Thanksgiving ‘86, ‘89, and ‘11

I had decided to break it off with her. It was the right thing to do. You see, I had a roving eye. We had dated through the summer and deep into the fall. Susi had a spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her light brown hair tended towards blonde at the ends of her curls. We sat in her car outside her house. Well, not her house, she rented the second floor with Anne, an adventurous redhead. I liked Anne. Therein lay my problem, I liked widely, but not deeply.

Susi had just finished her studies to become a nurse. She worked nights at Beth Israel down in Newark in the cardiac unit. Her shifts were long, but it left her with lots of free time. We had met in Manasquan 4 months earlier through a mutual friend. Friend that he was, he warned her off me. As it happened, she was dating someone else anyway. We talked a few times on the phone. I pursued her; she put me off. I moved on. A few weeks later, she called to say she had broken up with the other guy, Would you like to go out sometime?

Come the weekend, we ate at a Friday’s on Rte 4 and went to see Top Gun at the tenplex . We kissed when I dropped her off. I drove back to my house or I should say my parent’s house. I had remained there after college. It wasn’t quite embarrassing I was still in my boyhood bedroom, but it was on the verge. I went to the basement where I cracked a window, lit a cigarette, and called her from the forgotten phone. We talked into the predawn hours.

We dated, but I was down the shore in a rented house most weekends and l was young. My friends and I drank prodigiously, we smoked some weed, we snorted cocaine. At night we prowled the bars. I met Brenda then. She was a beautiful, goodtime girl. She liked to drink and party. She liked to fuck on the beach. All that summer, I dated Susi in the north and Brenda in the south. There were others sprinkled in there too. Susi was the serious relationship though, more so for her than for me, but I knew how she felt and I didn’t dissuade her.

After Labor Day, Brenda and I parted ways, being summer lovers and all. Susi and I continued dating. With time, I got nervous. I knew she was falling in love, maybe I was too, but I still felt a need to ramble. So a day or two after Thanksgiving, I broke her heart. Three years later almost to the day, we married. And 22 years after that, again almost to the day, we agreed to divorce.

#onlinedating #middleaged #manspov

#middleageddating #lastfirstkiss #love #kissing #humor #sex