Talk Dirty To Me – Epilogue – Eight Minutes Late

I’m standing in front of my bathroom mirror putting on my second earring and I’m late and I don’t care, which is new.

I am not a woman who is late. I am a woman who arrives five minutes early and has already assessed the room by the time anyone else gets there. I manage a front desk for a living. I manage everything for a living – schedules, people, problems that aren’t mine, moods that have nothing to do with me. I am extremely good at it and it costs me nothing because it’s just who I am.

What I was not good at, for a very long time, was this.

Getting ready for a man. Actually wanting to get there. Putting on the second earring and looking at myself in the mirror and thinking: I look good, without immediately following that thought with something useful and practical and completely unrelated to the fact that there is a man at a restaurant right now who is waiting for me and who I am – if I’m being honest, which I am now, which is also new – very glad is waiting for me.

His name is Nicko.

I met him in a bar on the worst night of the month – my relationship had just ended, my best friend was drunk in a way that required active management, and I had left my bag on the bar and gone back for it and found him there instead. He bought me a beer. I drank it. We went upstairs.

I told myself it was one night. It was not one night.

I told myself it was just sex. It was not just sex. Although – and I want to be clear about this – the sex was genuinely extraordinary, which is relevant information and not a small thing, and I will get to that.

What I didn’t tell myself, for a long time, was the real thing. The thing underneath the one night and the just sex and all the other containers I built around what was actually happening. I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t say a lot of things out loud, for a long time, until Nicko made it impossible not to.

That’s what this is about.

Not the falling in love part – though that happened, quietly, in the background, while I was busy deciding it wasn’t. The other part. The part where a woman who spent sixteen years not saying what she wanted in bed finally said it, and the world didn’t end, and the man didn’t leave, and it turned out that the only thing wrong with wanting more was that nobody had ever told her it was allowed.

He’s at the restaurant right now.

He doesn’t know I almost didn’t come tonight. He doesn’t know about the container I built, the arrangement I decided on without telling him, the months I spent protecting myself from something that didn’t need protection.

He probably knows. He’s annoyingly perceptive for a man who doesn’t talk much.

I put in the second earring.

I’m going to be eight minutes late, which is a new record for me.

I find I don’t mind at all.