The courtship

            My earliest interactions with Hannah were no less awkward than I should have expected, given my history of relationships with the opposite sex.  While we had known each other for the better part of the year and a half we had spent together in law school, we socialized with different groups of friends and were oblivious to the life the other generally led.  The lone occasion on which we interacted and I mustered up enough courage to talk to her, I had just enough time to shove a foot in my open mouth.

            “It’s cool that your little brother comes to class with you, “ I commented to her one day after noticing that she frequently showed up to class with a middle elementary aged kid.  “But doesn’t he have anything better to do with his time?”

            Hannah, smiling at me wryly, said, “Oh, Kevin’s my son.”   That moment stood as our most substantive interaction for the better part of a year, partly because we were both limping through relationships of our own and partly, I’m sure, because I was more than a little afraid of what my next ill-advised inquiry might be.

            But the tides began to turn one fateful holiday season when Hannah and my roommate’s girlfriend, Laurie, decided to host a party but needed a location for their gala.  The two-story house I was living in with Cooper and our third roommate, Drake, at the time seemed like a good enough fit for Hannah and Laurie, so I agreed to let them “host” the party at our house suspecting naively that my role in the process would be limited to opening the door as guests arrived—if that.

            As I scrubbed our downstairs toilet that day for the first time in the four plus months since the three of us had moved in and eyed the stack of decorations we had left to adorn the house, it occurred to me that my part in this celebration was a bit more involved than I’d anticipated.  Right about that time, Hannah and Laurie strolled through the front door with several bags of frozen meatballs in tow.

            “Did Cooper tell you we were coming over?” Laurie asked hurriedly.  Not waiting for me to answer, she continued, “He said you guys would be fine taking care of the meatballs for us.”  Hannah just looked at me and shrugged.

            “Where’s the crock pot?” Laurie added in her frantic pace.

            “What crock pot?” I responded, having no idea what she was talking about or why she was so harried as she unloaded her limited responsibilities on me five hours before the party was set to begin.  Besides, to my knowledge we had never had a crock pot in our house, and I most certainly hadn’t come across any cookware at the bottom of the toilet I had just pried myself away from.  “You’ll have to check with Cooper,” I said.  “He should be out of the shower in a minute.”

            “It’d be a lot easier if you could just tell me,” Laurie interrupted, apparently disregarding my answer to her last question.

            Realizing I could make no progress in the conversation, I turned to Hannah to take another stab at some sort of interaction, feeling slightly more confident on my literal home turf.  She had managed to busy herself with unloading a grocery sack full of supplies in the time Laurie and I had reached our stalemate.

            “How are we supposed to make meatballs with jelly and ketchup,” she asked, not really directing her question toward anyone.

            “That’s what barbeque sauce generally consists of,” I offered, taking advantage of what I perceived to be an opening door and fantastic opportunity to drop some knowledge on her from my rural upbringing.  I thought it was a great time, too, to inject a little humor into the conversation.  “Don’t you do hog roasts in the big city?”

            “Eww, I hate jelly,” she replied.  “Its consistency is too weird.  And I’m Jewish so I don’t really do hog roasts.”

            Strikes two and three, I thought to myself, having no inkling where to take the conversation from there.

            Fortunately, I didn’t need to worry since Cooper had gotten out of the shower and was able to help Laurie track down the crock pot she was seeking.  Laurie was ready to make up for lost time and started talking to Hannah about putting the meatballs together.  I used the opportunity to sneak out of the kitchen unnoticed and busy myself with setting up a train around our holiday display in the entryway.  This wasn’t so much a distraction as it was a reward for my hard efforts at devoting the entirety of the day up to that moment to cleaning our bachelor pad.  Drake, who was without a doubt the dirtiest roommate of the three of us, had holed himself up in the library all day to study for exams and very conveniently left all of the heavy cleaning and prep work to Cooper and me to do.  As motivation—both to get the work done and not to beat Drake’s ass—I had told myself that I could set the train up as soon as all the straightening up was done, but not until that point.

