Mr. Unavailable #137: Girls' Night Out, Part I

See Spring Fever for the background on this one.

As someone who doesn’t really drink, I don’t go out for drinks very often. But with a full-blown case of spring fever and a very open mind, I found myself—at 11 p.m. on one particular Saturday night—out for drinks with Nora at R Bar on the Bowery, watching groups of girls take their turns around a couple of stripper polls.

It was an educational evening. I learned that the new fashion is for women to wear the shortest dresses possible—no matter your size or shape. I also learned that a short dress is not a liability when dealing with a stripper poll, not if one of two things happens: the dress is appropriately tight or the woman in the dress clenches tightly with her legs.

Nora and I settled onto a banquette with drinks and scanned the room. A group of pretty boys stood across from us at the bar.

“I like all of them, especially that one,” Nora said, noting a particularly chiseled, bearded man. “I usually don’t like guys with facial hair, but he’s cute.”

“Oh, he knows he’s cute,” I said, meaning that that was his problem.

I picked out another one from the group that I liked, too. Dark hair, clearly fit—the kind of guy who wears aftershave and irons his shirts.

I turned to take a sip of my drink and when I turned back, the chiseled one had bolted across the room to sit at Nora’s side. They started talking and, within minutes, were making out.

I looked around, knocked at the ice cubes in my glass with my straw, went to the bathroom, came back, sat down, looked around some more. And then I saw the dark-haired, fit one approach. He said something to Chiseled and Chiseled leaned over Nora and introduced us.

“Tara, this is [#137],” Chiseled said.

“Hi, nice to meet you,” #137 said.

I hadn’t noticed from a distance, but, up close, he just seemed gay—maybe it was the lilt at the end of his introduction, or his product-laden hair, or the slight bounce in his step, or his symmetrical features. Whatever it was, it was palpable.

Oh, the chiseled guy's nice gay friend has come over to keep me company, I thought. Too bad he’s gay.

We started talking. It turned out that he worked at a mutual fund company that I did freelance work for—and, on a daily basis, he worked with the people I dealt with. We did a full department name check: “Do you know Angela? Greg? Carrie?” Check. Check. Check.

“That’s crazy,” I said, grabbing the arm of my new gay friend.

“Wow, what a small world,” he said, “Now I can’t say anything about how it really is there.”

“Yes, you can,” I said, smiling big and jumping up and down. There was no need to hide my spastic personality, after all. He was gay.

“Do you want a drink?” he said.

That was nice. Chiseled’s gay friend wanted to buy me a drink.

We stood by the bar with our fresh drinks.

“Well…now that we know the same people in a business context, I can’t say what I was going to say, “ he said.

“What can’t you say? Just tell me,” I pleaded.

“Well, you’re practically a colleague so now it’s kind of out of line…” he said, brushing his hand across mine.

“No, it’s not,” I said.

“Well, I was going to say, it’s too bad you’re practically a colleague because you’re really cute. Did you see me checking you out before?”

Aw, Chiseled’s gay friend was hitting on me. Wait. Oh my god. Chiseled’s gay friend wasn’t gay.

#137. Was. Not. Gay.

“No, I didn’t see you checking me out,” I said, trying to wrap my head around his newfound heterosexuality.

“Good. That means I was being slick,” he said. Taking my hands, he started to dance with me. And, no surprise, he could dance. As if his straight cred weren’t already flimsy enough, that just served to crack away at it some more.

Later, we compared war stories. He was an adrenaline junky, active in things like skydiving, motorcycle racing and bike racing (running from some kind of buried truth, perhaps?) while I confessed that I was afraid to ride my bike in New York City.

“It’s dangerous,” he said sweetly. Too sweetly?

Chiseled and #137 wanted to go somewhere else and Nora, despite her wobbly state, wanted to dance, so they took us to Hotel-something on the Lower East Side, where we headed to the basement and started dancing to 80s tunes. #137 danced close, holding me to him as he swung me around. He had that look in his eyes. It was a look of…well, the only words that come to mind are “gay delight.” Yes, he had a look of gay delight.

I could also tell that he wanted to kiss me. When he’d lean in, I’d smile and dodge. Smile and dodge.

“You’re really not going to kiss me?” he said.

“OK, fine,” I said as if I’d been dared. And then we kissed. And it was really good. The last time a kiss was that good it was 1999 and I was on the dance floor of Red Dog in Chicago when MY GAY FRIEND Preston said he really wanted to kiss me, and, when we kissed, I nearly fell over. This time, #137 nearly fell over.

#137 leaned back, stunned. “Wow,” he said.

I just smiled as if I knew it would be stunning all along. By the time we decided to go, he’d already given the keys to his apartment to Chiseled so he could take a now-very-drunk Nora there. We got our coats at the third floor coat check, stopping at every floor to make out, and then stepped outside onto whatever Lower East Side street we were on.

“I really like kissing you,” he said. “You’re a really good kisser.”

“So are you,” I said, really just basking in my own apparent kissing skills.

It was the turning point. Would I go home to my home or to his home? I have to be honest, I was having a hard time overcoming his gayness. It was more than just a metrosexual thing. A gay glow shined just under the surface—like a blue vein under thin skin—in his voice, in his laugh, in his dancing. Deep down, I just wanted to go home, but Nora was at his place and she was drunk and maybe I should really check on her and…

Well, I did say yes, but the real reason I said yes? Real estate. I wanted to see his place. Living in New York, due to the small apartment sizes and consequent lack of parties, one rarely gets to see where people live. And he told me he had a one bedroom in an elevator building on the Lower East Side. It had to be nice.  

Signs of Hope: He wanted me to come home with him. And the kissing was good.

Red Flags: He just seemed so gay.

Turning Point: The moment when, driven by real-estate mania, I decided to go home with him.

Diagnosis: For him: He seems so nice and stable and available—and gay.

For me: Maybe I’m the only one who’s getting a gay reading; maybe that’s just my own unavailability talking.