2 Questions Every Girl is Asking Herself

Chapter 25

I didn't sleep much that night – agitated and restless and not at all at ease with this turn of events. I watched Jeremiah making all the arrangements: calling his son, calling his parents, calling the airline. I watched it all in silence.

I worried if his stay will ruin my writing/experiment/dream, and he would lose interest in me and that I would feel cheated and used and abused. Yet, I couldn't bring myself to voice any of these concerns. How do you tell a guy who's been nothing but kind to you that you're worried he's just playing around? I couldn't tell him not to stay – I didn't have sufficient information to reject him. Nor could I embrace his stay with open arms – I didn't have sufficient information to accept him. We'd only just met three days ago. I hadn't yet acquired the dating vocabulary to understand or extract myself from these kinds of situations with dignity and grace. I didn't know what to do. So I did nothing.

The next morning, Aya came early to take me house-hunting. He took one look at Jeremiah and said to me, "BOYFRIEND?"

I shook my head and hands with frantic vigor, "no, no, no, no, no!"

Aya grinned. He didn't buy it.

I'm not sure how it happened, but it seemed implicitly understood that Jeremiah and I were hunting for a house, together. For us. Not just for me. He wasn't the male friend here to give me objective advice when I get too emotional about a place and forget about all the practicalities, nor was he the home inspector to help me spot broken pipes or faulty wiring. He was a stakeholder. A home-hunter. A decision-maker. Not an advisor. Aya tried to sell the houses to Jeremiah as though he was going to live there. As though I was the side-kick.

We toured 4 or 5 houses in Ubud, ever since visiting Ketut Liyer, I'd decided Ubud's my kind of neighborhood. I fell in love with a garden house I'd endearingly named "the concrete jungle", I'll explain in a bit. Jeremiah loved another house facing a gorge, which featured an outdoor shower tiled with multi-coloured pebbles.

Seeing our apparent disagreement, I said to him that we don't HAVE to stay at the same house. That he should absolutely stay at a house that makes him happy.

To which he simply replied, "I wouldn't even be in Ubud if it weren't for you. I'd be living by Legian Beach where it's easier to meet people and the acupuncturist is cheaper. I just want you to be happy. We'll take the concrete jungle."

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Two days later, at breakfast, Jeremiah asked, "Are you sure you want to stay at the concrete jungle?"

"Yeah, we already paid the deposit."

"Don't worry about the deposit, I can cover the deposit. We can still move into the other house."

Long pause.

"You really don't like the concrete jungle, do you?" I said, "We're moving in tonight, and you are still trying to talk me out of it. You know we don't – "

There he cut me off, "No, it's fine. I just want you to be happy," Jeremiah smiled.

When you're a girl with a new guy, you often wonder, is it love or lust? Will it last, or will it disappear in a shimmer? Those officious women's magazines are filled with articles of fabulous women who have a fabulous time with one-night stands or summer flings studded with fabulous men. I don't know how they do it. Do they really not care when the guy leaves after a mere one night and never call again? Don't our maternal instincts make us naturally more attached to people? As much as we'd like to feel we're equals with men, and that we're liberated and wild and strong, biologically, we're just... different. Women have six times more tear-inducing hormones than men, among many other emotion-inducing hormones that make women, women. I can never do one-night stands. I can't not care. I can keep a broken heart going for 7 years over a guy I'd dated for six months. All men entering my life are carefully screened, observed, considered. I haven't met his friends, I havne't met his family. I don't know if he does this kind of thing with every other girl he meets.

And now I'm moving in with him?

It didn't occur to me that I could insist we live apart. I felt that's kind of rude considering all he's done for me. Then my mind came to a screeching halt as I remembered something Dad said once, "Men will change their behavior once they 'get it'". Then like a drone, the worrying resumed.

Our first dinner at "the concrete jungle" was a simple meal of pasta and salad, ordered in from a local restaurant. We ate on the front porch overlooking the garden. Conversation flowed as easily as the summer breeze. He told me about his family, his ex-wife, his former girlfriends. He showed me the skeletons in the closet, and seemed to be at peace with them. I liked his candor. I liked our easy conversation. I liked his wise-ass comments when you're in the middle of a story. He said there's a distinction between loving someone, and being in love. He said he'd only been in love once. She was a poet.  

"She was very talented," He said, "It would be nice to fall in love again."