Tiger Lady

We’d only met the one time. After years of semi knowing each other in the way that the internet allows people to semi know each other. Like, you're not sure if you should call the people who live in the box or your phone your friend or not. Would they be there for you in real life? People who are only available with an emoji or a meme, who can silence you with a button or send you to voicemail. Who leave you on “seen.”

We met the one time, at a coffee shop, and we were polite and Ms. Manners would have nodded from her perch above and said, "Yes, those two did everything by the book.”

I would have gone off book.

His name was Sterling and his eyes were silver. In his avatar, anyway. But in real life, his eyes changed colors when he told me about the job he didn’t like and the hobby he wished was a job. And I told him about watering gardens for a living while painting watercolors on the side. He said he had never done anything like this before—met someone in person he’d only known online—and I hadn’t either. And neither of us should have. And we didn’t.

Come on, don’t look at me like that.

We. Didn’t.

We didn’t take things beyond that nice, polite meet.

But I would have. I would have gone back with him to his motel, and he could have gotten a bucket of ice, and I would have been out of the dumb sundress and under the covers before he’d come back. I could see it. He would peel back the sheets, and he would look at my tattoos, the ones that most people don’t know I have. He would see the tiger on one thigh, the lady on the other.

Would he open the door?

He paid for the coffee and said it was nice to put a face to the face. If that made sense. “It’s nice to see the person behind the pictures,” he said. He’d been the first to comment on my daffodil. To tell me that my painting of hydrangeas looked so real he thought he could touch the petals.

My boyfriend didn’t notice when I finished a new painting. Not anymore. Sterling’s girlfriend told him not quit his day job.

The interwebs allow for a type of superficial awareness. As if it’s deep, but it’s shallow. You can get to fantasies really quick though. In a way you couldn’t necessarily on a date. It strips some of the social niceties away in a paint-thinner, singe-the-edges style.

Would you go out with someone and tell them in an ever-so-seductive manner how you were going to dress ahead of time? Or is that only something a keyboard courtesan might do? “I’ve got on lavender lace panties.” That’s not something your date would know. But your internet “friend” knows exactly what they look like. Hey, you even made a reel about which undergarments you were thinking of wearing, with a poll, and everyone responded with a gif.

We’d had an emotional affair, I think is what the influencers call them. We didn't make eyes across a crowded room like the folks in airport novels. But he’d commented in one way and I’d commented back. He’d slid into my DMs. I shouldn’t have responded, but I couldn’t help myself. There was something more than pixels, I felt. More than emojis.

I had ended it. Once. Twice. I had ended it until I hadn’t. Until I wanted to look at my phone and have him there again, making me smile. Making me feel pretty and wanted and, dare I say it? Loved. He had always been there waiting, and when I asked if he was in other women’s inboxes, he assured me he wasn’t. I checked who he was following. It was all work stuff. Hobby stuff. And me.

We met the second time in a different city. Both of us traveling. He was there on business. I was there for a wedding of a sorority sister. An event that my boyfriend hadn’t thought was important enough to end. It wasn’t an accident that Sterling and I wound up at the same bar in the same hotel. But I told myself I could say it was. I could say, “Oh, my gosh! I had no idea!” and fake surprise if anyone who knew either of us found out.

It’s probably obvious here that we shouldn’t have. That there were extenuating circumstances back home for each of us, either of us, both of us, the two of us. The four of us if you count his her and my him.

It was the two of us at the hotel bar that night, though. Nursing gilded drinks with ice. Whiskey looks like gold when the light hits it just right. Gin doesn’t look like anything. The bartender would refill our desires and wander away into the gloom, as if he knew not to intrude. As if he could see we weren’t even supposed to be there.

Maybe we weren’t.

Maybe this was one more fantasy he had written to me or I had written to him. I'd said I had wanted to do it in a drive-in. Do they still have drive-ins? He had shared a vision about an elevator adorned with mirrors, the two of going up to the very top floor.

At first, we were nervous, but after the second cocktail it was all easy. All smooth and sleek and his hand on my leg and me leaning against him when he told a joke, as if it was so funny I couldn’t help myself. But it wasn’t that funny. What was funny was him trying to tell it but constantly forgetting one major part. Either the lead or the middle or the punchline.

He left the key on the table. I had my heart in my hand.

There are memories you preserve in the photo album of your mind. Like the way he looked when he stopped in the doorway of the bar and tilted his head at me in a "the decision is yours" type of way. The lady or the tiger?

Would I open that door?