Have I ever mentioned that I can't remember ever letting anyone buy me a drink in my life? Even with Aaron, I had all the money so I bought dinner, drinks, everything. It's sort of a control thing, sort of a "but I have a boyfriend" thing, sort of a pride thing, but mostly it's the fact that when somebody does something nice for me, I feel immediately vulnerable. So when I immediately agreed to Johnny buying me a drink, it was sort of a moment of departure and from then on, all bets were off.
We sat at a bar and drank beer and Bailey's and coffee and vodka gimlets and other such libations while my friends called or texted me every ten minutes. "Where are you?" "What are you doing?" "Meet us here." "We're coming to get you." I finally texted them back, "We're going to get waffles. And that's it." Apparently, and hilariously, Deanna was so trashed at that point that she was flipping out about my absence but could only utter, "Cheeseburger!" and "VERBATIM!" which she later explained was an attempt to get some food for herself and for Euliza to reread what I had texted her, verbatim, so she could unearth some secret meaning behind the statement. All of my friends were panicking for me, apparently. After all, I'm a Good Girl who does not talk to Strange Men, let alone allows them to escort me to a bar. But hey, you know...Vegas.
So we went and got waffles. Well, I got waffles, and he made fun of me for eating dessert for breakfast, which I still don't understand because...waffles are breakfast. We talked about what he does, what I do, immigration, music, why I love the Libertines, why he loves the Libertines, what our favorite beer is (Stella), what it is to be British versus English, what it is to be American, what it is to be patriotic, how pretty my eyes are, how his are green, how they only turn green when he's happy (eyeroll), the fact that I was only talking to him because I liked his accent, how excited he was to meet an American girl who wasn't blonde with fake breasts who had some semblance of intelligence. He repeatedly asked me about my love life, to which I responded that I did not care to discuss it, and I very pointedly did not return the query. This was Vegas, after all, and everyone is single in Vegas. Besides, I was never going to talk to him again, let alone see him again. His flight was leaving in six hours. His flight to London. Which is very far away from Santa Barbara. And, oh yeah, I have a boyfriend.
I was in a "Yes And" mood. I was curious. I was tipsy. I was deliriously exhausted. I was inexplicably attracted to someone for the first time in a very long time (I had trained myself to not look at the opposite sex as sexual beings--if they were aesthetically pleasing, that's as far as my imagination went). So he suggested we go for a walk and I said okay and he offered me his arm and I prepared myself for a treacherous journey in my three-inch yellow pinup girl heels and we started wandering around.
At one point, he walked and I teetered outside to the ramp that would lead to the parking lot. I was moaning about the fact that it was 7am, the sun was out, and I did not have my sunglasses when he stopped and kissed me, and kids? You know those movie kisses, the ones you might wait your whole life to experience, the ones that you feel everywhere, the ones that when you're over your eyes open wide and you realize that you're not actually floating but still stationed securely on pavement and you stare in wonderment at the creature that just made you feel like that? I want to say, That kiss was nothing like that, but the truth is, best kiss of my life, hands down, [thus far]. And he said, "You have no idea how long I've wanted to do that," and I said, nothing, and we continued walking aimlessly and stopping every once in awhile to make out until he offered to get us a room.
The hesitation in my response was less an opportunity to contemplate the cause/effect of what he had just suggested and more a chance to come up with the best way to say no. So I brought it back to money, that I couldn't afford it, haha, and then finally just said, "I'm not going to sleep with you." There's a lot of power in that statement, I think, and it's a lot easier to say than I thought it was going to be. "I'm not going to sleep with you." Boundaries drawn. This is as far as the Morgan line goes. Look around you to make sure you didn't forget anything and disembark in an organized manner.
He offered to walk me back to my room, I said that that would be nice, and we started the journey. Hilariously, I could not get the door open with my stupid key card, and Euliza finally opened it after my, like, 20th try and 20th nervous giggle. I went inside to get a pen, as he had asked if he could email me and I had said okay, wrote down my email address, asked him if he would actually email me, to which he scoffed as if not contacting me were even an option, and watched him walk down the hallway and very specifically not look back.
I went into the room and closed the door, my forehead resting against it for a few seconds while I smiled to myself in an attempt to absorb what had just happened, half-expecting him to knock on the door. Euliza asked in a whiskey- and sleep-soaked voice how my night was, to which, allegedly, I responded, "Magical."
Gross.