            So I eagerly busied myself with the childhood Christmas gift that had been long since stowed away as I entered my teenage and college years.  I have no doubt how goofy I must have looked as I covered the table in our entryway in linens and did my absolute best to use some sheets, cardboard boxes, trees and lights to create a winter scene worthy of the Bloomingdale’s store in Chicago we used to wander around every so often growing up—or at least the T.J. Maxx downtown that I had seen a couple times since I moved to the city for law school.

            I’m not quite sure how long Hannah had been standing behind me before I realized she was there, but I was fixing a broken track link when I caught sight of her out of the corner of my eye standing in the front room.  She was watching me with a smile on her face.  I was embarrassed and had to be turning bright red as I smiled sheepishly back.

            “I guess you guys are keeping an eye on the meatballs,” she said, still smiling and walking past me towards the door on her way out.

            “Oh, okay,” I said back, with absolutely no confidence and no intention of making myself look like an idiot with my ignorant small talk.

            “I’ll be back around 8:00 in case you guys need any more help,” said Hannah, closing the door and leaving me to my boyish devices.

            “Bye,” I said, not at all minding that I could devote my focus once again to the important task at hand, with the cheerful holiday sounds of Laurie and Cooper bickering in the kitchen.

            Hannah arrived at the party around 8:00 with her date, Joe, shortly after Laurie had returned to check up on the meatballs that Cooper had managed to burn.  I wasn’t paying too much attention to either her or her date when she strolled in since Drake had managed to show up right around the same time with two cases of beer to make amends for his utter lack of contributing in any way to our efforts at getting the house around for the day.  To make things even better, he had decided the best thing to do was shove the cases in the fridge, blocking out all of the food we needed to get to and, consequently, causing the refrigerator door to remain ajar.  When I pointed out the cooler we had loaded up with ice in anticipation of this situation, he looked at me, shrugged, said, “Whatever, bro,” and went upstairs to change into his “party jacket."

As it turned out, it didn't really matter since Hannah wasn’t especially impressed with Joe.  Maybe that’s too harsh.  It’s not that she was unimpressed, she just didn’t sense there was a great deal of chemistry growing between them.  Plus, she wasn’t wowed by his brazen attempt to usurp our TV to watch something other than college football, even apologizing to me for his misdeed later that evening when he ducked out to use the bathroom.

Hannah continued talking to me for a while about any number of different things even once Joe returned.  Later in the evening, we partnered up for a quick round of euchre before we started up with the Yankee Swap/Dirty Christmas gift exchange.  This part of the party had honestly been the last thing on my mind until I was at the store earlier in the day buying up various bottles of liquor and soda for Cooper's delicious party punch.  As I headed to the checkout lane, I came across a variety pack of Bod body spray which I didn’t give much thought to beyond the fact that, at $4.49, it came in under the $5 gift limit we had set—with change to spare.  So I snagged it, not expecting anyone to view it as anything other than the worst gift there.

As it turned out, I definitely had some competition.  Someone ended up with a copy of Jet and a hair pick.  I ended up with a bottle of King Cobra and a 40 of some sort, both of which were consumed by someone else at the party before I ever had a chance to get to them.  Hannah was the next to last to select her gift, so when she grabbed mine, I advised her to trade it up.  She kind of smiled at me coyly and said,

“Oh, I think I’ll stick with whatever’s in this one.”

As I’ve mentioned previously, the feminine wiles completely escape me.  So, I didn’t even give a second thought to this choice other than that she was a sucker who was going to end up with three vials of a fragrance that seems to find appeal only in the nostrils of prepubescent boys and, presumably, girls.  Hannah would later reveal, though, that this was her first attempt to flirt with me.  And we would both agree that I was too dense to know it at the time.

            In the end, the gift couldn’t have ended up in better hands.  As far as I know, Hannah was the only party-goer that had any close connection with any pre-teen boys since her son, Kevin, was nine.  He loved the Bod spray so much, Hannah finally had to hide it until she got a chance to throw it away without him noticing.  She did, however, use it as the ruse for her next attempt to contact me on IM at the start of the next week.

