True Stories from My Terrible Love Life 3

A Summer Romance

[Back to the May 2022 timeline.]

About a week or two after we first met, Nutria asked me out on a second date.

He invited me over to his apartment for dinner. We also planned to paint at the park and watch The Pirates of the Caribbean, which I had never seen before.

I ended up being an hour late because of traffic. Story of my life. I bother mentioning this because Nutria is very punctual. He's someone that's always at least fifteen minutes early to everything.

His apartment was nice and clean. It came furnished, but he had added some of his own touches. Thank God for clean men with taste lol. (Although, he said his mom helped some with decorating, because she's really into that.)

Because I was late, we didn't go to the park to paint and instead just painted at his kitchen table.

I was slower in my painting, but he hurried along so that he could start dinner while I painted.

I found out much later that he had planned and practiced drawing what he would be painting for three days prior to this date.

That poor man. His painting was still god awful.

But, it warmed my heart that he would do that for me and work so hard to prepare.

I forgot to mention it before, but Nutria is half-Italian (doesn't look like it whatsoever with his pale features lmao) and he cooked me some pasta that was a family recipe. It was seriously good and I was a little impressed.

After dinner, the sun had begun to set and it was casting an awful glare on his TV, so we went and sat on his bed to watch Pirates of the Caribbean on his laptop.

We had sat awkwardly side by side until our backs hurt. Then for a while, we laid stiffly side by side. Maybe halfway through the movie, he suggested that we could cuddle. I felt so nervous and awkward, because this was only the second man I would ever cuddle with, but I curled into him. He told me later that he thought it was so cute how I did that, and that I was a good cuddle-er. Ha.

After the movie had finished, he asked if he could kiss me. I said yes, and then we made out for a bit. It was my first time kissing a man with a beard, so that was interesting haha. The scratchy feeling on the neck though was nice *wink wonk*.

The furthest we got was some basic touchy-feely-ness. He was super respectful and didn't let anything more happen. I wasn't ready for that at all, and he knew it because I had mentioned my previous relationship and that it was the only one I was ever in. Plus, this was the second date. It was way too soon for anything crazy.

A little bit after that, I went home.

>>><<<

During the first week of June, I had a phone call with my sister's boss. I thought it was going to be an interview, but the job was basically mine because of the connection with my sister. I just needed to start the process for my visa application. So, the summer of 2022, I started planning my move to South Korea.

I told Nutria that the job was confirmed and not just a consideration anymore. We decided to keep hanging out and seeing each other, but also to keep it casual. We both knew it couldn't work out in the long run and were able to accept that. We still wanted to get to know each other with whatever time was available for us. It was nice to make another friend.

The only thing that distinctly changed was calling on the phone. Before, we had called almost every night, but he said he didn't want to do that anymore to at least set some sort of boundary for both of our sakes. For him, calling every night felt like strongly pursuing a relationship. I totally understood that and agreed. We still called occasionally, maybe once a week or less, but we continued to text everyday.