On the other hand, texting can be a not-so-nice and very convenient way of avoiding actual conversation, as in: It’s far easier to text your venom/anger/sadness/desire/flirty remarks rather than say any of it voice-to-voice, especially when your text is something you would NEVER say in person. I’ve done it; I suspect everyone has at some point.

A slight digression: I have also learned the hard way more than once that if a guy incessantly and only texts right from the start, “Ur so hot, baby can’t wait to c u” will soon be replaced with “Gotta cancel tonite, baby,” which will ultimately end up as “Not sure when I’ll see you, hon.”

Ah, and then there’s text regret, felt either immediately upon pressing “send” or realized the next morning when you piece together the previous evening. You know the text. It’s the one that leaves you wishing like hell that you could pluck the words from the air before they ever reach the screen of the intended so that you can shove the errant remarks back into the recesses of your phone, where they will instantly vaporize into harmless thoughts that were never fully formed. Alas, “send” means sent, and likely received and read. All the do-overs and retractions never seem to fully undo the text that got away.

Which leads to a text I received last week from a guy who insisted we should be together over the reunion weekend, despite his having a girlfriend living 20 minutes away. I immediately shut him down in a less-than-nice way when I realized what was happening. Yeah, yeah, can’t blame a guy for trying…whatever.

I received his text while I was sitting on the plane waiting to wing my way back to the Keys (see, this is one of those times you don’t want to talk on the phone and texting is incredibly appropriate).

“Great to see u. U were so nice to me. Thanx.”

R u kidding?

I texted back that I was pretty sure I hadn’t been all that nice to him and that frankly, he had confounded me with the persistent come-ons, given his admitted like for his girl “back home.”

A call came in just as I pressed “send,” which I took. A moment later I went back to my text screen, pressed his name and saw a new text response from him asking, “Why?”

Why? WHY? You have to ask “Why?”

“Um, u have a girlfriend and u just wanted a weekend quickie with me?” Send. Dumb ass, I thought.

Until I realized who I’d just sent that choice comment to: the one who’d ditched me in May, the one I’d lunched with. Yep, they have the same first names and last initials. How I’d managed that lovely faux pas remains a mystery. The “Why?” question was from weeks ago. I always clear conversations, but somehow this one was still in my phone and somehow I had just sent the wrong Jeff the right message.

Now who was the dumb ass?

I began the litany of apologies: “Ha! I am writing to the wrong Jeff! Had a situation in dc!! LOL sorry.”

Which didn’t feel like enough, so I followed up with: “So sleep deprived. Sorry!”

Which seemed even stupider to say, so I finished with: “I am jumping out of my plane when it takes off unless I die of embarrassment before that.”

Right, that fixed everything.

Hours later, I landed in Fort Lauderdale. Hours and hours later, I was back in my quiet Keys neighborhood. Within a half hour, I went to Jeff’s restaurant, where I knew he’d be tending bar, to apologize and hopefully laugh in person about the mistakenly sent text.

He had a big grin on his face as I approached the bar. “And what, missy, was all THAT about?” he laughed, waving his cell.

It was close to closing. I was the only one at his bar. I started laughing as I tried to show him the errant text thread and explain why I had so stupidly screwed up.

We both laughed, again and again, as I dug myself deeper into the rabbit hole and finally agreed, “I was an idiot!.”

We laughed some more about reunion parties and previous sixth grade loves of our lives and all the good and bad feelings that school reunions conjure up.

“Hey, thanks for coming in to see me,” he smiled when I said it was time for me to head home and sleep for a year.

“Hey, thanks for getting the humor in this,” I said, shaking my head.

He paused, then said, “I like it better this way. Friends?”

I looked at him, and I realized at that moment that I’d actually gotten over the hurt and the confusion he’d previously caused, because we weren’t ever really destined to be a romantic match.

But tonight, too funny. Tonight, all good. Tonight, perfect.

“Friends,” I smiled back at him. All thanks to a text that happily got away.

