A weekend with Semera in Paris

My dear, dear copin Semera was in Paris for work this weekend. We had an absolute blast!! It was SO nice seeing her in my new city; hanging out, shopping, eating at cute cafes, meeting people—I don’t think I realized how much I miss my friends until she arrived. We went out to Bastille on Friday night (a neighborhood in Paris with lots of bars and clubs) and met a couple of boys. One of which, a very cute boy, took a liking to Semera. The other one was really cool, he’s a snowboarder and invited me to go boarding with him and his friends this winter… so it was a good night (see pics below).

For Saturday night, Cancun had invited me to the birthday party of two of his friends. It was a big gathering for dinner and drinks at a restaurant that was owned by a friend of his. Cancun was just being his usual crazy self… and it turns out he just broke up with his girlfriend :o) His little 21-year-old brother decided that he was in love with me though and kept hugging me and trying to kiss me, so Cancun was teasing me about it all night.

Then there’s this boy—I’ll just call him B because he doesn’t really have a crazy story attached to him. He’s a friend of a guy I met through Cancun. I met him twice—the first time briefly on a street corner and the second time when I went out with a friend of his (the night of The Arrest). We went to B’s apartment for drinks before going to the bar and he was just really funny and sweet, and he was the only one who spoke English well, so we ended up talking for much of the short evening. Then last week I got a text from him saying, “It’s B, we met a couple weeks ago through S. I work near you and know some good restaurants near our office. Would you like to have lunch one day?” Totally innocent, we planned to meet the following Tuesday for lunch.

Anyway, the night of the party B walks in a bit late and he’s with a pretty French girl. For some weird reason I felt a bit disappointed, but didn’t think about it too much—I was just like ‘ok fine, he has a girlfriend’. We hung out and spoke as usual, although I was trying not to talk to him too much—you know how some girls get when other girls talk to their boyfriend—since she kept looking at me funny. Semera and I decided to leave the party after dinner and went to Oberkampf to get a drink. Later, I get a text from Cancun saying they’re all going to Bastille and to meet them there. We spent the night drinking and dancing at a cute little Spanish bar till 4am.

At the end of the night, the whole group was standing outside the bar (Cancun had left about 15 mins before, he was wasted and just up and disappeared while we were dancing... typical) and B and I were talking a bit apart from the rest of the group. He took my hand and was absentmindedly playing with my fingers as we chatted for about 5 minutes (he made a point of mentioning that the girl he was with was just his neighbor, not his girlfriend). So we said goodbye, bisous twice (sometimes friends will give 4 or more kisses on the cheek, who knows why, they're French, lol) and as I was pulling back, he kissed me on the mouth—for about 5 seconds. All I could think was, ‘Oh my god, what the hell was that about?’ It was just so random and unexpected. But it was really sweet, not like the skeezy guy who tries to steal a kiss. So I said bye to everyone else and Semera and I made our way down the busy street to catch a cab. I turned and looked back and B was craning his neck to see where I was, we made eye contact and he smiled and nodded, and that was it. There’s a scene in my favorite movie, Say Anything. Diane comes home from the party and is explaining to her father how Lloyd Dobler would periodically look for her in the crowd and catch her eye to make sure she was ok. We had that exact moment. And it’s so funny (and kinda scary) because last week I dedicated In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel to Helen on Facebook and wrote “…all men should aspire to be Lloyd Dobler”.

But there’s not much to say about him. He’s just B—extremely nice, really cute, kinda shy, funny, smart, interesting, he's an engineer... Semera thinks he’s great—she’s like “Forget Cancun, he’s all wrong. B is perfect. He was mature, watching Cancun and the rest of them act crazy and just laughing at them”. I’ve always fallen for boys who are like that, the life of the party, the one surrounded by a million girls—thinking that’s what I wanted because they were more exciting, and nice guys always bored me (Semera had the wisdom to mention this is probably due to my relationship with my father but that’s another story entirely). So its weird that I can’t stop thinking about this guy—and I never thought of him in that way at all before. But why not B?

So we’ll see how lunch goes… a demain.