Moving On

This story is from Lilian, a 24-year-old legal assistant from Boston, as told to Raz: 

One weekend, I was at brunch with my friend Shelly and a lot of her friends. And when I say brunch, I mean drunk brunch. The mimosas and bloody Marys were flowing like water.

At one point, Shelly informed me that her friend Greg, sitting at the opposite end of the table, thought I was hot and wanted to ask me out. He looked cute enough.

“He’s recently broken hearted,” she said, “so be gentle.”

“No thank you,” I responded. The last thing I needed was someone who wasn’t emotionally stable. Besides, I was moving out of town the next week.

Suddenly, the man from the other end of the table had switched seats to sit next to me. Feeling trapped, I started chatting with him. It didn’t take long for him to bring up his last relationship, which, it turns out, had ended almost a year before. “I literally didn’t do anything for 9 months after the breakup,” he said. “I just laid at home in my pajamas, devastated.”

“Breakups are hard,” I responded. Awkward! Before we parted ways, he asked for my number. I felt a little sorry for the poor guy (9 months in pajamas!), so I gave it to him.

A week later, I was finishing packing up my stuff (the movers were coming the next day), when Greg texted me.

“Let me prove to you that I’m not as awful as I seemed at brunch.” He said. “Let’s meet for drinks just as friends.”

My roommate was having a gentleman over that night, and I really didn’t want to be around. Plus, I was leaving the next day—what harm could a drink do?

Greg and I decided on a restaurant to meet at early that evening, and just as I was about to leave to meet him, he texted: “Would you mind coming to my place first? Me and my roommate just need to finish something up and then we can go.”

I was a little creeped out to go to a stranger’s apartment, but my roomie’s date had just arrived and I was itching to get out. I told her to text me every seven minutes to make sure I was still alive, then headed to Greg’s place.

When I got there, I found that the very important thing they needed to finish up was a jam session. There’s nothing quite like watching two thirty-year-old men playing electric guitar to each other… On the plus side, they offered me a drink right away, which ended up being a shot of tequila. I took it gladly.

Too many shots later, I was actually having a lot of fun watching them rock out. When they’d finally had their fill of guitaring (and tequila), Greg took me to another room for a heart to heart.

“You’re the first girl I’ve been interested in since my last girlfriend,” he confessed. Uh oh, now I was really uncomfortable, and I had no interest in leading this guy on.

I told him it was getting late, and I had to go meet some friends at a bar to say goodbye.

“Great, we’ll just come with you,” he said. What could I say? So he, his roommate and I cabbed it to the bar.  When we arrived, they introduced themselves and then hung back, silent and lurking behind me.

When the group moved to another bar, the twosome tagged along. And they did the same thing—hung out in the background watching me, without even attempting to be social.

At the end of the night, Greg asked me if I’d come home with him. Luckily, that’s just when I got the text from my roomie that the coast was clear if I wanted to come home without interrupting date night.

Greg looked distraught as he got into a cab with his roommate. I’m just hoping that—since we only hung out for one night—the pajama-clad grieving period will be short.