            We talked regularly throughout the the course of the ensuing weeks, whether it was over coffee/chai tea or Cajun food or via IM or text message.  The downside of starting up a relationship in between semesters of our second year of law school, we quickly discovered, was that we went on break right as things were starting to get hot and heavy, well, warm and slightly overweight at least.  Hannah had her plans, which involved heading to Disney World with Kevin and her dad, step-mom and sisters, while I was rolling down to Texas for a week with my parents and sister.  And for the first time in my life, I had something—or someone—on my mind other than the awesomeness I was going to experience on our trip.

So did Hannah, I realized, as our AIM conversations were replaced by frequent text messages and clandestine phone calls when we could sneak them in.  I’d get a text from her asking which was my favorite Muppet character, and she would get a text from me detailing the gear at the Alamo to see if she was interested in anything.  When our respective trips ended, I didn’t waste much time getting back to town to see her, even if I pawned it off as being for some other reason.

            I doubt I could really hide my eagerness, though, as I rolled up to Hannah’s house with obstructed views out of each of my car windows since I had clearly not even taken an extra ten minutes to stop by my apartment to drop things off before heading by to see her.  Our meeting was fairly brief as we exchanged the Swedish Chef (Hannah’s gift to me) and cork pop-gun (my gift to Hannah) that we had gotten for one another on our travels.  What our encounter most significantly included, though, was our first kiss as I walked out the door.  I think we both may have been too excited for it to be anything especially significant, but the moment certainly wasn’t lost on either of us. We decided we would pick up where we had left off pre-holiday break with coffee the next morning after she had dropped Kevin off at school.

            Whether we were completely lovestruck or just horribly unobservant, Hannah and I both entirely overlooked two of our classmates who were already standing in line to order at Starbucks.  That in and of itself wasn’t a big deal, but the fact that one of these two girls was a close friend of my ex-girlfriend, Erin, was somewhat problematic.

I think it’s safe to say that Erin and I could have had a good friendship.  That being said, we weren’t exactly on the same page as far as a dating relationship went.  I originally sought her out because we had attended colleges in undergrad that were only fifteen miles apart and grew up in towns separated by about twenty miles.  Our backgrounds had initially seemed somewhat similar enough, which was a comforting thought for someone like me who was lonely and having a difficult time adjusting to living by myself in an unfamiliar locale.

What should have been the first sign of trouble, though, followed on the heels of our first “date.”  We were heading out of class one afternoon when I asked Erin if she would want to grab dinner some night later that week. For all four years of my undergraduate career, I had lived in a dorm and had grown tired of now heading home in the evenings and not having anyone to talk to until I got back to class the next morning.  This would be a welcome break to the monotony, I thought.  In the meantime, some family friends who had been eager to set me up with a friend of their own called to arrange a blind date that following weekend.

As it turned out, I enjoyed hanging out with both of the girls and was comfortable with the idea of seeing what would take me where, knowing that I needed to be prepared to call it off with one of them if something really started to materialize with the other.  So, when Erin invited me over the next weekend for pizza and Napolean Dynamite, I accepted.  Somewhere in the course of the conversation, it came out that I had had a lunch date the previous weekend, at which point she started to undress me, figuratively, for daring to go out with someone else after we had already started dating.  Not being particular conversant with the rules of dating, I deferred to what I believed to be Erin’s expert knowledge and attempted to call it off with girl number two, a process that was made somewhat difficult by the fact that I did not have her phone number.

The relationship over the next six months wasn’t necessarily all bad.  Erin and I did have fun together, and being with her certainly cured the overwhelming loneliness I had struggled with when I initially started law school. Problems continued to arise, though, when she wanted me to commit to the relationship at a level I wasn’t comfortable with, and, rather than deal with that herself, she decided she would try to guilt me into seeing things her way.

Now, I know from having observed numerous relationships that this may be perfectly acceptable for some guys and some couples.  But I tend to be a little bull-headed (some might say an ass) at times and don’t particularly care for being told what to do.  The first major sign that our relationship was headed for derailment was when Erin made it a point after a couple months of dating to show me engagement rings “for no particular reason” at a time when I wasn’t convinced I was even committed to a dating relationship with her.

