Sherlock returned my smile and the joy to my voice.
He had recently moved back to the area I currently live in. We found that we have a mutual love of fitness. We both value technique when it comes to the movement of the body. Over time we got to know each other but would never run into each other on a regular basis.
This particular evening we walked out of the gym together. I had quickly changed out of my sweaty clothes into a dress because I was literally soaked from to toe and I despise pants. He drove over to my car while I was loading things into the trunk. He asked, “Why on earth, would you change after that?” With my giant, goofy smile I replied, “because, I hate pants!” He sat there completely stunned. His face literally said, “WOW, I can’t believe that she just said that.” At this point I was still quite surprised that he has not asked me for my number. We have a lot in common and there is a mutual attraction between the two of us and we always had a lot of fun together.
2 or more months go by.
It was a ROUGH week at work. I had been struggling with my satisfaction in work, life, and love life. I have a lot of things on my plate at work. Often time I am not sure what I want to do or where I want to go. I ask myself how “this” fulfills me. I have been “home sick” and joyless in my motions.
On this particular day, I was looking forward to going to into the gym to relieve some stress.
I walk into the gym and there is Sherlock! I was so excited to see him and I shouted, “HEY STRANGER.” We began the process of catching up. I found out that he had injured himself and that was why he had not been to the gym. This was one of his first weeks back. We talked for about 10 minutes and then I excused myself to quickly change. I was so excited!
The remainder of our workout was 1.5 hours of hard–core flirting.
I was in the squat rack and he was doing and upper body routine avoiding his injury.
At one point, he came over to say hello. I asked him to curl in the squat rack next to me (big no-no in the gym). He asked, “because you want me to look like a douche or because you want me by you.” I said both.
Later in our workout he had asked for a spot while doing skull crushers and I said, “Sure, I wouldn’t want you to hurt your face. I kind of like it.”
He replied, “Good, I actually just want you to stand there and look pretty.”
His workout did involve any equipment near me in the gym, and yet he continued to make his way over and make excuses to come near me time and time again.
At the end of the night, I was changing back into my street shoes and another one off his friends came up to him to chat. I kind of stood around and stretched for 5 minutes but decided to leave. I was 50% happy because I had so much fun on a crap day at work and 50% completely appalled that he didn’t ask for my number after almost 2 hours of flirting. I went home flustered and happy all at the same time.
The next day I went to the gym and no Sherlock.
After my workout I was walking into my apartment building, when i received a new Facebook Messenger invite. It was a message from Sherlock.
“Good evening mam’. I am sorry that I didn’t get to say thank you for the spot last night.”
I was so surprised.
I told him my name once when I first met him and never said my last name. This means Mr. Sherlock had to have done some serious research to find out my full name and then send me a private message.
We continued to message the entire night. Asking questions back and forth to continue to get to know each other.
The messaging when on for a solid 4 days. In that time he invited me to workout with him two other times in the same week. It was same fun workouts with lots of flirty and talking.
Still nothing… Still no asking me out in public. No asking for my number.
It dawned on me that he sent me a message request and not a formal friend request. I looked into the basics of his profile and… he’s in a relationship?!?!?
I was quite shocked because of the level of flirting that had happened that week and the questions he was asking to learn more about me. I decided to not look into it too much. He has spent so much time flirting with me and I didn’t really want to address the elephant in the room. I decided to continue messaging him and learning more about him and if it came up then I would ask the question. I kept all of my questions innocent. “What’s your favorite color? Do you have any pets?” Him on the other hand took the conversation to another level asking, “What is your favorite part on a guy.”
Over the weekend we joked and sent messages but his dwindled and the joy quickly left out of his messages. In the beginning he was sending messages every 5-15 minutes and then it went to 1 maybe ever 5-10 hours.
I am sad that I am still single and nothing has developed but I am so happy that I was given the gift of someone bringing so much fun and lightness to my week.
It made me reflect back to other first encounters I have had. One of the other guys in my life when he met me, he had NO DOUBT that he wanted to take me out to dinner. (Chiro)
I don’t want to be second best. I want to be someone’s world and even if his relationship is on the down shift I don’t want to be involved.
The mystery still evolves.
And so it is.