“I mean, so, I just want to be your friend. I like you and all, just not like that. So, can we be friends, you know, with benefits?”

“You are so adorable. You don’t have a daughter who dances at the strip club down the road, do you?”

“Do you still have a uterus?”

I wish I was kidding. I wish I was making this up.

I wish I could wish it all very, very far away.

It also turned out we were only 10 years apart in age, which seemed huge when I was 12 and hugely insignificant when I was working in the same school with her decades later.

“We should have lunch out sometime when we’re not working,” I told her one afternoon as we watched the urchins in our charge slurp warm milk from tiny cartons and dip fish sticks in ketchup.

“Oh, no. I never do lunch,” she said, almost angry and clearly appalled.

Ooooookay. Seemed like it might be fun….

“Nothing personal,” she added, now apologetic for her harsh response. “It’s just that after my husband died, that’s all everyone wanted to do–lunch. I don’t know why, I swore I’d never be one of those ladies–a young widow no less–who did lunch!”

Got it. Well, not really. But okay.

I never had lunch with her. I never had a drink with her. I never saw her again after my short subbing tenure. Happily, I was able to tell her she was the single most influential teacher I ever had in terms of my writing. So it wasn’t a total loss of re-connection.

“Lunch?” came the text last Monday from the boy who’d ditched me last month.

“Working,” I texted back. Didn’t he already know that?

Frowny faces and “Awwwww” popped up on my iPhone.

“Lunch?” came the text the next morning, Tuesday.

“Working,” I texted back. I knew he knew this. “How about a drink later after you get off work tonight?”

No response.

Much later that night, when I was asleep in bed, came this text: “Just got your text. Not feeling well. Lunch tomorrow?”

“Working the next two days,” I texted back, adding, “I’m sure we’ll catch up whenever.” No response. Oh please, I thought, you are the one who instigated this nifty little invitation thread. WTF?

“Lunch?” came the text on Friday, three days later. Brilliant.

“I have plans later this afternoon, but an early lunch, sure,” I texted back. Because now I was genuinely curious about his odd persistence to meet for lunch. Surely he had finally realized his mistake in ditching me! Haha.

He chatted about nothing much. He drank three vodka crans and I downed the same number of mimosas. Right, we were perfectly comfortable with one another. The bartender hung around, telling us how he and his girlfriend were leaving to go north for the summer. What were we up to, etc.? The boy responded in generic kind about staying put “even in hurricanes.”

As far as I could tell, there was absolutely no point to this lunch.

So I asked him, “Why are we having lunch?”

“I miss you,” he replied. “And we’re buds, right?”

“You don’t miss me,” I answered, shaking my head. “And buds? Oh, okay.”

“Look I know I hurt you. But you have to test the waters before you get your feet wet, right? At least I told you how I felt. I mean, hasn’t that ever happened to you when you didn’t feel it for someone?”

Yep, time to call it a lunch.

“You didn’t hurt me,” I said. “You confused the hell out of me. And yes, I remind myself every time I think I feel badly about you, about how I didn’t feel about a couple of guys.” He smiled like he’d won something.

Except I never asked them to be my guy, I never led them to think I was crazy about them, and I never asked them to stop seeing other people, I thought but didn’t say because I’d said it before and I was very much done.

“Thank God, I never slept with you,” I said, calmly. “You probably did me a favor, ditching me like you did.”

He was a little stunned–enough not to respond for a second. Then, “Ouch!” He paused, “But yeah, maybe I did.”

“Well, you’ve forced me back into the wild whacky world of dating,” I smiled, waving the screen of my cell phone in front of him that displayed two texts, one missed call, and a voice mail from said whacky dating world.

“We’ll take the check,” said the boy to the bartender. He turned to pat Rouletta’s head. Then he was oblivious when I paid the check with my credit card.

“No, no!” he feigned concern upon realizing.

“Yeah, you leave the tip,” I mumbled. And with that I untangled Rouletta’s leash and we walked to his car. I had walked to the restaurant, but he didn’t offer me a lift home. Which was fine, because I would have declined it, anyway.

