Third and last date with Эриска

For the next few weeks I caught myself obsessing over Эриска like a kid in school, and decided it was mostly because of her body. Working through it with Шеррила, I decided that things probably weren't going to go anywhere with Эриска and I should just let her drift away. I was kind of surprised when she asked to come over for dinner and hang out with us on a Friday night.

She arrived in the late afternoon, and she and Шеррила snuggled with me on the couch, with the conversation ranging around. She seemed comfortable with us both. Eventually we walked to a restaurant. When we walked back it was dark, and we built a fire with the wood I'd chopped earlier in the day, and we snuggled up again beneath a blanket, with me in the middle. Эриска backed up against me on the floor until we were spooning, and I stuffed my face into the hair on the back of her head and lazily ran one hand along her leg and hip over the blanket.

She and Шеррила zig-zagged into a pretty racy conversation about shopping for sex toys, and Шеррила asked if she preferred to be a "giver" or a "receiver", which I then translated out loud into "pitcher" and "catcher". I joked that since there was no equivalent to being a "batter", we should try and figure out what that meant. That got into some pretty funky talk about the mechanics of sex, and we laughed a lot.

Эриска mentioned a friend of hers who was also looking for romance, and I mentioned hearing about his dating profile. She borrowed Шеррила's phone and logged herself into the dating site right in front of us to browse around. I followed her fingers on the keyboard and noticed with some amusement that her password was "HITTER". Very relevant to the conversation...

She stumbled around the app a bit and eventually located her friend. From watching her look at messages and profiles I learned that most of her interaction on the site had apparently been with me. I felt somehow relieved at this, as though I wasn't just a random face in a crowd. So much of her schedule and social life was a mystery to me, and I had been worrying there was some huge piece of it I would find alarming or alien -- like, for example, twice a week she went out to a bar and got plastered, or, every week she invited some hot but boring guy over and they got freaky on her couch just long enough for her to get off, and then she kicked them out. A weird mix of paranoia and inadequacy creeping around in my head. I was glad to dispel it.

Since Эриска had the phone, I showed her the emulated guitar app my friend had written, and she played a little song while we made up lyrics and laughed. I ran my hand casually across her stomach, through her shirt. It was taut like a drum. She breathed in, pushing into my hand, and there was the briefest flit of a shared sexual interest, then it vanished.

After a long time, she hauled herself upright, to go home. At the door she gave both of us a huge lingering hug, and I put on slippers and walked her to her car. She opened the car, then turned around and gave me an arms-over-the-shoulders hug, as though she was falling into me. Not some half-hearted man-style thing, but a hug that said "I like you a lot."

"I like you", I told her.

She grinned. "I like you too! You're both good people." A calibrated response.

She drove off and I trudged back inside, shivering, and curled up in front of Шеррила. We chatted about the day for a while longer, then she poked her laptop and I did some writing.

The date had been both encouraging and strange, but it turned out there wasn't much more to our story. I invited her on more bike rides, and to more dinner parties, but she turned all the invitations down. We lapsed into silence. Eventually I sent her a message saying I understood if she found someone else and wished her well, and thought she might like a copy of the questionnaire Шеррила and I had put together as we explored polyamory, because it made for good conversation. I was surprised when she responded with a heartfelt confession that her wife was struggling, and her mother-in-law was sick, and she had been too harried by work and plans for traveling back East to even think about romance or her social life. I had taken quite the wrong read of the situation.

The outcome was the same though: She needed to stay off the map for a while. I didn't mind.

A week after that she was blasted completely out of my consciousness - along with almost everything else - by Моника.