Maybe you will meet him for the first time in a bar, sitting on a stool to the right of you, absentmindedly stirring his drink. Maybe your hands will start to shake and your heart will start to race, all the classic signs of an impending anxiety attack. But this time your hands will be shaking for a different reason.
Maybe when you order your own drink you’ll ask the bartender to make it extra strong because you won’t know a better way to calm yourself down. He will turn to you with a lopsided grin and a head of messy hair and slip you his number on the back of a napkin, cliché but effective, and you’ll go home and lie in bed, feet up, staring at the ceiling, trying as hard as you can not to look at the phone.
You will want to pick it up and punch in his number as fast as you can, fingers scrambling over one another like spiders, but you will decide to wait until the next day so you don’t appear too eager. For the rest of the night, what’s left of it anyway, you won’t be able to stop thinking about him. How his blue blazer had started to slip off his left shoulder, the way he picked out the olives in his martini and ate them first before taking a sip. The lines around his eyes that crinkled when he smiled.
You will count the syllables in his name over and over again instead of sheep to will yourself to sleep, and eventually you will drift off.
When you wake up the next morning, you will go back to that very same bar and sit at that very same barstool in your best little black dress, because you’ve heard that all the men can’t resist a woman in black. It’s sexy, mysterious, forbidden territory. And you will think that your dress will do the trick, that all the pieces will fall into place.
He will be there, but this time in a different corner of the bar with another woman on his arm. He will sit close to her like thunder and lightning, will kiss her as hard as a cop slams a suspect into the windshield of a car to cuff his arms behind his back. He will look like he is tasting her, filling his mouth with her name.
You will go home. You will wish he didn’t exist.
But still he will lead you on, will call you the next day and never mention a word of that woman, will invite you over to dinner for large bowls of fresh pasta with parmesan and pesto, will take you to bed like a gentleman with a bow, will look into your eyes and tell you that you are his entire world. You will evaporate under him like a pot of water set to the boiling point.
His room will be filled with your bobby pins for days after; you will count the moles spilling down his spine like flakes of pepper. He will call you every day and say that he just wants to hear your voice, and you will believe him. You will steal his sweaters just to have a reason to come back to him again.
He will never mention the other woman to you. Not even once.
But then there will come a day when he says he’s busy and he can’t come over for a date, and you will go to the very same bar where the two of you first met, and prepare to drown your sorrows in drink. And there he’ll be, stuck to her like Elmer’s glue, no, superglue, like Velcro, like sap to a pine tree.
He will look right through you. Like you are air or a lie or glass.
So go home, go home again like you did after the first time you met. Tear up the scrap of paper containing his phone number. Tear it to as many pieces as you can and shove it down the garbage disposal. Shred his sweaters, remove his hair from your clothes and bedsheets and wash them down the drain.
Delete his texts from your phone. Throw away his love notes. Erase every trace of him that used to exist in your apartment.
Practice falling asleep by counting sheep instead of the syllables in his name.
Practice going out for coffee without him next to you, ordering a vanilla latte.
Then, when you’re good and calm and over him, you go to that bar again when you know he’ll be there, and you dump a drink into his lap.
When you’re gone and he’s come to his senses enough to start trying to clean the mess off his pants, he will realize that the glass you dumped into his lap contains a copy of the key to his apartment.
When he gets home, it will be trashed.