I met a woman a few weeks ago. She’s not the perfect woman, not by any means, but she was there. And at this point, that’s essentially all I need.

At first I didn’t notice her interest in me. A friend of mine pointed it out during a trip. He asked me why I didn’t fuck her, and I guess I didn’t have a good reason. That’s when I became obsessed with her.

It was the first time I’d honestly tried to date a girl in some time. I laid it all out there, asking her to dinner and getting her alone, the whole thing. I could write a novel about the mixed signals she sent me, and the tired mind games I tried to play with her. But trust me; you wouldn’t want to read that book. All that you need to know is that she completely conquered my mind for about two weeks and she was probably unaware of it.

This isn’t the story of how she came to be so brutally important to me for such an insignificant period of time. Shit, I don’t even know if this is a story. It is about the most powerful pair of words I have ever read.

I’m a planner. I like to know what I’m getting into. It calms me; makes me rational. When I have a plan, I have control of the situation. If the situation changes, I get a new plan. One Friday night, I schemed and ended up devising a way to get this girl into bed. I would go to the bar where we often hang out, I would get a pitcher of beer and sit at a table, and I would text her to come to the bar. She, of course, would come to the bar where we’d sit and share a pitcher, then we’d go for a walk outside and hold hands and I’d kiss her under the moonlight and she’d feel like she was the main character in a Nicolas Sparks novel and of course we would just end up in bed together. Completely foolproof.

At this point, it was impossible for her to delude herself into thinking that I wasn’t trying to fuck her. She had to have known. Five days prior I had successfully gotten her into my room. We watched Run, Fatboy, Run and cuddled on my bed for the entire length of the movie. I tried to kiss her a few times but she turned away. Maybe she was teasing me, maybe she was legitimately uninterested. This is a topic for the aforementioned bullshit novel, but the look she gave me that night definitely belongs here.

All cuddled up next to each other on my bed, I wanted nothing more than to feel her lips on mine. It seemed like she wasn’t going to let me, despite performing all the ritualistic precursors to a kiss. I looked into her deeply, forced a coy grin, and went in. But she turned away, and I ended up kissing her tightly pursed lips. Not quite what I wanted, but I got so much more from what she did next.

It was either half a second after she rejected my advance or somehow at the exact same time. She looked down and away from me, then looked at my lips. She brought her lips in on each other and bit down. I want you to step back and take a minute to think of this scene. The girl is staring at the lips which she just disallowed from kissing her, looking at them and punishing her own lips for what she just did. I have never felt more intensely desired, and never felt more confused.

When she left, I sat back down on my bed surrounded by the smell of the shampoo she had left on the pillow and closed my eyes, forcing myself back into that moment. I flushed the resultant dirty tissue a few minutes later.

The bartender had a problem pouring the pitcher because the keg was all fucked up, but in a few minutes I had completed phase one of the operation. I texted her as eloquently as I could, “Come to the bar.” In retrospect, it’s obvious why she didn’t text me back. I sat there with my phone on the table, pretending to be interested in the episode of Ghost Hunters that played on the only television in the bar. My mind idly read through the lines of closed captioning without really understanding a single word of it.

When I text a girl and I don’t get a response, I like to text a whole shitload of other people. That way I’m not sitting there waiting for my phone to beep. I’m not waiting for that little green light to flash and reassure me that I’m a good, desirable person. So that’s what I did. I sat there and texted a dozen other people and got a few friends to come hang out with me at the bar. After about a half an hour, she texted me back with those two words that made me feel completely vacant.

maybe later

No punctuation, a half an hour late, and just as casual as can be. In those words she had told me that I wasn’t a priority to her. I was so low to her that she didn’t even bother to make up an excuse. “Maybe later, I’m shitting” would have at least made me think that she wanted to come, but was busy. Nope. Just ‘maybe later’ and she didn’t even bother to capitalize the M.

In the moment after I read that, I experienced every possible emotion as I tried to figure out what I felt. The wheel settled on ‘nothing.’ I didn’t feel anything for this girl anymore. Two days ago I felt like I was fourteen again and couldn’t keep my hand off my dick every time I rolled over and caught a whiff of the trashy perfume she’d worn as we laid together. I didn’t hate her, my balloon didn’t pop. It just deflated, lying there limp and wrinkled. My passion didn’t transform, it disappeared.

Last night she asked me what I was doing. I said I was out with friends. She said have fun. I said thanks.