Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Be Careful Which Random Guy You Offer Water To...

About, say, six years ago? I was working at a little nightmare of a place called Ruby Tuesday. And one day, y'all? I was at the hostess stand, you know, hostessing and shit. I think I decided to help one of the servers clear off their empty tables. I took some dishes to the back, and when I came back to the hostess stand? There was this guy sitting at a table.

A cute guy. In a blue dress shirt and (probably?) khaki pants. He didn't have a menu or anything. I thought maybe he had walked in while I was gone and, seeing no hostess, decided to seat himself. So I grabbed a menu and went to greet him. And he was all, "Oh, no. I'm here for a job interview." Devastating smile.

Reeeaaaalllllly. "Would you like a glass of water while you wait?" I blurted. I felt retarded for offering him a menu when he didn't need one and it was the first thing I could think of to say. Sometimes we offered applicants a free drink. Awesome, right? He declined, but he flashed me another smile, and I went back to my stand.

I'm sure I kept a vague watch on him, in the periphery, while I pretended to work. He talked with one of the managers. Things seemed to go well. I watched Cute Guy get up and walk over toward the bar where -

"Daddy!"

Wait, what? That was my coworkers' daughter, and my coworker, and they seemed to know Cute Guy, and... oh. Uhn-unh.

Cute Guy? He was my coworkers' ex-husband. She had been telling us he was moving back to be closer to their daughter, among various other things about him, most of which were... unflattering in the way that stories about one's ex-husband generally are.

Well, there goes that, I thought. I had a few dating rules, and Cute Guy violated all of them. No friends (or acquaintances') exes. No divorced guys. No dads. No coworkers. It was just as well, really, since I was dating someone anyway. (Oh, did I not mention that? Bygones.)

Then the very next day? My coworker, she mentioned to me that her ex told her about me, and that I was "cute." Wait, what? "But I told him you had a boyfriend," she added.

Oh, right. Him. (Bygones.) "Thanks," I said.

So Cute Guy and I were just two more people in the myriad of crazies that served people food at RT. (Really, we were all the craziest bunch of people you could gather under one roof. All of us.) So for a year? I continued to notice that Cute Guy was cute, in an off-limits, never-going-to-happen-in-a-million-years kind of way.

Even though he continually told me how "hot" I was. "I'm chilly," Cute Guy would say. "I think I need to stand next to Megan." Snort. Even though the managers kept putting us together when they assigned sections. Even though other people started to notice that he was getting rather funny and charming. "What's with Cute Guy?" they would say (except no one called him Cute Guy and everyone actually referred to him by his last name.) "He's so funny now." Indeed.

Even though he stayed an hour after his shift was over just to help me clean my part of our section when my shift was finally over. Wait, what?

Even though other people observed this behavior and made comments like, "Megan, he is like, in love with you." Wait... what?

So, finally, one day, I asked Cute Guy to the movies. (Oh - I had broken up with the boyfriend by then. Bygones.) I tried to keep the whole thing mum just in case, you know, things went badly. Because he still completely broke all of my dating rules.

Things, however, did not go badly. And two years ago, y'all? We finally got married.

I blame water.




♥ ♥ ♥ HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, MICHAEL! ♥ ♥ ♥