We were both first year teachers at Thompkins Middle School, me 7^th grade language arts, Cal P.E., so you’d think there might be a connection between us, but we barely said a word to each other, and then halfway through the school year, more than half, for it was after Easter, he came up to me in the parking lot and asked if I might like to go to dinner with him. I guess I was a little flustered—it was so unexpected—and I said yes, and he said would tonight be too soon, and still flustered, I said tonight would be fine.

I wasn’t sure how to dress, and maybe I made a mistake wearing something perhaps more appropriate to a club. The fact is that I was turned on to him and had been since the beginning of the school year. And in my defense I did vacillate between school wear and jeans with a bulky sweater. But what if he picked someplace fancy? Again in my defense, I did wear panties.

You shouldn’t get the idea I was any sort of hottie. I’d had a steady boyfriend in high school but we went to different colleges and for almost three years we had a long distance relationship, but then he dropped me for someone else, and since then it’s just been me and the cat.

The dinner was fine. It was fun. I learned a lot about Cal. That he’d hoped to play pro baseball but wasn’t really good enough even for the minor leagues as it turned out, so after six years of realizing his dream wouldn’t come true, he went back to school and got a degree and went into teaching. He had a nice smile and nice eyes. He knew something about wine—well, more than I know about wine, and it was really nice. We finished the bottle.

At my apartment he walked me to the door, and I wondered if we might kiss, and I wanted to, and I think he did too—we were so close—but I said something stupid like, Well, that was nice,” and he said yes it was, and I asked if he wanted to come in for coffee or something.

“What a sweet cat,” he said upon coming in. “What’s her name?”

You can’t blame me for being embarrassed. I was really tempted to make something up. “Whitey,” I confessed.

He cocked his head in an amused way.

“It’s not what you think,” I tried to explain. “My five year old niece named her. Well, she’s ten now, Christy, my niece, and Whitey is five. I’ve had her...” I was going to say since my ex-boyfriend dumped me, but I decided “for a long time,” was a better choice.