Submissive
Kathryn M. Burke
I'm Charlotte Norton. I'm twenty-eight years old, unmarried, reasonably good-looking (I think), and always hopeful that my Prince Charming will come along sometime.
If that sounds old-fashioned, it's because I was pretty much raised to be an old-fashioned girl. (Sorry, I mean
woman
âI'm long past the age when anyone should call me a "girl"!) My parents are kind of conservative where such things are concerned. For all the strides that women have made in the past century, they feel that men are still in charge of most things and expect women to follow orders ("especially," as Mom once said, "in the bedroom"). I guess I'm naturally shy and timid, but that doesn't mean I don't put myself forward when a presentable man comes along. I'm certainly not a virgin!
But it may have been my upbringing and overall temperament that got me into trouble when I went on a date with Patrick Kelly.
Yes, of course he was Irishâor, I should say, of Irish ancestry. A true-blue American, with a shock of charmingly untidy red hair, he looked really scrumptious from the photos I saw on his profile on this online dating site I had signed up for. He said on his profile that he was fun-loving and full of high spiritsâthat can't be bad, can it? He also said he'd been married onceâand divorced. I definitely had to figure out what
that
meant.
So after chatting online for a bit, we decided to meet. Maybe having dinner on the first date was too much of a risk: mostly because, if you really don't like the guy (or if he doesn't like you), you could be in for a long evening of exquisite boredom! Well, I figured I'd chance it.
He was kind enough to pick me up at my apartment in his car. (Of course, that meant that I had to give him my address, but I didn't think that would be a problem. He couldn't possibly be an ax-murderer, could he?) When I first met him as he waited for me at the entrance to my building, I was pleasantly surprised.
He was actually better looking than his photos indicated!
Most personal ads have photos that date back years, or have even been doctored somehow, so they don't look anything like the real person. But Patrick was only thirty-one, so he really didn't need to look younger than he was; and the special thing about him was that he was so
lively
in personâsomething a photo just can't capture.
He wasn't all that tallâonly an inch or two above my own height (five foot six)âbut there was a kind of suppressed excitement to everything he said or did that made me feel the same way. People have sometimes said that I look as if I'm perpetually melancholy or worried, that I don't smile very much, that I seem afraid all the timeâand that all this makes me less attractive to men than I might otherwise be.
But Patrick, bless his heart, seemed to drink me in with his eyes from the moment he saw me. His eyes actually twinkled when I first came out of the building, and instead of a meaningless handshake he bent down and gave me a chaste (I think it was chaste!) kiss on the cheek. I got a heady whiff of his man-smell, and I hope he got a whiff of my perfume.
The dinner was really nice. It wasn't a super-expensive place, but it was small and quiet and a little on the dark sideâjust the thing for a get-to-know-you session with a stranger. He revealed himself to be smart without being a nerd, funny without trying to make a joke with every sentence, and in general a real live-wire, always smiling and, as a result, making
me
smile a lot more than I'm accustomed to.
And I couldn't help seeing that every so often, when he thought I wasn't noticing, he glanced down at my chest. I don't know why men don't think we noticeâwe
always
notice. But that just shows he's a normal man with normal instincts, right? I guess I encouraged him by wearing a knee-length dress with a scoop neck that revealed quite a bit more cleavage than I usually do. (I'm 34C, if you're interested.)
In short, we had a wonderful dinner, and the time just flew. As the meal came to an end, I began to get a strange little tingling sensation. I really didn't want this date to be over, but I guess it would have to. Did he like me as much as I liked him? Oh, God, I hoped so! It would be awful to build up all these nice feelings for this incredible man and then find out he thought me a boring, silly woman he'd never want to see again.
I suppose the only disturbing part was when I asked him about his ex-wife. For the first and only time he became a bit evasive, just saying, "Oh, we just didn't get along." I couldn't get much more out of him than that, aside from the fact that he was married for only three years. That's not very long, is it? Some people think you're still in the honeymoon phase at that point. But what did I know? I'd never been married and could hardly imagine myself being married (but I really, really did want to be married!).
So it was with a heavy heart that, after more than two hours dawdling over dinner, I saw Patrick get up and say, "Well, I guess I'd better take you home."
Was that it? Did he really want the date to end so soon? I mean, it was a Friday night, and neither of us had to work the next day. My eyes suddenly filled with tears as I stood up unsteadily, but I didn't let any of the tears leak out: I blinked them away and tried to smile bravely. He gently placed a hand on my back and led me out of the restaurant.
The drive back to my apartment building seemed to pass almost too quickly. The next thing I knew, we were sitting in his car in the parking lot like two idiots, not saying anything. What was there to say? I was now almost
scared
that he'd just say, "Nice meeting you"âa telltale sign, on a first date, that the guy really didn't want a second one. I actually started to tremble.