Yes.

I meet him in a bar. It is May, Wednesday night and I am out with my sister and we had been to ladies' night at a bar called Chan's and moved from there where there were too many women to Shanahan's, a dance bar downtown. The air is hot and musty and smells of the Bay. It sticks to your skin as you walk from the car to the line where they are checking IDs. The bald bouncer lets us in with a lewd comment. When we first get past the crush of people at the bar, I have to get rid of the three or four vodka and cranberries I had at Chan's, so I bounce away from a work friend & the sis who stand and chat near the dance floor, while I brave the line to the ladies' room. Ladies standing fourdeep in front of the mirror, re-lipsticking, spraying Aussie Scrunch Spray and cursing at each other about some guy. Three stalls. Too long a wait but finally, I burst back into the darkness of the bar, ready to go.

When I come back, there is a song on that I have to dance to. Drums, bass, pounding, wiggle-worthy music. I will not remember the name of the song. It might be "Shake Shake It" cause I love that one. I race to the dance floor and grab the hand (brazen hussy) of the guy standing just on the edge of the floor looking like he might want to. He says (now) that he is thinking about either asking my sister, who he spotted first, to dance or going to get another beer. I give him no choice. He says: "I thought you'd never ask." Suave. Funny thing--my sister wouldn't have danced-- she needs a long time to get ready to dance with someone and we had just gotten there. She dances later that night with the guy in the Miller Lite beer delivery man shirt, with a Tom-Selleck-y mustache; we never see him again. Fate.

We dance all night. I tell him who he is.... military guy, in training at NAS Pensacola, I tell him he wears one of those ugly watches all military guys wear, has a "girlfriend back home" (cause no matter what they tell you ladies, they always do). He laughs, caught, guilty. (They are sorta broken up, but still, she has a hold on him). I tell him who I am-- well. Sort of. I fib a bit. I'm not YET in college and I say I am a sophomore English major. How do I know my one white lie ends up being caught by this guy I meet in a bar? I mean, who marries the guy they meet in a bar? His buddy Ron (Call sign Stink cause he is a charming, gorgeous brown-noser who will fly fighter jets like Tom Cruise in Top Gun and he knows it but he's way too short for me) comes up and flirts with us both. I kiss them both on the cheek, chaste but promising.

We leave the dance floor to sit at the bar, he buys me a couple of drinks, we talk. I keep asking him if there's lipstick on my teeth or something, cause he keeps looking at me with this look in his eye. He thinks I'm a little bit nuts already. He also thinks he might just score. I tell him I am going to be like the teacher in Back to School. You know. The one who erotically recites the end of the Penelope speech from Ulysses in front of her Brit Lit class and makes Rodney Dangerfield, well, excited about literature?

shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I am wearing thin hot pink silk-- shorts and a matching top. My hair is very red and long and curly in a spiral perm that takes three hours to set and roll at the salon (the stylist always amazed at how much hair I have). People say I look like Julia Roberts, but I don't, just my hair does. I write my name and number on a square cocktail napkin. He saves the napkin and puts it into a scrap book. I write my name, "the girl in the pink outfit, not from K-Mart." As he walks me to my sister's ugly baby blue and primer colored car, he gives me a sweet kiss.

We date for a while. I have really just broken up with the evil-ex-- about two weeks, officially, even though we were really splits for a long time. I figure this guy, this guy with a girlfriend back home, is just for fun. He's a rebound guy. We have great times together. I don't snoop around his apartment while he's in the shower (much). He lives right on the white sandy beach and as I try to throw him playfully into the water he trips me and tosses me in. He is already too competitive to let me win at this wrestling match.

One night, at a toga party as he is wearing a Popples toga, with banana boxer shorts and red-brown cowboy boots, at Trader John's, he quirks his head sideways, drunk, looks at me with a squinty face and says "Love me?" He is tricky, this one. He gets me to say it first. I try to drive his crazy, steering-column shifter truck home later because he has had too much to drink. As I try to remove the parking break, I pop the hood of the rust-red colored dented Ford that smells of clean but decidedly masculine male.

It takes us two years to get married. It is two years and four days after we first met. About two blocks from the bar, in the oldest house in Pensacola.

yes [13] years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all