I had a few drinks on Friday night after work. It was an interesting night in ways, becoming later one of those nights that seem full of colour.
What happened? The usual flirtations. There are a couple of girls at work who like me. One of them is playful and girlish about it - she's only young. I tease her playfully in return. I like her, I enjoy our little flirtations but it is never going to be anything more than that.
With the other it is a bit more adult. She's a little older - about 26 - an intelligent woman who knows she is intelligent. She claims she doesn't particularly like me, she just likes my company. Maybe, but she has got herself into a bit of a bind. It's now become sexual. She likes me from the inside - know, not the heart, she's right about that, but from the head maybe, and certainly from further south. I know it. I feel it and I know it.
I turn up Friday night and she makes room for me. We talk and she acts in her usual way, a sort of fascinated disdain. I smile back, not caring. A little later I speak of the sexual tension between us. She acts all outraged and goes and sits somewhere else. I let her go. She comes back.
She's hooked now, I know that, and my indifference to it only makes it more urgent for her. For most of the night we sat nearby, at the pub and later at dinner. She is a psychology graduate and enjoys analysing me. She talks about how I walk around the office. She discusses my attitude. There's been a bit happening at work lately - I'll write about that another time - and I have been one of the leading protagonists. She tells me I am too dominant, which seems a little ironic just now, but I respond: too dominant? You're in the game or you're not.
Amid all this a friend turns up. He starts telling them all about me in his gleeful way - he calls me P Diddy, which they find quite diverting. He has always had an over-developed appreciation of me. He tells them I am the coolest man he knows, no, more than that, the coolest man in the world! He smiles and laughs in his unique way: the girls like him.
We part from the girls and the two of us go onto PJ O'Briens. As always it is packed. It's not my scene but I hang around. I get talking to a girl, then another. It feels like anything is possible, but I don't want it. For all that has happened through the night nothing is any different. The last time I was in that place it was with the girl, and I remember that. I leave, I embrace my mate, good to see you again, and I walk out into the night alone.
