In hindsight, it’s easy to see that life had been preparing me for the moment Nicole and I would intersect.  For years, it had been force feeding me the necessary beans to produce a flatulence chemically formulated specifically to make her nostrils dilate in pheromonal ecstasy as she sniffed me up. I have a longer, more detailed recollection of the story here, but if you want the short and sweet, here is a quick summary:  

It began the moment our eyes met, a moment that filled me instantly with a certainty beyond logic and a moment she doesn't even remember.  For two weeks I pursued her like a hotdog its bun, a newborn its mother tit, Pepé Le Pew his Penelope, and for two weeks she Penelope Pussycated me, waving her tail under my nose, kissing my cheek and calling me a bad boy.  

Every night after conversing for hours while strolling Portland’s cold, wet streets, she’d leave me on her doorstep, soaked to the bone and ready to mount her like a bull elk, with nothing but a measly hug.  I would get home and pace my house like a lost dog, littering my house with pedals from the metaphorical flower, “she loves me, she loves me not”.  Exhausted, I would manage to finally let her go and rock myself to sleep with a bottle of warm milk and a binky, only to wake up the next morning to some cryptic text from her saying how must she enjoyed our time together, how she would love to keep… exploring.  

Exploring what!?  I wondered, flustered.  

Portland or the magic between us?  

And just like that, the flame I’d manage to snuff out the night before would flare back to life, tossing me once again into that frantic, godforsaken world known as “Hope”. 

One moring ole Pepé had enough, it was time to throw on my thickest french accent and pepper her with Le Pew. 

“Oh, Nicole, yu are ze corned beef to me and I am ze cabbage to yu, your lips ze say 'no'…but your eyes ze say yes”

She gently informed me she was not available but invited me upstairs to her apartment and roped me in for a long hug.  I nestled my cheek into her wool shrouded shoulder, somehow smelling what I imagined she would smell like, feeling right at home.    

I left her apartment a free man, I felt lighter, I did everything that I could.  The ball was now in her court.  I put everything I had on the table, it was up to her.

From then on I danced about her, unapologetically loving her from a sidelines, whistling the lyrics from Linda Ronstadt’s 1975 hit:

Love is a rose

But you better not pick it

It only grows when it's on the vine

A handful of thorns and

You know you've missed it

You lose your love

When you say the word mine

And so it went for four days, until finally, during one of our goodbye hugs, she raised her lips to mine and snuck in a kiss.  Just a quick peck like a fish surfacing for a nibble, then quickly retreating back to the safety of my shoulder.   Again, she would come up for a kissie, a nibble, and return to my shoulder.  Until we stood there in the rain, kissing unapologetically on the sidewalk as people squeezed past.  I mean were talking a picturesque Hollywood scene here, think, The Notebook, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Four Weddings and a Funeral, frickin Spiderman for christs sake, it was electric.  The forecast had only called for rain yet we were bringing the lightning, after she invited me up to her apartment, came the thunder… ; )