I am becoming rather skilled at deleting numbers from my cell phone and blocking those whom I’d rather never know about again from Facebook news feeds and then deleting them from email lists. Bye and bye and bye.

There’s another world out there, as whacky as it is. It’s one in which people call me first, return my calls, make plans, and call again. It is a world in which I caught my first fish and had a blast with someone I’ve known but kept at arm’s length. It is a world through which I no longer feel the need to rush.

And no doing lunch unless it’s a first date. And never again, after the fact.

Don’t misunderstand, in general, I like cats. I only owned cats back in the day. But now I have Rouletta the pup, and frankly, Keys cats are kind of scary in all their bravado. In a word, I am over cats.

I do not want to “date” these days. But suddenly, there they are, lurking around every bar stool at work or re-connecting after hearing how the latest boy ditched me. They are seemingly sweet and genuine, like they all seem at first, and they almost dare me to accept an invitation for a day on a boat or drinks or dinner.

Don’t misunderstand, I am flattered. But this last one did me in, because I only followed his lead and never forced the issue about “a relationship.” Of course, in the Keys–at least for this gal–relationships pretty much consist of drinking lunch and smoking too many cigarettes. In a word, I am very much over dating.

“You will go out with them,” said my bartender girlfriend from Fort Lauderdale. “You will give the ones that you say bore you a second chance, and you will quit falling for the unavailable types.”

Yes, ma’am.

“No really. You never know. Another girlfriend of mine went through everything you have with men. And finally, finally, she allowed herself to like a ‘normal’ mature man. She is head over heels!”

Well, great!

“Don’t you dare humor me,” she laughed. “Please, give some of these guys at least a chance. You gotta stay out there and try to have fun. And I swear, you just don’t know!”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was worried I had made a mistake by quitting the dive, money being as tight as it is living the dream here in paradise. And I’ve never just walked out at the end of a shift and waved goodbye. But suddenly I have almost five full shifts at the local bar, my loyal daytime customers are back in full force, and all is looking pretty good for me there.

Sometimes, if you just wait a minute, you end up feeding a sad, scrawny kitten who wandered into your driveway. You smile and say you’d love to go out sometime soon to one and promise to go fishing on Sunday with another. You try your best to accept a kind compliment from a customer who says, “We love having you here, you know.”

You do your best to put the negative crap behind you as you vow to travel more than a few steps on this very unfamiliar road of giving everyone and everything a first and second chance.

Thus, I could not understand why I could not shake a pretty horrible hangover yesterday. Sure, Upset Waitress and I had tied on a pretty good one the night before, but still.

“We need breakfast,” said UW when she picked me up yesterday morning. “A huge breakfast, which I know YOU can eat because you eat like a damn pig all the time. Why you’re so thin…oh, never mind.”

UW is always so good to me.

We scarfed eggs and bacon and hash browns, and when UW and her husband didn’t finish their has browns, I ate theirs, too. They were greasy and crisp fried. In other words, perfect.

Within an hour I felt horrible. Worse than I had when I woke up. Within two hours I felt like I was going to be sick.

“Let’s go get a beer at the other place near your house,” said UW.

“Um, I cannot drink anything except Coke. I am a frickin’ mess,” I told her.

Like many places down here, the spot she was referring to has a pool, so if you’re eating or drinking there, you can use it.

“You can go to the pool and I’ll sit inside at the bar, if you want,”
she laughed.

I was not laughing. I was thoroughly ill. Pool, hot sun. Maybe I could bake this stupid hangover away.

So began a bizarre day of dunking myself in the pool, getting sunburned and stumbling back and forth to the inside bar to refill my Coke, while UW regaled the local and tourist crowd inside with whatever UW regales anyone about. She’s never met a stranger, and she knows every local in town. A party always swirls around her.

Meanwhile, outside, I dozed in the sun and willed my head and stomach to settle. My will had no effect. I felt worse and worse as each minute passed.

