Maybe I should already be writing my memoir. Apologies for any inconsistencies on editing or tense. This was written while things were going well, and I’ve tried to before posting make some upgrades, but a 98% success rate as a copyed is off the scale. This is a lot of copy to revisit, and if people were able to edit themselves, not much point in the role.

Back in 2004, I’d been living in Oregon for about a year after being in Virginia for my first two jobs. I grew up in Phoenix and went to school in Seattle, so the West is my natural habitat, but I didn’t really know anyone in town (population 20,000 – the smallest town I’d lived in at that point). I’d just broken up with my first girlfriend in four years, and a girl I’d met online when I was 15 who I still talked to (we ended up in Phoenix at the same time in 2002 and finally sealed the deal, as it were) suggested OK Cupid as a good site to meet the type of chick who likes nerds.

So I signed up, made a profile, took some tests and answered a couple thousand match questions. I was bored. I talked with a few of them, sometimes for a few months, other times I’d e-mail with an expression of interest only to be shot down or ignored. And then there was one who contacted me: my ex-wife.

There was one chick that I had a total crush on, short hair, into S&M, cute as fuck – I hadn’t really had a chance to do anything about the curiosity I had about kink, and said as much. I don’t remember if she even responded to me when I admitted I was curious about learning. I think I got a one-line “I don’t have any interest in teaching someone” response.

If there’s one thing I know in life, it’s when I’ve been shot down, so I gave up. My ex-wife and I got serious soon thereafter, so it wasn’t something I gave too much thought to.

She and I got married in 2007, I got laid off a few times (the newspaper industry isn’t the most stable), we lived apart for about eight months later that year into 2008, and when she finished school in Ashland, we were together again – but it was never the same. After another threatened layoff, I took a job in Taos, N.M., as the special sections editor for the local paper, and things unraveled rather quickly (She grew up in Idaho, and Ashland was her first foray far from family.).

I had a nervous breakdown, quit my job and she left me. Thus began more moving around, first moving in with my mom in Santa Fe, N.M., (I’m not appending states because I think folks don’t know; I’m just following AP Style) then getting an initial interview for a copy-editing position for a medical publishing company in Walla Walla, Wash. After the phone interview went well, they told me the next step was an in-person interview, but I’d have to pay for half the flight.

So, as I’d done once before (my interview in Virginia was in October 2001, and as one might imagine, flights were hard to get at that time), I packed up everything I’d need to get my new household going into my Civic and drove up to Portland to await the next step. My college roommate was from the area, and I originally thought I could stay with his parents (I’m more comfortable around them than around my own), but with the economy already having gone south, not only were him and his brother back home, but pretty much everyone of our generation had moved back in with their parents. So, I lived in a hotel for a couple of weeks as other things kept going wrong.

The medical company got back to me and said they had no interest in talking to me further. So, I was royally fucked.

One of my groomsmen was also my former boss (first layoff) at a copy store in Ashland. I got a hold of him from Portland and asked if I could crash at his place for a week or two while I worked my network and found a job in the Medford, Ore., area. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years, but he agreed to it, so I went to his place in mid-October last year.

I spent a third of the time looking for jobs that didn’t really exist. Interviews went nowhere. Another third, we had very serious discussions about going into business together. The other third, we drank.

We had a blast. I lived on his sofa, and his kids lived at the house every other weekend. I’d never had small kids around, and they were very well-behaved, so I adapted to the idea of children in the house. We both love cooking, so we were almost in competition to make the best meals, and thus ate well. But by Thanksgiving, a week or two had stretched to nearly two months, and while we’d talked about being roommates, it was becoming clear that he wanted space with his boys and I’d outstayed my welcome.

Now a good thing to mention here is that the girl I lost my virginity to in 1998 got in touch with me through Facebook last fall. She came down from Seattle to visit in November, and though married for over a year to her wife (I never realized my thing for bi chicks went back that far – she was straight at the time – it’s more of a matter of practicality: I don’t like makeup or any of that girly shit), we had sex at a hotel room she got in Medford. But as soon as we did, she started crying about cheating on her wife and left – driving another seven hours home at 10 p.m.

This is just about where everything had to happen exactly as it did for the rest of the story to be possible.

There was a new profile on OK Cupid that piqued my interest – hot chick, piercings, tattoos, into kink – she said she worked in computers, and since I build my own, I sent a message asking what she did in the field.

The former boss and I agreed the first Monday in December that I’d move out the following weekend. I talked with the lesbian ex-girlfriend (we’d still been talking; she was quite apologetic for the abrupt departure), and since her sister worked for Marriott, she was able to get me a hotel room in Tacoma, Wash., for four nights starting Sunday night to let me have a base of operations to look for work up there.

The new girl on OK Cupid didn’t get back to me. After about a week, I sent her another message, “Just noticed you were online and as I hadn’t heard back from you from my e-mail, thought I might give it another try. Of course, I’m not so dense as to consider that I didn’t hear back for a reason.”

As she tells it, that was the message that got her attention. We exchanged a couple of e-mails.

That Wednesday, my “roommate” mentioned via text that he was still expecting me to be out before he got home from work that Friday. I’d assumed the weekend meant Sunday. He stood firm (I did pay him rent for November, mind; I wasn’t freeloading), so I had two nights that I was homeless.

I worked my network: Old family friends had moved to Ashland in 2006, but outside of town up the mountain. They were happy to host me, but heavy snow was forecast on the Valley floor; heading up 1,500 more feet would have been disastrous. Another expat from my paper there (who lived at a lower elevation) offered me lodgings for a single night on Friday.

