Mr. Can't Get It Up, Part One

(The following is another excerpt from a book I am working on, currently entitled, "Dabbling with Dating Disasters" which I might some day get up the courage to submit for publication. The first excerpt, if you haven't been reading along, is entitled, My First Childhood Love.)

Mr. Can’t Get It Up remains one of my biggest regrets, and not, by the way, because of his unfortunate nickname.

I met Mr. Up when I was working at Kohl’s Department store in a town not too far from where I grew up. I had just moved back, temporarily, into my mom’s house and I was trying to get a job, a real job, doing something using my degree that I spend so much money for, as my mom liked to frequently remind me.

Since I wanted to use my degree and I was tired of waitressing, I naturally decided I would apply for a job at Kohl’s (or just about anywhere that would allow me to keep my clothes on and not have to serve food to people). Although I really couldn’t justify how a job there was using my degree, it was a paycheck while I was waiting to land the job of my dreams helping those less fortunate than me. (Really, I’m not that altruistic, but I really did want to find a job where I needed to have a bachelor’s degree, since it was long past time to start paying the loans back!) I was hired to convince people to sign up for credit cards and to run credit application checks on those people who were silly enough to actually sign up for them. It wasn’t a bad job. Interminably boring towards the end but I worked with some cool people and our supervisor was laid back.

I don’t recall meeting Mr. Can’t Get it Up at the new employee orientation meeting, where we were herded like sheep into a tiny room to learn about the benefits we would never be getting and watching movies about the proper way to lift boxes we would never move. If I had seen him there, that probably would have made the event far more memorable.

Mr. Up was unlike any guy I had ever been attracted to in so many ways. First of all, he was much shorter than me and while I’ve never been a stickler for a guy’s height, I still cringe when I think about my sisters dancing around with the family dog on it's hind legs, mocking the fact that my prom date was almost a foot shorter than me…before I put on shoes! In addition to being shorter than me, Mr. Up had (probably still has) the brightest red hair I’ve ever seen on someone and an explosion of freckles everywhere, or at least everywhere that I could see, and believe me, I wanted to see much, much more! In short, he looked like a little leprechaun and reminded me, with great longing, of the time I spent living in Ireland, and by default I guess, of a man I loved very deeply when I lived on the Emerald Isle and hadn’t heard from in ages. He (Mr. Up) even had an authentic Irish name to boot! I was smitten. Not instantly, of course, because I had been working really hard to ensure that kind of crap never happened again, but I was smitten nevertheless.

Mr. Up and I did not spend a lot of time working together at first. It was the store’s policy (or someone’s policy) that there had to be two greeters at each entrance trying to get people to apply for a credit card while the rest of the group stayed in the back and processed the applications. In the beginning, we were too busy smiling, pivoting, soliciting and processing credit card offers to have much of a chance to talk to one another. Sometimes though, especially as the weeks wore on and it became obvious who was better at what job, Mr. Up and I would get to sit next to each other and flirt shamelessly as we worked diligently to approve all the credit applications. It was somewhere amidst the piles of paperwork that I became aware of my attraction to him.

I don’t know what the clues were, maybe it was my embarrassing inability to put together coherent sentences when talking to him. Maybe it was my aching clitoris or the panties which constantly felt like they needed to be changed when he was around. Maybe it was the fantasies I had about being back in Ireland that made me attracted to him. I don’t know and I don’t really care. I just knew that I wanted to fuck him.

That was it really.

In the time we spent getting to know each other, both at work and hanging out with co-workers outside of work, I had gleaned enough information about him to know that dating him was a terrible idea. It would have been catapulting myself down the same dangerous road of all those other disastrous relationships…the ones that I tried to heal, to patch back up, to love ‘em ‘til they’re perfect, all the while forgetting about my own needs. Although I was lusting heartily for him (a lust which was made far stronger by the knowledge that I should not, could not, date him) I was also terrified that I would not be able to simply fuck him and walk away, even though I had more or less done this routine before. Mr. Up, I still believe, has a really big heart and he seemed like he was looking for more of a relationship than I was.

Nevertheless, the day came when I finally told him how I felt about him and it went something like this:

Me: “I think you’re kinda hot.”

Him: “Uh, thanks.”

Me: “I’d like to have sex with you.”

Him: “Uh, what?”

Me: “I would like to have sex with you and that’s it. I like you but I don’t want a relationship. I just want to fuck you and see what it is like.”

Him: (Long, very long period of silence. I begin to regret what I have just said) “Uh, isn’t that what the guy is supposed to say?”

Me: (Very long period of silence. Wondering why I thought I should share this with him.) “Well, that’s how I feel.”

Him: “Huh.”

End of conversation.

That may or may not be verbatim, but it sure is how the conversation felt! I was sitting there, all lusty in my loins and telling him that I wanted to have sex with him, which, by this point, I thought was obvious. No matter what I did though, I was feeling like I was about to get shot down. It was humiliating!

Turns out it really bothered him that all I wanted was sex, not a meaningful relationship.

Christ!

I thought I was supposed to be the one who, stereotypically, gets upset that someone just wants to fuck me. And here he is all questioning himself and me and my motives! It would have been a better idea to go home and masturbate for all the work this was becoming!