How We Met

When I first agreed to go out with Harry I had no idea I was getting a spanker out of the deal. We met under tediously vanilla circumstances. My sister and a friend had dragged me into a pub -- the kind of seedy place I'd never been before and would never have chosen -- and sometime after an adequate number of vodka-cranberries had been consumed to put me in a friendly mood for chatting with the natives, he sat down at our table. The first thing I noticed about him was how big his hands were, but idle fantasies notwithstanding, it never occurred to me that he might be like that. I mostly only agreed to go out with him because I was impressed that he memorized my e-mail address without writing it down and then e-mailed me when he said he would two days later. I definitely didn't think he was my type or that anything more would come of it than maybe a pleasant evening and a new experience.

I got my first inkling that he might have potential pretty early on in that first date, though. We were waiting to go into the movie theatre for an afternoon showing of the latest Superman and he was telling me about the earlier installments, which I'd never seen, and this naturally lent itself to an old man comment (he's five years older than I am, and well, I'm a brat). Rather than getting annoyed or ignoring me, he gasped in mock horror and reached over and gently patted my cheek in a way that was totally non-threatening but was nevertheless obviously meant to mimic a slap. In this barely post-PC era I was pretty surprised that he'd have the guts to do something like that, and even more so a few hours later when he reached across the front seat of his car and smacked my leg when I made a similar comment regarding his taste in music.

I spent the next week debating with my then-best friend about the odds that I'd accidentally met a fellow spanko in a random bar that I hadn't even intended to go to, the suspense of which led to an unprecedented confession on my part the following weekend when he came over for dinner, and the rest, as they say, is history.

We were talking about that first date over the weekend and I told him about the speculation that his playful love taps had caused and he revealed that the first time I got up from the table at dinner that night after the movie, he'd had to suppress the urge to smack my backside as I walked by -- that I somehow I just provoked that urge in him -- but that he'd resisted because he didn't know how I'd react.

The only truthful answer I could give to that was, "Heh, I'd probably have slept with you on the first date." You can just imagine what his response was to THAT.