The entire I-5 corridor had ice forecast on Saturday, so I looked at every option I had, and one – a long shot – looked best. The girl I’d been talking to for a week and a half lived on the South Coast, where it would be far warmer (above freezing). So I e-mailed her and asked if she’d “fancy a visitor.” There was apparently another online guy that asked her the same thing for the same weekend – she doesn’t know why she said yes to me.

We talked on the phone the night that I was at my former co-worker’s to finalize plans, and she asked point blank if I was coming by to make new friends or to have sex. While I found her hot as hell, I didn’t really think a hook-up was what I needed – just a way to avoid the frozen freeway and have an adventure.

I came by the next day. Since her brother lived with her, she came up with a story of how we’d met years ago when she was living out of town, and she was doing a favour for an old friend. I agreed to it while on the road.

Upon entering the house, the refrigerator was in front of me (back door), and as soon as I saw what was on it, I knew at the gut level that this was not the last time I’d be in this kitchen. Like, right then. I’d been in the house for all of perhaps 10 seconds, and I already knew, and it had nothing to do with her. Which dialed up some apprehension about whether we were really going to succeed at this being a platonic adventure.

We played some Guitar Hero, smoked some cigarettes and had a generally good time. If anything, her profile pics undersold how hot she was, but at this point it may have been pheromones, because it wasn’t just the fridge items casting a bit of an electric current in the room that I’d only experienced once before with my boss in college. I wasn’t here to have sex, so I kept resisting what was clearly happening in my mind but at that point was not aware we were already on the same page.

For perspective, we never formally agreed on what day we got engaged. Estimates have ranged from the moment we met to the blathering conversation I start with “of course I’m not going to ask you to marry me” after my divorce finally went through in March, and after letting me ramble for several minutes, she pointed out that when she’d gotten me a ring out of a quarter machine at a pizza place because I complained that my ring finger felt weird without one, she’d already claimed me. That’s less than a week after moving in, so do with that as you will.

She had two boys, so after dinner, we watched both movies they were named after characters in. The first one was one of my first memories as a kid, at a ski lodge (in Taos, of course) where the kids were shunted away to a back room while a TV was wheeled in so the adults could drink back in the common area. We’re sitting a few inches apart on the sofa while we watch when she turns to me and says “you know you can touch me, right?”

I would later learn that this was wildly out of character. She does not like to be touched, and this again ends up binned with “I have no idea why I did this” alongside letting me show up in the first place. In fairness, she assumed I was gay from my profile pics and therefore thought I was safe.

This sense of safety evaporates when I touch her hand, and this is where everything assumed and discussed goes off the rails. We both had the same reaction … it didn’t feel like touching someone else, but rather just an extension of each others’ bodies. We have to go out on the stoop and chainsmoke after the second movie finishes, pretending what just happened had somehow not. But we still were desperately attempting to operate under the original guidelines.

When bedtime came, she asked if I wanted to push the sofas together, and I said I wouldn’t mind. She said she slept naked. I said the same.

We went to bed. We cuddled, and we were talking, and I noted that the bridges of our noses were touching. She said she never made the first move, and I did the only thing that made sense: I kissed her. And then we had sex. Again, the way she tells it, it was the most awkward sex she’s ever had.

We had sex again in the morning, and I left for Tacoma. The ex met up with me at the hotel, and we had sex and then went to dinner. She was planning on coming back every night, but she ended up with stuff she had to do with her wife, so I didn’t see her again. Which was sort of fine, since I’d been texting constantly with the girl I’d just met, as well as talking to her for at least two hours a day. I was falling for her, HARD. On top of everything else, she asked me what I was into sexually, and I listed everything but the one I thought was too out there. She then asked if I liked my main kink, which I’ve removed for Beehaw’s pleasure. That was the one thing I didn’t want to bring up.

She worked at the time for a call center here and mentioned that they hired just about anyone and paid well. So, whiffing out with anything I could find in the Seattle area, I convinced my parents to bankroll a hotel down there once my time in Tacoma ran out. I looked online and booked, not realizing that the hotel I found was essentially across the street from her house.

One of the reasons sex wasn’t originally an option was the fact that she had finally gotten involved with her best friend of 12 years. He was coming by a few days after I left, and she’d been saving herself for him.

I showed up again on Dec. 17 – got a weekly rate and settled in. She was fired the next day. But with her boyfriend staying with her, instead of telling anyone she’d lost her job a week before Christmas, she came to the hotel room every day. We talked, fucked, and listened to “There’s a Hole in My Bucket” – I have eclectic music on my netbook – we fell in love. And after showing her boyfriend the damage I did to her backside (she was a masochist … she was literally asking for it, and not in a red-pill way), he left in a huff early Christmas Eve. That was when my week at the hotel ran out, so I went to Christmas dinner with her family (and also learned that bringing a side dish to a stranger’s holiday dinner is weird to them) and moved in while looking for work.

The second or third day I was there, she used her brother’s girlfriend’s laptop to get online. She signed onto alt.com with a username that seemed entirely too familiar. I looked at her, dumbfounded, and said “Wait, that’s you?” She looked at me just as dumbfounded. I mentioned that was the username I tried contacting in 2004 on OK Cupid.

She stops and asks what I sent her. I told her I’d been looking to learn about kink, and her response was “I have zero interest in teaching anybody.” After an eyeroll. she says “yeah, that’s exactly what I would have said.” The first tattoo she did representing me was my stuffed animal – sleeping with one still is the only reason she deigned to respond this time – sitting atop my SBB watch, but complete with broken springs to represent how fucked we’d been on timing.

So, that’s how we met. It only took five years. Well, five years, meeting someone online in 1995, losing my virginity to the person I did, having the college roommate I did, having my marriage fail, having my former boss let me move in, having the job in Walla Walla fall through, having I-5 freeze, having the balls to say I know I’m not the most interesting person to respond to, having awkward sex and having her best friend leave in a huff.