One of the first questions Andrea and I get apart from "How did we meet?" is "Was it love at first sight?" While the former will have to wait for another post, the answer to the latter is most definitively, "Nope."
Although Andrea was born and raised in Auburn, she attended and graduated from a much smaller, picturesque college in Toccoa Falls, Georgia. After graduation, she returned home and took up residence with two other ladies in what we all called the "Hoover House", our local hangout named for the family name of one of Andrea's housemates.
Being very southern, she and her housemates threw frequent dinners and lunches at their place. At one particular gathering, she found herself fielding questions about college life at Toccoa and inevitably was asked for the 411 on significant others.
She'd only dated one guy at Toccoa. They'd met her freshman year when he was an upperclassman. The relationship was serious enough their friends assumed they'd eventually tie the knot. However, it did not work out, and they'd broken up by her sophomore year. She was sharing the details of how and why the relationship went south and was getting a lot of supporting nods from the ladies in the group.
I happened to be in attendance at this particular party, and Andrea, to whom I'd only recently been introduced, was being very candid with us. In a fantastically misinformed reading on my part of the "Bro Code", I penned a defense for her in absentia ex, I guy I'd never met, and slid it under her bedroom door after she retired for the night. She did not take it well. For the first of many times to come, I incurred the wrath of the redhead.
I was shocked at the verbal pummeling she gave me the next time I was over. We broke off the discussion and retreated to opposite corners, with her being convinced I was a controlling, mansplaining, egoist. For my part, while I'd encountered personalities as prickly as cacti before, I considered her a man-hating yucca. We were both wrong but didn't know it. It was not a promising start.
At the time I had been crushing on Andrea's roommate, so I still found my way to the Hoover House. Plus her other roommate, also an engineering student, had a PC set up in the spare room. We all borrowed cycles on it from time to time as the house had become our defacto computer lab. It became impossible to avoid Andrea. Over the intervening weeks, she and I somehow managed to have civil discourse, and somewhere along the way, I found I started to enjoy chatting with her. Those who know me well know I'm not the most verbose conversationalist. Yet I found Andrea very easy to talk to and I was shocked at the ease with which she was able to draw me out of my taciturn shell.
She made me laugh and wasn't afraid to laugh at herself. If you get the chance, ask her to regale you with her story about the "Wide Mouthed Frog". Somewhere along the way, the incident in Rock-tober: Day 23 occurred. We started hanging out, just the two of us, rather than with our full gathering of friends. We had 2 AM rendezvous at all-night diners, afternoons at state parks, and long drives through the country byways of Lee County, Alabama. We hadn't had "the talk" and weren't overt or officially a couple, but we'd become the topic of heated discussions among our friends.
"Hey, what's the deal with those two? Are they or aren't they?"
"Pfft. Are you kidding? No way that'll ever happen. He's Navy and she's going to Brazil. Besides, you remember that bone-headed stunt he pulled with the note at that party, right?"
"I dunno. They seem to be enjoying each other's company a lot recently."
For our part, Andrea and I swore up and down we were just friends. Then, one evening, with a lit fireplace as a backdrop, she and I were chatting away about life in general. This morphed into a deeper level discussion about our plans and fears and goals and dreams. Before we knew it we'd had "the Talk".
The next day, I stopped by to see her and borrow time on her roommate's PC. Andrea was the only one home and she was getting ready to leave for work. As I was clacking away at the keyboard, she came in to kiss me goodbye before she left. My eyes followed her as she walked out of the room, and it took me a moment to snap back to reality. Meanwhile, she'd queued up a CD on the house stereo and as the screen door closed behind her, Bonnie Raitt's "Something to Talk About" started playing.
I leaned back in my seat and smiled. "Damn. My girl was smooth."
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