At the exact moment I was sweating and shaking–even as I was still soaked from a quick lap in the pool–a text came in from the boy who’d ditched me the week before: “U ok? Bad hangover?”

And he knew this, why?

“Yeah, u drunk texted him last night, then deleted it. I guess you sent it after all,” UW laughed while I did not.

I told him I was baking away my troubles at the pool, and he asked if he could stop by.

Wonderful. Whatever.

I woke up an hour later to find him standing over me. “Hey!”

Hey.

He rambled on about a friend coming to town, about how he’d had too much to drink at lunch and now had to get ready for work, haha. I don’t know what else he had to say, because I felt like my stomach was in 17 knots and my whole body ached. WTF kind of hangover was this, anyway?

Suddenly he bent over, kissed my forehead, and said, “I still miss you.” Then he walked away.

In my aching, sick state, I asked myself what I ever saw in him. In my aching, sick state, as UW laughed and carried on inside and the boy was gone yet again, I asked myself why I tumble into like with such immature, unavailable guys who promise their care and adoration and great intentions and then flee–almost within hours of stating them. In my aching, sick state, I wondered what the hell was wrong with me, on all levels.

And just as I was ready to throw myself down the rabbit hole, it dawned on me–the hash browns. Those deep fried, greasy delicious patties. I’d eaten almost four of them. Of course. Most hash brown patties are made with wheat. I avoid them all the time. What the hell had I been thinking when I ate them several hours ago? Right, I hadn’t been thinking. I was tired and hungover, and now I was really sick.

Ugh.

It had been so long since I’d had an “attack,” I’d forgotten how awful it was. And I’d really done it this time. What an idiot.

The irony is that May is Celiac Awareness Month. No one is more aware of Celiac disorder than those who know they have it. And here I was, smack in the middle of May, sicker than sick because of wheat-infused hash brown patties.

Sometimes, however, you can see your life clearly when you’re battling just to keep from doubling over in stomach pain. Suddenly, the boy is not such a great catch. A pal, perhaps–but nothing more. Suddenly, the beauty of the Keys is colored by the nonstop partying, where every hour of every day can be measured by quantities of draft beer and shots of Nassau.

Suddenly, you just see it all for what it is and isn’t. And you make peace with it, because this is the life you’ve chosen, for now. Mostly it’s good. It’s fun. It’s hilarious. But it often takes you to the edge, and then a dance with gluten brings you back to reality.

Take care, you say to yourself. Take much better care. No one else can do it for you. No one else ever will.

“Don’t worry,” said the handsome lawyer who showed up at my locals bar at the behest of a patron who had heard about the missive I’d just received in yesterday’s mail. “The bank will probably be happy to let you stay there, you know, until the place is sold.” Oh good. Great.

“I’ll make a call and see what’s up tomorrow,” said the handsome lawyer who now had my cell phone number. Smooth.

“You have to let me pay you for your time,” I urged. Handsome or not, no charity work would be done by this lawyer for this gal. Especially because he was handsome.

And suddenly it was three hours later. The handsome lawyer and I had covered all the ground it usually takes to cover in three weeks.

You were a writer in D.C.? You owned a chain of restaurants?

You lived in Fort Lauderdale? You went to law school after how long in the restaurant biz?

You have grown children? You have grown children, too?

You snorkeled in Australia? You loved Amsterdam?

Who’s your favorite writer? Who’s yours?

You’re gluten intolerant? You’re a vegetarian?

You’ve never been fishing? You almost drowned while fishing last week?

You are incredibly interesting. So are you.

I’d love to take you out on my boat. I’d like that.

No really. I know.

You’ve been separated for how long? Almost two years, and you?

Um…. Oh, you’re married–married?

Yes, yes, I am.

Oh. Well. Gee. Thanks for the drink and great stories. Let me know what the bank says, and what I owe you for your time.

I really enjoyed meeting you.

Me too.

***

“You’re how old? How old?” asked the wide-eyed young man who claimed to have met me weeks ago at another spot.

“I just told you,” I said.

