In which Primo and I have the Gateway Nap and we confirm that I am indeed easy

November or December 2005 I'm too lazy to find an old calendar to determine the correct date. Primo, however, would know this off the top of his head. He is a bit savanty that way.

We had our second, first kiss date. That was on Monday. Primo goes home, then decides he can't wait to see me again. So he returns on Thursday. I have to "work," so I pick him up, drop him off at my house, and go to my cubicle that used to be an eighth-floor window office until my boss with no backbone let someone take our office space and covered parking and moved our entire team of nine to the converted warehouse ten miles away in the neighborhood where there were regular carjackings at gunpoint. But I'm not bitter about that. Not at all. I don't remember that as if it were yesterday.

I leave work early and go home. Primo has been working from my house. He has already ordered the supplies to set up wireless internet so it will be easier for him on future visits. He has also walked to the flower store a few blocks from my house and bought me some tulips, which, along with stargazer lilies, are my favorites.

Primo has already told me the part about how he is still married, which does not please me, but I understand why Isabel wouldn't want to pay for her own health insurance (really, who does? I don't like paying for mine when my layoff company-paid COBRA runs out after six months and I have to get my own policy with a $5,000 deductible, but I pay for that before I buy a new house, re-do the bathroom, and buy all new furniture) and it seems like a logical, although way too nice reason, not to be divorced. Plus Primo has been waiting for Isabel to be "ready" to get divorced. That will never happen. She is never ready.

Anyhow, I have told Primo that there will be no s-e-x until he is not m-a-r-r-i-e-d. I might be a fornicator, but I am not an adulteress. Although technically, Primo would be the one commiting adultery, not I. Still, early to bed can be death to a relationship, or so I've heard, and I am going to stick to my guns on this one. Really.

I have made up the guest room for him. He will be perfectly comfortable there.

He sleeps in the guest room Thursday night.

Friday, I don't go to work. We are both sleepy from staying up late on Thursday. One of us suggests taking a nap. Probably Primo. He is sneaky that way. The thin edge of the wedge and all that.

Well, we might as well nap together.

But in the guest bed, I insist. He is not coming into my bed. I mean it. Men don't marry women who sleep with them too early.* Cow, milk, free, etc.

So we nap. Really. Well, as much as you can nap when you are next to a hottie.

But that night, after we go out to supper and he has plied me with wine (he now accuses me of having faked liking wine and tricking him, which may be a little bit true - that supper might be one of the last times I drank with him), we decide that he might as well sleep in my bed with me.

"But platonically!" I tell him.

I am also thinking, Well, heck. I should have done this from the outset because then I wouldn't have had to wash the guest bed sheets. He tells me now he never had any intention of sleeping in the guest bed more than once.

We pass a couple of platonic nights. It's not so hard to be platonic when one of you (me) is encased from head to toe in flannel pajamas. My house is a 1922 bungalow designed to keep in the cool during the summer, not the heat during the winter, so I have to dress warmly or pay a $400 heating bill, which is what happened my first winter month in the house.

But Primo is a really good kisser. And it's been a while since I broke up with my last boyfriend. (Gomez the Moroccan millionaire does not count.)

Let's just say that my resolve crumbles and I lose all my negotiating leverage regarding the divorce, which was probably not the best long-term strategy for getting the alimony done** and means we probably pay more in alimony than we should have because Isabel's cancer is diagnosed right when she and Primo are getting ready to sign the decree and she uses the cancer as a way to get more money.

Yes, I am easy.


* Except I have had several boyfriends want to marry me and those relationships were not platonic, if you know what I mean.

** We cannot replace the electric stove in our current house with a gas one until we are done paying alimony.