I should have known that this was a mistake, but I couldn't help myself: I'm just a natural flirt. When I was in high school, I couldn't chat up girls at all: I was a real geek, the tallest, but skinniest guy in the school (it was a small high school; there were only 78 people in our graduating class), and I never had a girlfriend. Oh, I jacked off plenty, fantasizing about the cheerleaders, but somehow I managed to work in every white girl in the school into my fantasies!
Once in college, when I met some girls who didn't know of my terrible-with-girls reputation from high school, I started having more luck, but even then I didn't lose my virginity until my sophomore year. I was walking up the steps of the apartment building in which I lived, when I saw this cute girl knocking on a door on the second floor; I lived on the third.
"I'm not home," I said to her, which got the response, "I wasn't looking for you." But the guy for whom she was looking wasn't home, and I started flirting with her, and somehow I managed to get things right, because by the end of the evening e were in the back seat of my 1962 Ford Fairlane - this was 1972 - with my tongue in her pussy! But, that's a story for another time. The important part for this story is that, once I finally broke the ice, I was able to chat up, and charm, girls, almost effortlessly.
Fast forward to 2002. I was walking up Race Street in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, looking at the Victorian architecture. I live in Jim Thorpe, and am very familiar with the architecture now, but in June of 2002, I had only been there for a month.
I had been looking at the architecture, but I also found myself looking at a woman, who was looking at the buildings as well. That's where I made my mistake: "I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who likes to look at Victorian buildings."
"Oh, hi," she said, and I can't remember too much of the actual conversation at that point. But we started walking together, and as Race Street made a right hand turn to merge into North Broadway, I could see where this was going, and I made it clear: "Look,before this goes the wrong way, I need to tell you that I'm married."
"Oh, that's OK, I'm married, too."
That took the pressure off, but we continued to walk together, chatting about really meaningless stuff. On reaching North Broadway, we turned left, going up the hill. It was still about half a mile to the end of the houses, and we stopped at the last house on the right. The Millway, a stream which runs partly above ground and partly underground through town, plunged underground at that point, but the homeowners had developed a long, narrow grassy area before the hillside cut it down to nothing, and they had set up a natural home which had attracted ducks to make the place their home. We stopped and watched the ducks, and the stream as it babbled over the rocks, and when we turned to walk away, we still headed up the hill.
The woman's name was Cindy, and I was impressed by her physical fitness: I walk a lot, and can cover long distances, but she was right there, keeping up with me with no sign of excess exertion. Another half mile, and we reached the drinking water treatment center.
At that point, Cindy had something in one of her shoes, so she put her foot up on the guardrail to remove it. She was a fairly short girl, only about 5'3" or so, but she had
nice
legs. She was wearing shorts already, but this action put tension on her leg muscles, and, coupled with her removing her shoe and sock, really looked awesome, and yes, she caught me looking. I don't remember her exact words, but they were something along the line of, "You like what you see?" with a really big smile.
I didn't need to answer the question; she knew that I did.
At that point, we started heading back downhill, into town. Again, it was mostly mindless chatter that I can't recall clearly, but I found out some of the facts. She was 50 years old, a year older than me, and lived about thirty miles away. We kept walking, and since I already knew more about the town than she did, I pointed out some of the architectural attractions. Jim Thorpe is a tourist-trap town, and the architecture is one of the drawing points.
We got to the Asa Packer mansion, but didn't take the inside tour. Instead, we walked through the lawns, which are terraced, and a one point I put out my hand to help Cindy up a short stone wall; once she was up, I didn't let go of her hand, and she seemed to like walking hand-in-hand with me. Something was definitely happening, but I didn't make a move to push it further.
Well, maybe I didn't, but finally, at the end of the day, when Cindy had to head home, she made the move. "I hope that you don't think this is too forward, but I'd like to walk with you again some time." We exchanged e-mail addresses, which I knew was a mistake, but I made the mistake anyway.