“No, you’re lying,” he said.

“Ha!” I laughed.

“You’re lying,” he said again, not laughing at all. “And now I know why you wouldn’t give me the time of day when I first met you.”

Uh oh.

“Because women of a certain age–older women–you just tell it like it is, right? Like you’re telling me to fuck off because you’re sooooooo much older, right?”

Seriously?

“Oh I get it. You smiled and talked to me then, but now you’re just too old for me, right?”

Uh, right on every count my insane and scary little man.

“Fine. Fine! But you could have told me. You should have told me!”

Uhhhhh.

“I don’t even believe you. Lemme see your ID.”

I gotta go. Run, actually, really fast.

***

“She is so sweet. So cute,” he said to his friend who told a friend of mine that he’d said it. “And I’d like to hang out with her and all, but I know I’ll end up breaking her heart.”

What?

“Yep, that’s what he said,” laughed my friend. “Don’t worry, I told him to tell him your heart was just fine because you already hang out with so many other guys–old and young. SO MANY! Didn’t he know that?”

Wait, what? Break my heart? I’ve never even been out with him. What?

“Ha! I think it’s funny as hell,” laughed my friend. “God, it’s fun to watch these guys with you. They don’t have a clue, do they?”

These are the times that keep a gal happily single.

A man tells you what he thinks in person.

A boy always has an excuse why he can’t see you, which he delivers via text.

A man makes plans and keeps them.

A boy tells you he is falling deeply for you and wants to live with you in the Keys.

A man suggests he will miss you, but hopes he can visit as often as you will invite him.

A boy tells you he is falling deeply for you and then stops suggesting even a last-minute drink when he gets off work, preferring, instead, to hang out alone or play darts with a guy friend.

A man tells you he’s got plans with his buddies tonight, but makes plans to take you to dinner tomorrow.

A boy tells you that you are being “crazy” when you beg for honesty about how he’s really feeling.

A man tells you where you and he stand–for better or worse–so that you have enough information to decide if you want to stand next to him.

A boy ends it by simply being silent, usually after a final bootie call that he insists wasn’t.

A man says he wishes it could have been different, but he understands that you are moving away in less than five days.

You know you will eventually get over the boy.

You hope to eventually learn how to recognize a good man.

A boy broke my heart.

A man says he knows my heart is hurting, but he’s happy enough to help me hang blinds in my new Keys house.

In a certain kind of bar, and this one is no exception, you hope to see the bartender open a new bottle of wine if that is your drink of choice. Because in this certain kind of bar, you never know when an open bottle was actually opened–today or last week? The beauty of this bar is that the wine comes in little single-serve bottles, so it’s always just opened. Ha ha.

“I’ll take another glass of your fine wine–the airplane-style vintage, please,” I laugh to the bartender.

“Would you like to taste it, first?” she deadpans.

“No, you can just unscrew the top and pour,” I say.

This bartender has not paid a lot of attention to me up until now. I have been sitting by myself off to the side, content to be quiet, alone. But now a pony-tailed gentleman has just asked if the bar stool next to me is taken. I sigh. Oh well, conversation is probably good after almost an hour of none.

And now the pony-tailed man has also attracted the bartender’s full attention to my quiet part of the bar.

“Oh my God, talking about the wine reminds me of one of my favorite regulars,” she says, talking to the pony-tailed man more than to me. “He used to always order my cheap white wine, and I’d make a big production out of it.” Her pretty brown eyes sparkle as she begins her story. The pony-tailed man and I exchange a glance.

“I’d put a white bev nap over my arm like this,” she gestures in an imitation of a wine steward. “Then I would present the bottle of jug wine to him, and he’d read the label.” We all laugh. “I’d unscrew the top, he’d sniff it like a cork, and I’d pour him a taste.” She pauses, glancing around to see if someone’s glass needs refilling. The band starts playing a version of “Brown Eyed Girl.”

“When he died,” she continues a minute later, now looking at me as much as the pony-tailed man, “I did that whole thing, the napkin and the label and all of it, right over his casket.”

