefree. Charming.
And you? You look charmed. I have seen this look on your face before. I like it. I like knowing that at this very moment, I am the reason it is there.
You keep talking, and I ask you if you are happy. When you tell me you are, I believe you, because I’m happy too. You and I, we fulfill some need for each other. Maybe I remind you that you are still attractive, still exciting, still interesting. Maybe I represent a life that you don’t really want – not for more than a few hours at a bar every few months – but like knowing you could still have, if you so chose. Maybe I know this because that’s exactly what you do for me.
The drinks are gone. In a few moments we will be as well. I will sleep with you if you ask, but you don’t. I’m not disappointed. Maybe I’m even relieved.
We embrace and go out into the cold, you to your car and your children and your wife, me to my apartment and my writing, neither one of us looking back, both of us happy, both of us knowing that the line we once again didn’t cross is still very much there.