There Was Absolutely No Shame In That Walk

We’ve all heard the term ‘Walk of Shame’ before and I’m going to venture to guess that 104% of people that are reading this have either experienced it first hand or at least witnessed it on Saturday/Sunday mornings in their neighborhood.  ((Halloween is coming up!! Best walk of shames EVER!!!  Get excited, people!))  There was absolutely no shame in the walk that I had to do Monday morning… my head was held high and was beaming from ear to ear.

Sunday night my friend Stefan took me as his date to a wedding on a beach nearby… beach weddings in October, who would have thought!?  Sunday wedding?  Eh… a little weird, but whatevs… I’m down.

I need to go ahead and introduce you to Stefan.  He is a guy that I went to college with that was a sophomore when I was a senior… so we weren’t close friends or anything, but I definitely had my eye on his crazy attractive, lip pierced, [extremely talented] singer/song writer in a punk band, hilarious, carefree (etc etc etc) self.  Of anyone that I ever met, I would dubb him with the highest probability of becoming famous.  He made every girl swoon.  Heck, I was a bitchy senior sorority girl and even I swooned.

judge all you want, but your college girl self would swoon too… don’t hate

After I graduated from my university I spent the summer volunteering as a mentor to high school students; Stefan was spending his summer just a few hours south of me so we hung out occasionally throughout the summer and literally every time we hung out it was a great time the best day ever.  I developed quite the crush, but he was still in college so that was a little weird and I could also not get a read on him for the life of me.  The last week of that summer he found out that I was going to be a camp counselor so he decided to be a counselor as well… he showed up early, buddied up with my brother, seemed excited for us to get to hangout… and I was sitting there asking myself if he liked me (idiot, idiot, idiot, Young Sarah).

The first night of camp I was one of the counselors that was selected to do the chew-food-like-a-bird-and-spit-it-into-someone-elses-mouth skit from SNL.  Guess who I got paired up with.  YUP.  Stefan.  My hopes for a 22 year old version of a summer camp romance were out the window as soon as I saw a chewed up ball of spaghetti leave my mouth and go into his.  Sigh.  That week I barely got to spend any time with him… one of the other counselors was pining after me, every high school girl and their mom was pining after him, a bird pooped on my forehead, I had to do disgusting competitions (such as eat live goldfish?) and wear obnoxious clothing while rallying the campers… I have no idea why he didn’t fall in love with me after that week.

Pictures for reference:

Fast forward four years: Stefan lives in the city that I just moved to so we’ve been hanging out here and there. Don’t worry – we’ve been mutually friend zoning each other to the max… he asks my advice on girls and even introduces me to them to get my honest opinion, I share awkward guy moments with him.  All in all it’s a pretty great setup.  When he called and asked me to be his date to this wedding a few weeks ago I didn’t think anything of it… my first thought was: Score!  Free booze, great food and a dance floor!

Noteable Sarah moment: the dress I wore happened to be the exact same color as all the bridesmaids’ dresses… of course.  It was wicked awkward.

I polished off three G&Ts and lord knows how many shrimp dumplings at the cocktail hour; Stefan was rolling with Jack and Coke and loooooving the lamb chop skewers – shouldn’t surprise anyone, but we were having a blast.  When people asked our connection to the bride and groom, Stefan shared that he had been friends with the bride back in the day and I shared that I was just here with Stefan.  A few people learned through small talk convos learned that I had not lived in this city for very long; they asked what brought me to this city and Stefan would jump in and tell them that I had moved across the country to be closer to him.  Rather than waste energy to correct the statement for the people that I will never, ever see again… I just shrugged and responded ‘Who wouldn’t?’

Dinner and reception time: Stefan and I were pretty tipsy and loooooving life; the people at our table could not get enough of us and we were definitely milking the attention.  Dinner was over, toasts were starting and next thing you know his arm is around me and my hand is comfortably resting on his knee.  Weird.  Different.  New.  But totally felt natural (after two glasses of Merlot, I guess there’s a lot that feels more natural).  One of the girls sitting across from us kept insisting that she use my phone to take pictures of us… again, we’re crowd pleasers so we went along with it.

wasn’t joking. there are about fourteen versions of this picture on my phone.

Toasts were over, champagne was drank (had been drunk? was drunk?  had dranken?) … it was time to dance!  Neither Stefan or I are great dancers… but I will say I love a good dance floor and he’s always game for anything.  We had a blast.  We made a couple more trips to the open bar to continue to drink champagne and a slow song came on.  I definitely didn’t want to impose a slow song on an insignificant other wedding date but I do love a good, close, slow dance.  Before I even had the opportunity to be awkward about it, he had already set our glasses of champagne down and had me on the dancefloor.  Love him.

I’m not exactly sure how it progressed, but I think he said something sweet, song was over, so I gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek as a thank you.  Which led to a few [publicly appropriate (pretty damn good)] kisses on the dance floor.  In the five years we’ve known each other… that was most definitely a first for us.  Interesting.

We went back to his place and I had definitely sobered up, but not enough to feel comfortable driving so I crashed there.  And got absolutely no sleep.  Needless to say, me and my backless dress and bra-less self did the Stride of Pride Monday morning (should have put more thought into my dress selection) with 5″ wedges and chunky gold jewelry in hand.  I left that morning feeling a five year sense of accomplishment (much like the one with Cread), as I dodged people on their way to the office.  Highfive, self!

He suggested we grab drinks tonight.  Interesting.

We’ll see where this goes.  In the meantime, here’s a super cute pic I Instagram’d from the wedding!