While it was at times endearingly awkward, and at one point mildly infuriating, wL and I finally had "the talk" that I was about ready to give up on yesterday when he emailed me in the morning to bail out on dinner because of a last minute get-together with university friends who were back visiting from Australia.
Perhaps I should rewind a bit: I called him up Wednesday night and to say that we should do something Saturday night. I emailed the next day to suggest sushi and a movie and he replied yesterday to say that he had to take a raincheck because of the get-together. I wrote back and suggested Sunday and he never replied so I thought, forget it, I'm banging my head against the wall because he has the habit of not responding sometimes and I don't like being left hanging. (I know, I could have called instead of going the passive-aggressive email route, but who really calls anybody anymore?)
So, I got a call tonight about 6:45 - he wanted to know what I was up to and if I still wanted to have dinner since his friends had disbanded without dinner and his brother wasn't going to be home. I said I was just going to make something but we could still have dinner if he wanted to.
About an hour later, he was at my door and we headed off for sushi. I'd sent S a text to say that wL and I were still on - she knew that I was getting rather frustrated with him - and she wrote back to say that I should be sure to have the talk otherwise it would nag me forever...and she's right of course.
We get to the restaurant, and clever girl that I am (heh) with the sneaky investigative skills, I brought up the Thirty-Two Questions on Love in Letters of a Portuguese Nun and asked him a few questions from the list, including #13: in love what is the greatest crime, to be refused or not have dared to ask? I didn't ask it in so many words, but you get the idea. His answers were all very interesting and telling...I found out for example that in 3 of his 4 relationships, it was more of a slow-burn situation in that he laid his cards out on the table straight away, and the girls took about a year to come around to his way of thinking - I will come back to this later.
We paid up the bill and he drove me home and we carried on with our easy conversation even as we were parked on my driveway for another 10 minutes or so before I decided it was now or never. I told him I wanted to ask him something and prefaced it all by saying that it may very well be awkward, but I wanted to know if he thought that there could be anything between us beyond friendship.
So he paused for a bit and said, among other things that he was open to the idea of a relationship between us. Turns out that he'd had a crush on me for about a year when we first met 5 years ago. Why he never said anything, I don't know, but I will certainly ask when next we talk, because if this works out, it would again follow his pattern, only he never declared himself upfront and it took me 5 years to come around to the idea of us together. As a random aside, I've always thought that he had beautiful hands...I noticed them when we first met.
He himself had been thinking about the idea of an "us" for awhile now too, and his reservations were around religion, as he's Christian, goes to Church and teaches Sunday school, and I'm completely ambivalent about being baptised Anglican. Now, he's never been particularly vocal about his faith, and it's only in the last 6 months or so that I was aware of how important religion was to him. In one of my earlier probes, I had asked him what his dealbreakers were and while he hadn't said religion, he did say that it was a preference...so he brought that up tonight.
We sat there for another hour or so in honest, open conversation. The infuriating part was his answer about what being "open" meant because he kept talking about the reservation he had - essentially, he didn't want to be unfair or hurt me if it turned out that his Christianity, or rather, my "just be a good person" school of religion became an issue. To which I answered, "It seems like you're closing the door without even opening it to see what's on the other side." He stopped, thought, and said, "You're right." Of course I am.
So. What does this all mean? It means that neither of knows what will happen but we're going to spend more time together and see what happens. We jokingly laid out some ground rules - in regards to phone time (there was a girl he dated who complained that he didn't care because they didn't talk on the phoen all the time) I told him we're not in high school anymore so I don't expect us to talk every night on the phone - in fact, I'd probably be the one to say, I gotta go, I need my beauty sleep - but I did expect that he replied to my text messages. If things work out and there's a happily ever after for us, yay. If not, well that's fine too.
The good-bye was the really funny part, and I'm rather embarassed to admit how awkward it was, because we were both sitting in our seats and staring at each other, probably wondering if we should kiss, and laughing nervously because it's suddenly weird, and then he opens his arms and I lean in for an awkward hug and then we said goodnight and I went into the house, all happy and glow-y, I'm sure, because I looked in the hall mirror. :)
I've decided that the first thing we'll do when next we see each other is to get the first kiss out of the way immediately so as to avoid another awkward goodnight.
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