Before she began this story, I had hastily hung up on my day-at-a-time boy in a momentary fit of misunderstanding and confusion with which I am trying not to become too familiar. So far, I am three for three in having it all wrong, as he will reassure me very soon. The pony-tailed man knows the phone call has upset me, as does the bartender, because they both overheard my side of it, and I think that maybe she is sharing this story to diffuse the moment and recall a sweeter one for all of us.

“They drilled a hole in the edge of the bar–not this one, the one around the corner. And they poured just a little of his ashes in it,” she smiles. “He’s there to this day.”

As the night goes on, and as my misunderstanding hangs in the sticky air that feels more like September than two weeks before Christmas, the pony-tailed man and I talk for hours about relationships and starting over and over again. When we part ways at an early hour by Key West standards, we have said much and solved nothing, but for some reason, I get it that I overreacted on this night.

I don’t know it yet, but I will find myself embraced and reassured by my one-day-at-a-time boy the very next evening when we meet at my neighborhood dive bar. He wants many, many days at a time with me, he will tell me. Wherever that takes us, he will say, he wants it to be together.

An older couple will walk in to the dive bar as we are having this talk that involves lingering stares and tiny kisses. I will be nursing a terrible glass of white wine when the couple raises their glasses across the bar to us.

“I want to be them,” my boy will say, and I will only be able to stare at the couple who smiles back at me, at us. It will be hard to grasp that I am hearing this, and it will likely take me many days to believe it, as much as I will find myself wanting so much to just live it and let it be.

And when I sip the wine that has a definite kick to it, I will be reminded of the story I heard the night before about a man who got the joke about his jug wine and who will always have a place at his bar. I will silently toast the couple across my dive bar and tentatively grasp my day-at-a-time boy’s hand. I will allow myself to feel a faint, first blush of possibility.

“Did you hear?” I overheard someone say several nights ago. “Melissa and Carl are done. Over.”

No way, I thought. This is stupid gossip founded on nothing. I knew they had some kind of disagreement on election night, but no. Not over. Not them.

Then, last night, when my confident and positive girlfriend was feeling anything but, and she needed a girlfriend to whom to vent, she said we needed to call Melissa and invite her, too. “She’s not in a good place since she and Carl split up.”

So it was true, the golden couple was now tarnished silver.

When you hear that a couple who seemed so right has gone wrong, it makes everyone’s relationships seem at risk. You know the sentiment–if THEY can break up, then what hope do any of the rest of us have in our fledgling attempts to try on companionship and see if it fits? Because if the best of the best can fall apart, why should we bother?

Melissa fought tears as she chain smoked cigarettes I’ve never seen her smoke and gulped down an orange-someting martini. She detailed Carl’s heinous personal attacks on her psyche, how he had an uncanny way to always find an opportunity to remind her why she should doubt herself, how he reveled in his “retirement” but resented her having to work so hard and so much. A 20-year age difference between the two that had once seemed as insignificant as it was endearing, proved to be an unspoken deal breaker. Because at 35 she is in the prime of her work life and ready to start a family. At 55, he is in the afternoon of an early tropical retirement, content to walk the beach and drink at the beach bar.

Then there was the night it all fell apart. When he continually berated her, saying he “couldn’t believe” how she had voted, she left. When she was barely around the corner, he started kissing one of the girl players, and then he brought her back to his and Melissa’s apartment. After a long walk on the beach, Melissa came home to find the boyfriend about whom her mother had said “has to be the one,” in various stages of undress with the girl player.

As she spoke, I had to wonder, had they ever been a happy couple? Had they ever been right? I asked her as much.

“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I had just come out of a relationship that was so emotionally abusive, I wondered how I could ever love anyone again. And suddenly, there was this handsome older man who showered me with affection and told me over and over how beautiful I was. So beautiful.”

We were all silent then, each of us fighting tears and our own personal demons.

