Cyprus

I don’t know why he always chose post-coital moments to spill the beans about some big secret, but that’s just what My Mr. Grey did… more than once. He would taint the hottest, most erotic nights and/or weekends of my life with too much information. Women. Work. Friends. Life. Sex. I never knew why he did that, either. Eventually, I’d learn. Not until years later, though.

“I’m going to Cyprus with work,” he said, super nonchalantly, like he was telling me what he’d had for dinner, or something. “In a little under two weeks.”

“For how long?”

“A year at least.”

“A year?!” I didn’t know what else to say. “What about… you know… us?”

When Grey scratched his head and frowned, I knew that I wasn’t going to like the answer.

“I don’t know…” His voice was flat. Completely monotone. “A year is a long time, isn’t it? I don’t think I’m in the right place for a relationship, especially a long-distance one.”

My heart sank even further than it already had. He could’ve asked me to go with him. He could’ve asked me to wait, or see how things went after he’d gone, or any number of other compromises… but he didn’t. Looking back now, that should’ve told me everything that I needed to know, but hindsight is 20:20, and a damn wonderful thing. Back then, I came up with solutions. I tried to, anyway. I’d chosen Grey over The Lapdog, hadn’t I? This had to be worth it. It just had to be worth it. He couldn’t choose Cyprus over me.

Grey shook his head to every solution that I came up with. “I really don’t think it’ll work,” he eventually said. “I don’t want to lose you as a friend.”

It wasn’t until a few hours later that those words angered me, but when they did, it was like pulling the pin out of hand grenade. Lose me as a friend? We had slept together multiple times. I thought we were dating to form a relationship. We weren’t friends. Weren’t we lovers?!

I didn’t understand it, or him… so, I decided to text him and try to understand it. Repeatedly. My daft ass thought I could literally text him into changing his mind. I was young and dumb. Thankfully, I’m not quite that young and/or dumb these days, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Friends with benefits. That’s what Grey said. Good friends with benefits.

Ummm, sir, I did not know that friends with benefits was even a thing at that point, let alone something that we were doing. Shouldn’t I have known this information beforehand? Was I meant to guess? I felt like I had been duped into sex. I mean, no, we weren’t exclusive. We’d never had that chat. But how the fuck was I meant to know that we were just friends that fucked every time we saw each other? Was Grey doing that with all of his female friends? He sure seemed to have a shit load of them. Oh, my god… was I one of many?

Not for the first time, and unfortunately not for the last time, Grey appeared to have made a bit of a fool of me.

Did I learn my lesson? No.

Did I tell Grey what I actually wanted? Also no.

Did I let Grey go? Absolutely not.  

Temporarily, though, I did say goodbye to My Mr. Grey. It’s not like I had much of a choice; I’d already lost him to another country. After his flight, I cried for two days straight and didn’t go to work for three. That guy had already opened lots of doors for me, in many different senses of the word; but he’d closed more than a couple along the way, too.

This closed door stung, though.

The next blog post in the dating timeline is this one: An Almost Proposal.