The First Date

This chapter is about my first date with J.C.

As the day wore on, J.C. continued to pretty much blow my phone up with texts every time he got a break from working. By the time the evening rolled around, he had asked me to come hang out with him that night. I told him that I had a wedding rehearsal dinner to attend (Ryan and Shannon, the directors of the youth group for which I was a sponsor, were preparing to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary by renewing their vows) that would most likely prevent me from being able to do so and thought that I had surely dodged the bullet of the undesired date. However, he responded that he didn't get off work until 10:00, anway, so it was okay that I was busy earlier in the night.

 

I knew that the rehearsal dinner would be over long before 10:00, but reasoned that I could always just tell him that it was still going on at that time. However, for reasons that I have never understood even to this day, I found myself saying that I would be free and agreeing to meet up with him.

 

I attended the wedding rehearsal, but left the church before dinner was served. Before bailing, I pulled Shannon aside to explain that I had a date...a bit of information to which she responded by squealing with excitement and telling me that she expected full details following the wedding ceremony the next evening.

 

Why didn't I stay for dinner, you ask? Well, for some reason, I ended up with this crazy little feeling that the three and a half hours or so that stood between me and my outing with J.C. should be spent on me getting myself prepared for said outing rather than feasting with the wedding party.

 

I had showered, styled my hair, and applied my make-up before the rehearsal (and everything still looked...and smelled...perfectly fine), but I ended up doing all of that stuff over again upon arriving home. I then proceeded to go through about six different outfits before I finally settled on one.

 

Once I had gotten completely ready, there was nothing left to do but just sit around and wait for J.C. to text me and tell me that he was ready to meet up (the point in time at which I would drive to his house in Pollok--about twenty minutes away from Alto--where we would get into his truck and make the roughly ten-minute trip to Lake Nacogdoches).

 

There was nothing particularly appealing on television and nothing particularly interesting being said on Facebook, so to pass the time, I opted to engage in two of my favorite hobbies--playing the guitar and singing. In the midst of my rendition of Edwin McCain's 'I'll Be,' I found myself letting my mind wonder just where this whole thing with J.C. might lead...as well as where things would end up with Steven in the event that I decided to continue pursuing them.

 

Eventually, I got the text that I had been waiting for and headed off to Pollok. At around that same time, my conversation with Steven got picked up where it had left off earlier in the day...which succeeded in reminding me how intrigued I had been by him throughout the week and how much I still wanted to carry out the plans that I had made with him for a lunch date on Saturday.

 

As I drove to his house, J.C. continued to text me, telling me how excited he was about the two of us hanging out. I told him of my own "excitement" and resisted the urge to warn him that we were going to end this night just as friends--if he was even that lucky--since I was already quite interested in someone else (and how once I've made up my mind that I'm interested in one person, it's not really all that easy for another person to turn things around). It just didn't really seem right to say something like that in a text message; I figured that the least I could do was tell him to his face. It would be easier to really explain everything that way, anyway.

 

He was standing out in his driveway next to his truck when I pulled up. At this part of the story, you're probably expecting me to say, "And in that moment in time--that beautiful, priceless moment in time--I experienced what it was like to fall in love at first sight," or something incredibly cheesy like that. As sweet and cutesy as that would be...it's just not the way that things went down. Here's what really happened.

 

My reaction to seeing him in person for the first time was about the same as my reaction to seeing him on Facebook. There were no fireworks; there was no special feeling...really, it was kind of just like sharing a passing glance with a random, strange guy on the sidewalk at college or something like that.

 

The first thing that he did when I got out of my car and made my way over to him was give me a hug. If you're expecting me to say, "And that's the moment--the beautiful, priceless moment--when I fell in love with him!"...well, plan to be disappointed. He had a handsome voice, he smelled really good, and it was a nice hug and all...but still. No fireworks; no special feeling.

 

However, that hug did trigger the element of change ever-so-slightly. I managed to open my heart and mind to the point where I definitely planned on being friends, texting as much as he wanted to, and even hanging out on more occasions (on a strictly platonic basis, of course). Even so, I hadn't opened them to the point where I thought that anything beyond friendship was even a remote possibility.

 

We hopped into his truck and headed for the lake, making small talk about how our day had been and what exactly we had been up to. He told me the story behind his "rather out-of-the-ordinary" facial features; to sum up that story, he had experienced an episode of baseball gone bad as a young child, and there had been no way of reversing the damage that had been done.

 

After hearing that story, I felt very sympathetic toward him. However, I cannot lie and say that his appearance had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I did not see romance in our future. I am only human, after all, and sometimes--like all you other humans probably know all too well--our hearts forget about that old saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover," and let our eyes make all of our decisions for us.

 

Our arrival at the lake changed things even more. He let it slip that he had a slight desire to see the movie 'Justin Bieber:  Never Say Never'--which had recently become one of my favorites--and also that even though he wouldn't consider himself a full-fledged Belieber, he at least had a sense of "respect" for the Bieb...which definitely scored him some extra points in my book (especially since he was a twenty-year-old straight male who was confident enough in himself to actually admit something of that sort).

 

We got out of his truck at the lake's scenic overlook. Rather than just standing on top of the hill, we chose to journey down to the lakeshore below. As the stars and moon lit our way, he offered me his hand, and I took it. I proved my tendency to be somewhat uncoordinated as we walked, but his hand never let go of mine; he simply held on and guided me down the slick, narrow dirt path in a way that--for some reason--got my heart feeling all warm and fuzzy.

 

As we sat there beneath the night sky, talking and watching the water gently lap against the shore (and getting a little something extra to laugh about as my shorts-wearing self lost an awkward battle with mosquitos, ants, and stingweed), he slipped his arm around my shoulders. This simple little movement unleashed even more change and scored him even more points; the voice in my head was shrieking, oh, my gosh, this is so cute! It's just like Taylor Swift sings in that song, 'Mine.' "We were sitting there by the water. You put your arm around me for the first time."

 

The feeling-changing chain of events continued as he smiled at me and asked what is perhaps the most adorable question that I had ever been asked. "Would it be weird for me to kiss you right now?"

 

With a smile making its way across my own lips, I shook my head slightly and responded, "No...it wouldn't." My heartbeat thumped in my ears as the two of us lowered our lashes, tilted our heads slightly, and moved in for the kill.

 

Do you want to know the moment--the beautiful, priceless moment--in which I realized that I loved him? Well, I hate to break it to you, but you'll have to wait just a little bit longer to hear about that moment, because we're not quite there yet. But don't worry--it's coming soon!

 

For the time being, let's stay focused on the moment after J.C. and I parted from our first kiss. I had made several more visits to his Facebook page following the first one and had been looking at him pretty much the entire time that we had been hanging out. But in that moment...it's lke I was seeing him for the first time. I finally noticed how beautiful he was. Especially those eyes of his. Big and blue, they had a depth that I had never seen in anybody else's before. And his smile...it was absolutely radiant.

 

What I had planned on being about two hours actually wound up being more along the lines of five. It was around 4:00 on Saturday morning when we arrived back at his house and I headed down the road to Alto (after one more hug and kiss...as well as an agreement to hang out again the following night).

 

About five minutes after I pulled out of his driveway, I sent a text message. It didn't go to J.C....although I did wind up texting him soon after that. No, this particular message went to Steven. I can't remember my exact words, but I basically told him that I had been doing a lot of thinking and had come to the conclusion that calling off our scheduled date would be the best thing to do (he was a very good sport, by the way).

 

Although I still couldn't quite believe it, J.C. Naron had actually done what I had considered to be the impossible. And I had a sneaking suspicion that I hadn't seen anything yet.