There were plenty of other odd moments, too, such as when we were at a birthday dinner for one of our friends after we had been dating for a few months, and Erin was talking to everyone about her kids’ names—all of which ended with my surname.  I hadn’t quite agreed to these terms yet, but I wasn’t about to make an issue of it at someone else’s party.  (Hannah loves this story since she was sitting at the opposite end of the table.)

The last major sign was when I returned from what was basically a long weekend trip to visit some family out East.  At that time, cell phones still roamed at a cost of $3 a minute, and our time on the trip was nearly completely filled with dinners and get-togethers with my mom’s rather large family.  I told Erin all of this ahead of time and let her know I would call her as soon as I got back, which I did.  It didn’t turn out to be the most glamorous of dates, but we were both in dire need of groceries, and I thought we could head to the store together before I completely passed out from exhaustion.

Erin proceeded to spend the entirety of that evening bitching at me about having not called her and about how she talked with all of her friends, and they all told her she had every right to be mad and tell me off.  The only problem was that I didn’t care in the least bit.  I didn’t care what her friends thought, I didn’t care what she thought, I didn’t care that we hadn’t talked since I left for the trip.  And I didn’t care to be in the relationship any more.

Knowing that Erin didn’t handle stressful situations especially well, I tried to hold out on breaking things off another month until we were finished with semester exams.  I nearly made it, too, until she insisted on having the conversation the night following our first exam.  I told her repeatedly to let it go for the moment, but she insisted on having it out that night.  In so many words, I told her I was done.  She kept saying she thought it might be good to take a break, but I told her it wasn’t a break, it was over.

When Erin finally accepted that there wasn’t anything more between us, she decided she needed a shoulder to cry on, which just so happened, unwittingly, to be Hannah’s.  Hannah tried her best to be supportive but was a little baffled since 1) she was not especially close with Erin, and 2) when Erin got to complaining about me, Hannah couldn’t really see what Erin’s big beef with me was.

So, I knew from the moment our classmates left our table at Starbucks that morning after exchanging pleasantries that it was about to hit the fan.  I tried to explain to Hannah the direness of the situation, but she was convinced it wasn’t quite as big a deal as I was making it—until she got a phone call that night from Erin.

            I had tried to do the whole “we can still be friends” thing with Erin in the early months of our break-up since we interacted with some of the same circle of friends and were bound to sit in the same classes at some point during the course of our next two years of law school.  But it turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had anticipated, and she wasn’t as ready as I was to move on quite so quickly.  As a result, Erin and I hadn’t talked in quite some time when Hannah and I started hanging out.  That we had been broken up for longer than we dated also hadn’t seemed to cross Erin’s mind.

            I’m not exactly sure what all transpired between Hannah and Erin in the course of that conversation.  Hannah said there was a lot of crying—not on her part—and questioning from Erin why Hannah hadn’t told her about us first and why she had to hear about it from someone else since she was so close to both of us.  The problem was that Hannah didn’t really know what to say since we weren’t quite sure we were a “thing” yet and neither of us still believed Erin to be an especially close friend.  Still, the conversation did have the effect of forcing us to “define our relationship” as we prepared to return for our second semester as the source of potential gossip among our peers.

            And this turned out to be a good thing.  Aside from being able to have a say this time around about when our dating relationship started, one of the issues that had been rolling around in my mind over the course of the prior month had been that this wasn’t a normal dating relationship.  There was a nine-year-old boy involved, and I wasn’t comfortable keeping him waiting in the wings if I wasn’t completely serious about what I was getting into with Hannah.  I didn’t want to waste his time or his mom’s if I wasn’t committed to the both of them for the long haul.  Fortunately, Hannah and I had several opportunities to give the waters a good test as we headed into the summer.

            First was the weekend Hannah and I were finally heading up for her to meet my parents and sister.  It was already Kevin’s dad’s weekend to have him, and neither of us had class on Friday.  We had planned on heading out as soon as Hannah dropped him off at school.  I arrived at Hannah’s house, however, to discover her locked out of her house and sitting on the steps of her front porch.

