The witching hour had been and gone. It was now entering that part of the night where the pretenders had gone safely to their beds, but the hedonists had not totally taken over the club, their drug-addled eyes moving fitfully as their passions empowered them. Or as my mate Dave would have it, late enough that you weren’t a pussy but not so late that you’d be walking home, not a taxi in sight. Or, as Steve put it, Pick-Up Hour. The flirting had to end one way or another.
My mind had been on that particular idea for the last few minutes, actually. You see, there was this girl I’d been eyeing off for quite some part of the night, and sure enough, I’d seen her eyeing me too. The occasional glimpse had our eyes locking, before her eyes would dip demurely as she smiled and returned to her own conversations. We’d eyed each other on the fringes of the dance floor, passing on our way through the masses of late night humanity, eyeing up and down at the bar – all over the place.
In short, it’d been a night where little was said, but plenty was understood.
Now that the crowd had thinned somewhat, I got a decent look at her. She was tall, closer to six foot than five, though ably assisted by a killer pair of heels. Her legs entirely did justice to the heels, and those in turn were shown off to a greater extent by the is-it-a-shirt-is-it-a-dress number she had on, which I swore and hoped would ride too high at any moment. Deep brown hair framed her tanned face perfectly, and a seemingly too-serious mouth broke into an easy grin at the slightest word from one of her friends.
This time, she leaned forward on the bar, patiently awaiting the swamped bartender. Her gaze slowly wandered the club until our eyes locked, and this time she held it. She smiled again, nodded and mouthed something. My guess was “I’ll be over in a minute.”
Hello. The night was just about to pay off.
It’s at this point, as a guy being approached by a girl, you get two conflicting feelings. The first, primary one is simple: fuck yes, I am the shit tonight. King Dingaling, got ’em coming right over. Doesn’t matter if she’s not perfect, it’s her coming to you, not the other way around. This is the way these things should happen, you think.
And that’s rapidly followed by the second thought. Fuck, shit, what am I going to say? You’re used to approaching and seeing your lines get shot down, brave soldiers in the conversation war go to a thousand needless deaths. Now that she is coming to you, you’ve only got one job: don’t cock it up. If you can get away with it, don’t say anything: your body’s obviously done the job already, why mess with the formula? But, shit, what if she gets closer and then changes her mind?
Do women go through this every time? It must be excruciating!
So your confidence and self-esteem follows a trajectory more regularly displayed on an ECG, all in the space of the minute or two, and that certainly doesn’t do any favours for the approach. By the time Brunette Hottie arrived, I’d merely resolved to try to hold in the stomach some.
Every little bit helps right?
Turned out there was no mucking about with this girl.
The smile was now just a small one, the eyes showing more mirth than the mouth. She took a sip and without any by-your-leave reached around me to put down her drink behind me. One hand went up around my neck, the other, having deposited her glass safely, grabbed my butt. A leg may have intertwined between mine; I’m not entirely sure, because at this point I was so far out of my depth, I think I froze out of sheer what-the-fuck factor.
This was not usual. Nuh-uh, no-how.
Her mouth approached mine, which I was trying madly the keep from dropping open, possibly to the floor. At the last moment, she turned it into an… embrace, I guess you’d call it, her mouth next to my ear, as I could hear a soft, near-whispered laughter. Below, her hand slid around from behind, around the thigh and most definitely on approach to my groin.
“Uh,” was about the only syllable I could manage. You know how some concepts sound great in the abstract, and you totally think you’d love it if it came to life, but you know when it does you’d just chicken out? I was now wondering if she was nothing so much as an A-grade psycho, or whether someone had put her up to this. I could handle option 2 with only a small bruise to my pride, but option 1 looked far more likely.
Which is when she reached my groin. All movement stopped for me, and I think if I’d been any less inebriated I might have reacted somewhat. As it were, the mind’s gearbox had just been entirely destroyed and I couldn’t move.
“You know… I’ve been seeing you all night,” a voice like velvet caressing my ears said, somehow over the usual nightclub din. My right ear had surely shut down so that my left could concentrate entirely on what she was doing.
“Yuh?” I managed, somehow, to half-grunt out.
“And you know, I thought you’d have noticed by now,” she said, almost petulant.
Hell yes I noticed, I wanted to say. “Wuh…” was all I managed.
“But I guess you still haven’t noticed,” and at this point, her fingers found the bottom of my zipper.
When a woman has your zipper, all other things tend to be of little importance. Some comedian once said that god gave men two heads, but only enough blood to operate one. Never is that truer than when someone has you in their figurative grip, and you don’t half mind it.
“…your fly has been undone the whole night.” And with that, she zipped me up, gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and skipped away.
And that is how I met Pippa.
XD