The older woman at the karaoke bar told me I was cute and that she loved my energy. This was encouraging, because the energy in question had mostly involved a few beers and dancing with no apparent system.
I’m 22, single, and a virgin. I hadn’t gone out with a strategy for changing any of those things. This is one of my favorite bars, a dive where I can enjoy myself, and there was music playing between people’s songs. Everyone else was dancing. I joined in with whatever movements occurred to me. Choreography would be a generous description.
At some point, I caught her eye across the bar. I noticed, then went back to what I was doing. I wasn’t trying to work out whether I had just received a signal. As far as I was concerned, I was having a good night already.
Then she came over. There were the compliments, followed by a little conversation and some banter. Until then, I had been entertaining myself. Suddenly someone else seemed entertained too, and specifically interested in the person responsible.
Eventually it was my turn to sing. I did Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now,’ which turned out to be a more ambitious choice of evening soundtrack than I had realized. Afterward, her interest seemed considerably less open to interpretation. She touched my arms, my thigh, the back of my thigh. When she had to leave, her hand lingered on my arm and she gave it a squeeze.
I might not have much experience, but there was quite a lot of evidence to work with. This wasn’t just me deciding that eye contact meant we had a future together. She had approached me, flirted with me, and kept finding reasons to touch me. She seemed to want me. I also had no idea what I was supposed to do with that information.
After she left, she texted me. We carried on flirting, and then she asked about my preferences in bed. That moved the conversation well beyond whether she had enjoyed the singing. She was interested in talking about sex with me, and I had reached the part where my actual experience was going to be relevant.
I told her I was a virgin. She didn’t mind. Instead, she asked what I thought I might like, and we ended up talking about kinks and exchanging sexual messages. I could be honest about not having done this before without the conversation immediately ending. That was a welcome development in an evening I had not planned especially thoroughly.
She said I could text her anytime. She also asked where I lived and said she wasn’t far away. Nothing in this had reached an actual date or sex. But this was no longer a nice encounter that had ended when somebody left the bar; she was keeping the conversation going, and the possibility of seeing her again felt very real.
Now I’m worrying about messing it up. Dancing badly in public had apparently come quite naturally. Working out how to continue with a woman who actually wants me is the part I’ve never done before. I went out to sing a song. I’m still figuring out the follow-up.