            As it turned out, one of our former classmates, Suellen, had spent the night at her house, and, in spite of Hannah’s directions to the contrary, locked the front door when she left.  The problem this created was that Hannah relied on her alarm system to secure her house during the course of the day while she was away and did not otherwise keep a key to the house readily accessible.  For the next three hours, then, we watched the rain fall and waited in the driveway for the locksmith to arrive (who was perpetually ten minutes away)  to pop open the front door in about all of about 90 seconds with what looked to be a glorified blood pressure sleeve.

            I had never been a huge fan of Suellen’s to begin with, but I felt like I now had a valid reason to detest her, especially since she told Hannah she had locked the door on purpose when she left because she thought it was a bad decision on Hannah’s part not to want it locked.  Still, we had nothing else to do but sit in the rain and wait for the locksmith—a good test of our patience with one another, we thought.

Then came the Barristers Ball at the start of March.  This event was basically the equivalent of law school prom but with booze supplied readily by the caterers instead of a flask from someone’s tux coat.  And at fifty bucks a head, every law student there was prepared to drink his or her money’s worth.  It really was the one and only time I’ve ever been to a fully catered affair and seen the bars run completely out of liquor before the servers ran out of food.  This led to a diaspora of sorts across the downtown as various groups of ball-goers tried to find somewhere to keep the party going that wasn’t already overrun with other attendees.  On top of that, the cabs were somehow at a premium as we readied to make the eight-block trek south to a local martini bar.

For the record, I was still in pretty good shape.  Hannah, however, was several sheets to the wind by the time she ordered her first martini and was already in the process of telling me how much she loved me.  It may have been very drunken drivel, but it was also very memorable from the single comment she made, albeit several times, that she loved me enough that she wanted me to be happy, even if it wasn’t with her.

            Over the course of the preceding months, I had really grown to appreciate the type of person Hannah was.  She was very comfortable in her own skin and wasn’t the typical girl I had often crossed paths with, frequently laughing at herself and inviting me to join in.  I really appreciated her confidence and independence and appreciated that she also valued that in me.  It made it very easy to get comfortable with her without feeling like I was being smothered or was about to get roped into something I wasn’t expecting.

            But this disclosure blew me away.  I had never really come across a girl who could honestly tell me that she wanted what was best for me, even if it may not have been what she thought was best for her.  Now, I suppose there is the off chance that she—being a woman and potentially inherently manipulative—knew all of this which is why she said it in the first place.  But I don’t think so.  Mostly because she’s never been that person in the nearly five years we’ve been together and partly because she was inebriated beyond the point of internal monologue at that point and was completely incapable of keeping any latent motivations for these comments to herself.  So, convinced I had a pretty good gal on my hands, we wrapped up our conversation and called it a night, but not before she tried to pay the check on three separate occasions, having forgotten on two subsequent occasions that she had successfully paid off the tab the first time.  (Hannah insisted on buying the martinis since I footed the bill for the Ball tickets.  She thought it was “dumb” for me to pay for everything, another quality I appreciated.)

The final opportunity came three weeks later when we left for spring break.  Hannah was leery of leaving Kevin with his dad for an entire week, which she’d never done before.  I completely understood and left the choice to go to Florida entirely up to her and honestly hadn’t expected that she would agree to go.  However, Kevin’s break coincided with ours, and he was supposed to be headed to his dad’s for the week anyway.  So, I was pleasantly surprised when she told me a couple weeks out that she had already talked with Kevin’s dad about him coming over for the week.  I figured she must have been pretty committed to something if she was willing to give Kevin up for the week.

I don’t know that there was anything particularly significant that happened that week, aside from watching the pool cleaner shoot herself in the head with a stream of water from the hose when she finally arrived to clean the pool on the next to last day of our stay in the rental house.  We just had a lot of fun being able to walk on the beach, cruise around downtown Siesta Key, grab breakfast at the Broken Egg a couple times, play shuffleboard and hang out in general without the stress of school and everyday life.  Even more than that, we were able to survive being with each other apart from the daily grind of life.  That we could still enjoy one another’s presence without all of the drama was a step in the right direction, we thought.