"A Second Chance at a First Impression"

CW: Sexual coercion, misogyny, substance abuse

A Second Chance at a First Impression.

They worked for the same international company. He hadn’t returned to the headquarters—where she lived—in twenty-five years.

After rubbing his eyes and pinching himself, he decided to discreetly run his finger down the guest list. Sure enough, he found her name, and having used her maiden name, her identity was left beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In their early twenties, they first crossed paths at a wedding for the first and only time. Now (decades later), happenstance had brought them back together at another wedding—this time, the wedding of a senior executive’s daughter.

After their initial encounter and its less than happy outcome, he had been haunted by their short but explosive time together, and he always tried to push the memory out of mind upon being reminded of it by some random trigger. However, over the last few years, that all had changed, and all the disappointment that he had felt for her had shifted onto himself, and now he saw her only as one of the many other girls whom he had hurt while recklessly trying to fulfill his ambition of officially earning the title of “A Ladies Man.”

Although he had never told anybody, he had kept track of her silently and anonymously in the background, and all the happiness that she eventually found in forming a beautiful family and all her wonderful contributions to her community both eased his conscience and made him feel robbed.

He guessed he’d been a sort of romantic kleptomaniac back then, a robbery knight who stole from himself and others. He wouldn’t dare shield himself from admitting that when he heard that she had left her husband after a twenty-year marriage because of her husband’s infidelity. He was pleased—not pleased at her loss, but pleased for a chance to redeem himself in her eyes and maybe finally even be able to convince himself that he really wasn’t the villain of this story.

He didn’t have to fly into that wedding; he chose to. He had a purpose in going, though he didn’t exactly understand what it was, and the chances of her even being there were slim to none.

He had stopped denying to himself that she hadn’t been that beautiful of a person, both inside and out; and upon seeing her, he recognized that, like the wine she had drunk that night, she had simply grown more beautiful with age. He found himself hoping she would still be at least as sweet and kind as she had been almost three decades ago.

He remembered when he last saw her: her smeared mascara had begun to run with her early-morning tears as he stumbled over his words and excuses for making such a sudden change of plans instead of spending the day together. To make matters worse, he had accidentally let her cat out as he stumbled through her front door and into the unforgiving daylight, and the last sight he remembered was her rushing past him in hot pursuit of that cat while she pulled up and adjusted the bridesmaid’s dress she had worn the night before, having grabbed it from the floor as she ran.

Back then, he had just been a probationary account manager and a fledgling alcoholic. It didn’t take many stiff shots of tequila at the nearest bar to ease his conscience for the pain he had caused such an innocent girl—and the string of all the other girls he would leave behind in his wake.

But that was all a very long time ago, and today he had been sober now for five years. Funny how sobriety doesn’t ease the conscience like liquor did; instead, it made all the memories of those he had hurt feel like surgery without anesthetic.

Roughly five years ago, he had run out of good looks and finally made up his mind to run out on liquor.

He couldn’t help but make a significant effort to always be aware of her location in the banquet hall.

Without liquor, he almost felt like a little kid with his first crush on a girl but afraid to approach her. A kid overwhelmed by nervous energy.

He still wasn’t even sure what his intentions were at that point—an opportunity to apologize or maybe something much more undignified and carnal. Maybe, somewhere in his subconscious, the thought of giving her an explanation had crossed his mind.

Eventually, he managed to lock eyes with her, but only for a moment, as she awkwardly looked away—not in recognition, but uneasily, as if uncomfortable with a stranger staring at her.

As ridiculous as it sounds, though he hadn’t been sure of his intentions, he had suddenly become extremely aware of the reality of his situation. She didn’t have even the vaguest recollection of him, and that both embarrassed and deeply wounded his ego. But it only stood to reason because his appearance had so drastically changed since they met. He had only grown facial hair in his late thirties, and only to compensate for his aggressively thinning hairline, not to mention his pants size moving up in sizes.

He still remembered the first time he caught her eye—accidentally—while he was ogling the maid of honor’s hourglass figure that he considered perfect for a “one-night stand.” She was the personification of the augmented Barbie stepping right out of his fantasies, but then he was momentarily distracted when he glanced suddenly into the gaze of the second bridesmaid from the left before quickly breaking eye contact and returning a gratuitous smile, then awkwardly looking down, gathering himself back to the respectability of his position. After all, as the groom’s best man, he outranked her and had already set his sights on the maid of honor.

