Part I is here.

Also, The Daver was spurned into action by my review and put up Part I of his review of Pacify Me on his oft-neglected blog. Will Part II ever air? Likely no, but hey, what can you do?

And there’s this:

My plea to you to help me try and not be spanked so badly out there. They won’t spam you, and all you have to do is enter your email! It’s simple to vote and damn, I know you’re out there, my sweet lurkers. Why don’t you come out of the dark? I won’t bite!

So there we were, sitting there, Pashmina, Matthias, Pashmina’s roommate and I. Newly minted members of The Loyola University Polo club. After a brief moment of congratulating ourselves on an idea well played, the idea was shoved back away to make room for more pressing issues: namely, would my roommate break the Bubble Chair again?

(answer–although the suspense would be grand– Yes. Like me, Vanessa didn’t seem to learn from her mistakes)

The fall pressed on as Matthias searched high and low for stables and horses the rest of us just sort of forgot about the Polo Club. But we were still often in each others’ company.

One mid-winter Friday night, Matthias invited the lot of us to his apartment which felt so grown-up and urban after living in the shoe boxes we referred to as The Maxi Pad (why yes, we did think we were clever!) for wine and pasta. Oh! How Continental we all felt! We also felt like alcoholics, as we’d each gotten a bottle of wine to bring with, making the total bottles of wine somewhere near 7.

Dinner was eaten off paper plates and the wine was happily dug into by all of us, including Matthias’s roommate, Matt. Whomever had paired them together was obviously a joker.

Wine has, and probably always will, in addition to making me swell up like the Michelin Man, gotten me hammered as fuck.

So, we were ALL suitably toasty when we started to play a game, sitting there on the floor passing the wine bottles around. The game was, of course, a favorite of mine: Truth of Mother-fucking Dare. There’s very little I won’t do or won’t answer truthfully (a blessing AND a curse), so I was stoked.

The game, as we were all 19 or so, immediately took a sexual tone. Someone answered describing losing their virginity, someone else discussed fantasies, and I’m pretty sure that someone streaked, but my memory is suitably foggy. Eventually, it was my turn.

The question must have been something or another about The Sex, for the life of me, I don’t remember the specifics, but my answer was, in drunken drawl, “I *snort* I dunno. I *hic* just like *hic* sex.”

It was a most unfortunate choice of words that I would pay for for months after.

Because Matthias’s roommate lit up like a Christmas tree. We’d been talking earlier because I am chatty and I could tell he thought I was cute (obvs: wine goggles), but there was no interest on my part. He just wasn’t my type.

But between the stupid comment about sex (to be fair, the rest of the comments were much, much more raunchy, and had I been any less drunk, I’d have been more descriptive) and the fact that I responded to him in a conversation, he was smitten by the time the night was over.

In yet another gigantic error in judgement, we’d made plans to hang out the following weekend when we were both home as we’d discovered we lived in the same hometown. By the time that weekend rolled around, and I was home, I had no real desire to hang with him and told him as much when he called my parents’ house. I wasn’t being unkind, just wanted to see my other hometown friends. I forgot to call him back and promptly forgot that I’d forgotten.

This, apparently, was the Wrong Thing to do. Because when I returned to school the following Sunday, my roommate informed me that someone “named Matt had called about 10 times.” She looked a little freaked out. I felt a little freaked out.

Over the next week or two, he called non-stop and had taken to hanging outside around our dorm, his eyes glinting creepily as he scanned the crowds for me. Maybe he just wanted to sell me some Amway, maybe he wanted to tell me that he’d discovered the key to world peace, maybe he wanted to give me a check for a million dollars. I won’t ever be sure.

Because the constant calling and skulking about the Ashtray (the gigantic fountain in the middle of the quad, outside of our dorm. Seen from above, it looked like, you guessed it, a large, concrete ashtray) had made me skittery and nervous with a touch of anger thrown in for good measure. Because now I couldn’t even call Matthias without fear that Matt would pick up and tell me that he’d been sacrificing kittens in my name.

He was just that kind of guy.

Part III will air tomorrow. Sorry, y’all.