Chapter 3

Meeting someone was the very last thing on my mind. I was less than 2 months separated from my husband. And dealing with a little complicated side situation so really I just wanted to hang out with my friends and go home. But you know, the universe or God, has a real funny way of turning your whole life around without you even expecting it.

I walked into the bar with 3 of my closest friends. One of my friends, Beth, was always trying to find “the love of her life.” She is a few years older than me but has never had a very long, serious relationship, for one reason or the other things never work out for her. And she is a hopeless romantic, she just wants to be married and do the whole family thing, to just settle down with a good man and call it a day. I can get behind that. So of course as soon as we walk into this place her eyes are scanning the room. And they fell on this character sitting alone at the bar. And I won’t lie. My eyes also stopped at him.

“Look at that guy at the bar.” She nudged me to see if I noticed.

We took our seats at a table about 10 feet on the opposite side. One of our friends, Nancy, was meeting a tinder date at this same location so she left our group to go talk to her new friend. It was only 3 of us now and I told Beth to go sit next to this guy, go chat him up a little bit.

Our other friend and I decide to also sit at the bar but a few seats down. We were just making small talk and sipping on our drinks but my eyes kept anxiously glancing over at Beth and this guy to see how it’s going. I can’t explain the feeling I was having but I just really felt like it should have been me sitting next to him. Unfortunately for Beth, things were not going good. She was striking out and getting a little nervous. So I moved over to sit next to her. After making small talk with this guy we learned he was just waiting for his friends to show up.

Beth got up and it was just me and him sitting there now. And I felt a very familiar feeling with this guy. We get into a pretty interesting conversation and next thing we’re laughing and taking shots and talking like we’ve known each other for years.

His friends finally got there and he left to go play pool with them across the bar. When he walked away from me, and I’ll never forget this, I felt like there was a literal rope attached to us and even though my back was to him and I couldn’t see him I could feel that he was near. Occasionally I would turn around to look at him and every time I did he was looking at me. He came back over to us every now and again to say hey or take another shot with me.

It got late and it was time to go. I couldn’t find him to say good bye but earlier in the night we exchanged numbers.

I felt so connected with this guy, like I never have with anyone before.

I went home that night and I blocked John from my snapchat and other platforms. I honestly felt like this connection I made was something intense.

It would be another whole month before I worked up the courage to text him, the guy from the bar, Austin.