After the ceremony and throughout the beginning of the reception, he spent the lion’s share of his time in pursuit of the cartoonishly better-looking, drunken maid of honor who had been standing just to the left of her, and whose fiancé had apparently been delayed by a last-minute flight cancellation and who seemed all too delighted to pass the time by slow dancing, her head facing down, snuggled into his neck.

He gently whispered to the maid of honor, “Let’s get out of here… do you like Italian food?”

She seemed to neither remember nor care that she had a fiancé. He eagerly joined her in that sentiment—that is, until the dance was abruptly cut short by her being pulled from their intimate embrace by the forceful, jerking motion of her betrothed.

It seemed to him at that moment that he suddenly had an audience, as if they had been amusing the crowd for the better part of three dances.

He couldn’t move, paralyzed by humiliation, until the sting of her stare struck for the second time—but now it had turned from a gaze of admiration into one of judgment. It was the second bridesmaid from the left—just as she spun and vanished. The only thing left was the wake made by the skirt of her bridesmaid’s dress as she forged her way through the crowd, which he used to make his escape.

He rushed off the dance floor and dashed up the stairs, where he ducked out a side door and onto a balcony—a place he’d hoped would be a crowded place of seclusion, but much to his dismay, he found it to be rather empty, with only himself and the second bridesmaid from the left, a.k.a. the vanishing voyeur.

She managed a nervous smile, which he greeted with his traditional smirk, and with a gentlemanly gesture of his hand and a slight bow, he casually invited her to join him at the second open bar.

She declined his offer to join him in another tequila shot, saying it was much too early for her—but as for him, if he felt comfortable continuing on his established pattern of drinking throughout the matrimonial ceremony and into the reception, it was fine with her, but he’d probably regret it.

He eventually managed to encourage/convince her to accept a glass of wine (or three…) as he had taken her earlier sarcasm as an invitation—or even a challenge—to break down all the defenses she had so readily put up in anticipation of his less than honorable intentions.

So, after he finished off another shot with a slight grimace while simultaneously signaling the bartender for another, there was a moment of uncomfortable silence, broken only by him asking her, “So, who’s your favorite writer?”

To which she almost immediately responded, “Steinbeck… Steinbeck, especially ‘The Grapes of Wrath."

He complimented her on her great taste in literature and responded that his personal favorite had always been Guy de Maupassant because he often wrote about the innocence of pretty young girls, just like her.

Was Guy de Maupassant his favorite? Not really—he just liked the sound of it rolling off his lips. And so did she, as he interpreted from her sudden blushing and shyly looking down.

He went on to share that he himself was an aspiring writer. She asked if he had written anything, and he glanced down at his feet and back up with a smirk and said… a title…

She asked, “And what is this title?”

And he said, “Faint Perfume & Treason…”

Their conversation continued far into the night, and they both found themselves sincerely intrigued by one another. The two seemed inseparable on that balcony, save for the intermission of throwing rice.

The evening faded into night, and his hands began to move in an all-too-familiar way, and though her naïveté remained, her moral fortitude was soon rendered powerless to do anything except encourage him.

He remembered her whispering into his ear that somehow this just felt right and that she might not be so innocent—at least by the morning.

Promises were made by both, but kept by only one.

Later, upon entering her bedroom, the instructions he gave and the way she obeyed both thrilled him and ignited his need to punish her, for she had disqualified herself from any future consideration by so readily following his insatiable demands.

All their earlier discourse into the night had been sincere; given the open bar, he would gladly do it all again. But absent the open bar, and with an aching brain and pounding head, his hangover unfortunately regained its dysfunctional driver’s seat the next morning.

I guess it’s obvious that he had lied to her; he hadn’t spontaneously remembered his previous engagement. He had just been ashamed.

At that point, he wasn’t yet a “blackout drunk,” and he distinctly remembered what he had asked of such a sweet and innocent girl and how she had reluctantly let him do it.

It hadn’t been pretty nor over quickly, but it had been—and in the end, all his sinful desires were fulfilled, not by a tramp but by an innocent girl who looked more like she should be hugging a lamb than acting the part of a willing seductress.

I wished she would have stopped me and that I could have frozen her in time and put her on a shelf until I had gotten all my childish fantasies out of my system and only then returned to reclaim my beautiful little doll.

The maid of honor would have been perfect for an 8-hour “roll in the hay” if not for her rather intrusive future husband, but girls like this one weren’t meant to be used and then tossed away but instead protected and coveted over a lifetime, and yet I still blamed her for letting me do it.

