"I can't listen to this anymore. All I hear is the message he's trying to send you," Kristie eyerolls.
"What are you talking about? This is a CD he made for all his friends. It's just music he likes."
"I've had guys give me mix CDs before. There's always a message."
Not always, I think. Sometimes, it's just good music.
"Oh," I say.
"I don't like him," she starts, but I don't like him either, and say as much. I feel that familiar twinge I get when I'm about to be bitchy and I have to remind myself not to care when we start to discuss why we don't like him, as a customer, as someone who has a crush on me, as a person, but this one episode explains it perfectly:
I'm sitting outside the bar, checking IDs while this other guy who organized the show takes the cover money, and he comes up.
"I didn't know there would be a cover tonight," he says. "I only brought $5." He's a student, and broke, and I would probably let him in for free, but I would have to convince this other guy why, and I need this other guy on my side because I want him to pay me to write about music, and everyone would get the wrong idea. The other guy says, "Sorry." I say, "Sorry." He leaves.
He comes back a bit later and sits next to me, me on my comfy little perch, him on the ground. We chat idly, and then he says, "I really only brought $5 for one beer and I knew exactly what I was going to get. I was really looking forward to it."
I've already apologized for something that's not my fault, and now he's asking me to do him a favor when all he's ever done is make me feel massively uncomfortable by publicly pronouncing his feelings for me, so I just purse my lips and nod in manufactured sympathy while he stands there, awkwardly, silently. In spite of the band going off inside, and the din of the crowded patio behind us, we're all asphyxiated by silence, gagging on the unspoken words. We all just stare at each other until he leaves.
"This is really about your boundary issues," Esp says later when I bitch to her about it, explaining that the real reason I'm annoyed by this is because the guy assumed we had reached a certain level of friendship -- the freebie level -- but really, it's everything I hate about the world, exemplified in a five minute extravaganza of awkwardness.