First Date Heat

Once upon a time I met a guy who made all appearances of being relatively normal. I should know better than to fall for this type of act. We are talking about me after all.

Once upon a time, I also thought being in close proximity to a man breathing hard, sweating, and occasionally gasping or moaning meant I was going to be hotter than the surface of the sun. Turns out I can be wrong about that too.

After talking a couple of times, we made plans for dinner. In trying to decide what to eat we discovered that we both like spicy food and I made a suggestion for Indian food. To my surprise, he was game, even though he'd never eaten it before. I did warn him though that even though he liked spicy food when they asked if he'd like his food mild, medium, or spicy to ask for medium at best. Quite honestly, the local Indian place should be required to label their 'spicy' dishes as 'the fifth pit of hell' because I'm convinced that you have to have more than a mere human tongue and stomach to be able to handle that kind of heat.

In a display of what I can only call pure 'pppfffftttt, I'll show you silly girl' showmanship, he defied my warnings and ordered his food spicy. I shook my head and wished him good luck.

Conversation was slow, but not horrible while we waited for our food and I wasn't looking to chew my leg off to escape. In matters of my dating life, this was chalking up to a win, even with his risk on the food. Hey, maybe he's already had his insides titanium lined giving him a higher tolerance than normal lowly humans.

Food arrived. As his dish was placed on the table, the smell wafted my way and in seconds I was left without eyebrows and my top two layers of flesh because the aroma carried white hot heat searing everything in it's path. I do believe my cheeks were roasted to a fine medium rare. I was thankful they sat mine a distance from his.

We served ourselves and I have to admit, he seemed to be handling the heat quite well. I was shocked. So shocked in fact that a few minutes later when he turned bright red and started gasping for breath, I thought the man was having a heart attack. Then he started sweating. Profusely. I'm talking dripping from the top of his bald head onto his shoulders and the table. I was ready to start screaming for a 911 call until it hit me that he was still eating. His cheeks started turning purple and I realized it was the effect of the food. I'm nearly certain that he thought he was playing like he wasn't in extreme agony because he kept trying to talk to me as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. He even went as far as to offer me a spoonful. I thanked him and told him I prefer to keep my internal parts free of flames. The fact that he was in obvious agony and continued to shovel the cause into his face was very off-putting; so off-putting that I reached a point I found myself far too focused on him shoveling his food in his face that I, first, could no longer pay attention to the conversation and had to keep asking him to repeat every tortured statement or question, and second, found myself nitpicking the way he ate his food until I was so thoroughly disgusted that the thought of being anywhere near him made making out with a gorilla seem more appealing.

Once dinner was over, and he was trying to compose himself, he made quick excuses to get gone and I was relatively relieved because it saved me the trouble of making up my own excuses.

Date over.
HA! It's never that easy when I'm involved.

I thought date over. I thought wrong.

Keep in mind, we'd had only a couple of conversations prior to this and what turned out to be one very painful dinner for both of us. He was on his way home...he lived about 40 miles south of me...and apparently discovered he didn't have the stomach for spicy Indian food. Why do I know this one might wonder? Oddly enough, my phone rang about 20 minutes after we parted ways and to my surprise, it was him. To keep with the ever more bizarre twists that seem to love me so, I could hear echos in the background that made me wonder where the hell he was. He wasn't shy about telling me, which saved me the three seconds it would have taken to ask where he was. Having said little more than hello, he announced, “MY ASSHOLE IS ON FIRE (brpfffttttttttt)! Holy shit this hurts!” I've heard about romance and all, but mercy, this one took it to a whole new level. Or something. Yeah, something. To give him credit though, he did wait until he was between toilet droppings to tell me he had a very nice time and would like to see me again. Unfortunately, I am a cold bitch and dodged the question to say, “you shouldn't have ordered spicy” and told him to drive safely the rest of the way home.

Just a tip. Nobody wants to hear about a flaming asshole or hear another dropping a number two on the first date. Well, there may be someone into both, however, that is a specialized crowd to whom you'd probably be better off finding on Craig's List.