“There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

He hadn’t left because of other plans; he was escaping the shame and embarrassment he had brought onto them both, and he was very remorseful but just didn’t know how to say it, so he ran away from both her and himself.

Her whispers in his ears from the night before were ringing nonstop in his echoes like evil harbingers threatening the shattering of his mind.

All playing out within his psyche in a seamlessly never-ending loop.

“…somehow this just felt right” – “I might not be so innocent…” – and “he’d probably regret it.”

He would continuously torture himself with dueling scenarios… had she been a seductive temptress the whole time…? Or was he just that charming…? Either choice left him in a self-destructive cycle of both regret and self-hatred that he only knew one way to make it stop.

His haunting revelations carried on through his first couple of drinks, and flashes of their evening kept springing into his mind, like their arguing over choosing names for their kids and just how many they should have.

All just harmless flirtation… at first anyway… until it turned into their practical applications in the act of reproduction that quickly evolved into raw animalistic lust.

She obeyed every lecherous order he gave her, and this both thrilled him and ignited his need to punish her, for in following them she had disqualified herself from any future consideration.

He had been rather self-delusional back then, and that which he demanded of her was nothing short of lecherous, and ironically, the expectations he had set of a wife were simply unachievable, and he would never have found such a woman. If he ever could have, he wouldn’t have deserved her.

Nevertheless, he was too insecure and emotionally fragile at that time to even come close to allowing himself to look in the mirror and face the unadulterated truth; his heart would surely have imploded. Maybe that would have been the best-case scenario at the time.

Like all good liars, he was even able to sell his own lies to himself and be very selective about where he placed blame.

That morning and into the afternoon, he realized that because of what she let him do, he could never marry such an easy girl—a harlot who would so eagerly perform such explicitly scandalous sex acts on their first date.

Even if he allowed all the blame to fall on himself, there was still no way back to viewing her as anything other than a slut, regardless of any responsibility he personally bore for so aggressively helping her earn that rank in this unforgiving world.

It had taken him a long time to “grow up” and mature into a real human being with real authentic feelings that confronted him with irrefutable proof that he had been a monster.

The removal of alcohol in his life was the key to exposing himself to the cruelest but honest reflections of how many “pretty girls” he had damaged along the way.

He often thought himself irredeemable and destined to spend the rest of his life in regret, but then happenstance happened, and he had managed to run back into her… and though he still had bouts with “Jekyll & Hyde” syndrome, in his heart he truly wanted to be forgiven by both the world, himself, but especially her.

He didn’t know if his moral epiphany had subjected him to even half the pain that he had caused others, but it sure felt like it had.

But maybe now it was his time to make up for his misdeeds—or better yet, erase all her bad memories from her mind and replace them with a better one.

Seeing how she seemed to have developed a faint case of amnesia where he was concerned, he felt it was the perfect occasion to launch a new beginning.

He strategically “involuntarily eavesdropped” while standing behind her in the buffet line and later positioning himself inconspicuously within “earshot” of her other conversations. He even found occasional spots to respectfully “chime in” when he felt it appropriate.

He learned things about her, both new and old. He had so many questions he wanted to ask her, but not at the moment.

He made a point of introducing himself to her (but only by first name) before he left and found her to be as gracious as ever.

Over the years, all the emotional pain he had caused himself and others had slowly eaten away at his soul, eroding all the careless charm he once wore like a mask of designed chivalry.

As Fitzgerald once wrote, emotional bankruptcy was his fate—until, finally, he realized that only he could perform a fundamental exorcism of his past.

A few days later…

He approached the park bench where she sat almost every pretty day just outside of her work. He was no longer battling the shakes of a hangover but instead the nervous trembling of hope and quiet anticipation—hope, pure and simple—that this time he could be sincere with both himself and the object of his affection.

This time, he was successful in catching her eye as he “coincidentally” passed by the bench where she was sitting.

They both shared a mutual smile, and he walked over and said, “Hey, aren’t you that nice lady I met the other night at the wedding? I believe we have a love of Steinbeck in common…”

Then they talked for the better part of half an hour before she realized that she was going to be late and hurriedly apologized as she rushed to collect her things.

She said, “It was a pleasure meeting you, and I really enjoyed our talk. Maybe we’ll run into each other sometime,” and she smiled in the most natural way.

And he said,

“Do you like Italian food…?”