How easy it is to fall for the guy who gives you a fleeting feeling of worth. How easy it is to be swept along and ignore the little annoyances that will soon explode into relationship-killers. How easy when you feel beautiful.

A gentleman who knows he hurt me–devastated me–as I gave myself to him in a misguided attempt to purge the boy once and for all from my heart, has worked hard in the past week to show me how truly sorry he is, how he’ll do anything to prove to me that he is a gentleman who adores me “because you are so beautiful.” And while I believe him and sense that his apology is sincere, I can’t muster the strength to welcome him back as more than a friend, despite an unexpectedly wonderful weekend of wining and dining together far away from the beach bar bedlam. He knows this, and he says he understands this. As he reminds me, again, how beautiful I am.

To be held, loved, and told you are beautiful. For an hour. For a night. For as long as possible. Would that it was that easy. That it was enough.

Some days, however, a flock member acts out in a way that makes me glad that I am taking my time getting to know him. Taking a long, long time. Remember the multiple-month rule? Right, think longer than that.

Because, it seems, the flock is getting to know my living room couch quite well when they imbibe too much and end up here. Despite this, they still flock.

This past weekend, for example, RG Son came into town for a quick, all-too-short visit. I spent many moments explaining to several Hard Rock Improv comedians, multiple front desk security personnel and assorted bartenders that this boy was my son. MY SON! Okay? Okay.

Enter the former professional athlete flock member. We usually see each other on Sunday evenings, watch football at the beach bar, place a bad bet, and kiss goodnight. RG Son met him. RG Son liked him. Former professional athlete flock member liked RG Son. All good. Except that this past Sunday’s plans remained a bit vague after RG Son was safely deposited on a flight back to Cinci.

“What r u up to?” came the first text at 3 p.m.

“At home. U?” I answered.

And so it continued, and so it went, for hours–circular texting, if there is such a thing. In desperation, I finally called him twice and texted one last time, “R U getting any of my messages?” because his repeated texts all asked the same thing, as did my answers to his repeatedly asked question. No response.

At 9 p.m., I gathered the pup, put on sweats and a T-shirt (yes, it’s almost “cold” here right now), and congratulated myself on going to bed without having smoked a cigarette in two days or having drunk more than a single glass of wine.

Which was when the former professional athlete flock member called. Thoroughly trashed.

“Can I come over and watch the Series with you?” he asked, sounding just cute enough to say yes to.

“Where are you?” I asked, wondering how long I could stall him so I could put on jeans and a real shirt as well as makeup.

“At the valet,” he laughed.

Crap.

“I’ll be right down,” I laughed, sounding cheery but not meaning it so much. Sleep at 9 p.m. had sounded oddly wonderful before he had called. This should tell you where I am with my flock right now. Love ‘em, but also love my alone time.

The second I met him in the lobby, right in front of the assorted security personnel to whom I had explained away my son as my son all weekend, the former professional athlete flock member decided this was as good a place as any to give me a huge kiss, as if we are…you know. Except we are not. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

And he was drunker than I realized. Great!

I spent the next two hours watching Philly win another game in the Series I secretly don’t care about, but about which I tell the former professional athlete (Rays fan) and my Philly guy who is resurfacing tomorrow (duh, Phillies fan) that I do. All this as I got annoyed fending off the former professional athlete flock member’s advances and then texted my Monday night bartender/football watching/professional drummer/multiple ear piercings cool flock member that I am making chili for Monday night’s football game.

Sunday night ended with me tossing a blanket and pillow at the former athlete flock member and showing him the sofa as I shut my bedroom door behind me and the pup. He was fine with this because he was that done. I was not at all fine with this, but I figured it was better than sending his sorry drunk behind away in his car. I even told him this. Because that’s how I am with my flock members–brutally honest.

On a wing and a beer, they flock. On a prayer, nothing will change with my flock. Even as I know it will, even as each flock member makes me smile about what could come next. If only I would let it happen, which I am not ready to do.

One of these days, one flock member will swoop too close and tell me I have to choose. May that be many, many days away from now. Until then, there’s the sofa.