My coworker texted to ask whether I wanted to spend the weekend at her house on the shore. She mentioned that she likes going there even when the weather starts getting cold. A perfectly reasonable detail about a house. Slightly harder to concentrate on when you recently kissed its owner.
I’m 23. She’s 62. We work together, and we’ve grown close. That was already true before Halloween, when a party at work gave us a setting that involved less work and more alcohol. We were both there, we danced together, and we ended up kissing.
Afterward, our schedules meant I hadn’t seen her. No chance to find out what it would be like to see each other at work after crossing that particular line. The kiss had happened; the next ordinary encounter hadn’t.
Then her message arrived. Instead of an awkward return to being coworkers, I had an invitation to spend a whole weekend with her. At a house on the shore, no less. Whatever small next step I might have imagined, this came with considerably more time attached.
I would really like to go. That part is simple, and I don’t want to make it sound more complicated than it is. I’m attracted to her. We’ve already kissed. Being invited away by someone I want to spend time with is good news, even if I’m managing to receive it with the composure of someone who has been assigned an unexpected presentation.
The nervous part is that I’m not experienced. After a kiss and an invitation like this, sex feels like a real possibility. It isn’t something she has explicitly promised or asked for, and I don’t know what she expects from the weekend. But pretending I’m only considering the coastal weather would be a fairly ambitious performance.
The age difference is there too: thirty-nine years isn’t a detail I can round down. Still, knowing her age doesn’t tell me what she wants or what she thinks of my inexperience. I know we’ve become close, I know we kissed, and I know she wants me to come. That is more encouraging than the alternative, though it hasn’t supplied me with a text message.
That’s the oddly small task in front of the very large possibility. For now, I need to answer the woman who invited me. I want to sound interested, because I am, without trying to pass myself off as someone who takes this sort of invitation effortlessly in stride.
She has told me she likes the shore even in the cold. I’m still working out how to tell her I’d like to be there with her.
