Honestly, Joe wouldn’t have had to be all that smooth with me. I thought he was the best thing in the world. I was completely smitten. It didn’t matter that he had a dumb sense of humor, wrote awful poetry, and once popped a zit on his leg in my presence. I didn’t care– he was perfect.
But, despite my already thinking Joe was the best thing since… well, since my last crush, he still managed to execute some smooth moves designed to make me fall even more madly in love with him.
He went slow with me when we first started dating. I think he could tell I was a little… we’ll say skittish. Basically, I probably would have screamed, scratched him, and run away if he’d made a move too fast. I was fourteen and had never so much as held a boy’s hand before.
Joe was smart, though. He worked with it. He always had a ton of cats running around at his house, so maybe he learned the technique from them. After all, cats are pretty good at the whole scream, scratch, run away pattern. He’d wait until I made a tiny move. Then he’d make a tiny move. And before I knew it we’d be snuggled up next to each other and he’d be grinning in his victory.
He did this once in the back seat of a car when we were driving home with a group from some church function. He convinced me to sit in the middle next to him instead of leaving the middle of the bench seat open. We rode along for maybe twenty minutes or so just holding hands, and then he pulled the stretch-and-yawn and left his arm on the back of the seat behind me. It was so contrived I almost laughed.
When we hit a bump, his arm came down around my shoulders. When I started nodding off, he inched me toward him until my head was on his shoulder. And just like that, I was sleeping like a kitten on this boy who made me so giddy and nervous normally that I could barely stop fidgeting when I was with him.
That? Is a good talent to have.