Part 1 is here

Part 2 is here

I was “too sweet” and “too awesome”.

Great.

He’d been through a breakup about the same time as me and was still reeling. He wasn’t ready to get emotionally entangled, but he knew that he would if we kept on the way we were.

According to him, I was not someone to be dated casually.

And then he asked the dreaded question.

“Do you think we can be friends?”

He asked me what I thought as we wandered by a stop sign, edited to add “Don’t” and “Believing” to the sentiment.

I considered reminding him of the rarity of our immediate attraction, connection and comfort, our lengthy late night phone discussions about every damn thing, our parallel life goals and our laughter.

But then I remembered what it’s like to convince someone to love you. It can be done. Especially if you possess the kind of stubborn determination I’ve been known to apply from time to time, but in the end, you can never be quite sure of the other person, and you can drive yourself crazy with uncertainty.

The worst kind of love potion is the one that works.

So I didn’t remind him of anything.

Instead I said, “All right, friends it is…but you do realize I look fantastic naked, right?”

And I let the butterflies go.

*Part one is here

We never did ride bikes.

We did, however, spend the next 12 or so hours together. We chatted and kissed and snoozed and laughed and ate and snoozed and chatted and snoozed and watched a terrible movie.

He invited me to a wedding.

It was around hour three, catching a glimpse of our reflections, standing side-by-side in matching jammies, brushing our teeth and grinning at each other, that it occurred to me that I might have stumbled onto something rare.

As I drifted off to sleep, I heard him murmur. “I think you’re a really nice person.”

The next afternoon, as he got ready for the wedding, my practicality wrested the wheel back from my giddy romanticism, and I decided to head for home rather than try for the world’s lengthiest accidental first date.

So he went to a wedding.

And I went to Spain with this lady.

We went for brunch, we went for dinner and to my amazement the bizarre comfort we’d found that first night didn’t fade.

It felt like we could be honest about anything. And it felt like we were kids.

One day we went for a walk in the park. He told me about his imagined perfect life: The job, the family and the priorities that lined up spookily with my own.

We perched on a bench overlooking the dog park and an honest-to-god horde of butterflies started fluttering around and landing all over me.

Butterflies.

And that’s when he told me he didn’t want to date me.

(I told you it wasn’t a love story)