Niki's sister Danielle, the quietly funny one visiting from San Francisco, sat with me outside one of the lofts on the ninth floor. There were a couple of parties on the floor. It was almost 2 AM. She was bored, and I was too, but I'm not 25 and visiting New York City on New Year's Eve. She wanted to party. I just wanted to go to sleep. I felt badly.

The cute guy in the brown pleather coat who had asked me if we had met before (we hadn't) walked out of the loft. I stopped him.

"Hey, tell us a story. We need to be entertained."

"You want a story?" He thought for a second, but really, it was no more than that. Sometimes you meet people who have no problem with storytelling whatsoever, always have one on the quick. It's an incredibly attractive feature.

"OK, this was something I was just thinking about on the train the other day, something I just realized. When I was in 7th grade I had a crush on this girl, Emily Bailey. I went to this party to see her once, and she and I ended up hanging out. We went downstairs to where the kitchen was, and no one was around. After we hung out there for a while, we went back upstairs, and she stopped me on the stairs and said, 'Are you a prude?' And I said, 'No.'

"And then she grabbed me and totally started kissing me, like, hard. It lasted maybe three minutes. And then we kept walking, and we stopped in the hallway in front of this empty bedroom, and she said, 'Where should we go?' The whole time she's talking I'm thinking, 'God, I'm glad I got that out of the way, now we've made out. Now I can really enjoy myself.' So I said we should go back to where everyone else was hanging out, and so we did.

And this is what I realized on the train last week, that she wanted me to go into that bedroom with her. I don't know why I didn't think of it then, I guess I was just so relieved already. I don't think she wanted me to have sex with her, maybe just --"

"She just wanted to go to second base with you, " I said.

"Right," he said.

"Maybe third," I said.

"Maybe," he said. "Anyway I couldn't figure out why, when I called her a few weeks later to ask her out, she said no. She laughed at me. I thought it was something I did, but really it was something I didn't do."

I thought: Maybe she didn't want to go out with you because you waited two fucking weeks to call her, but I kept silent. Why ruin a perfectly good story?

"You didn't want to go out with her anyway," I said. "She was too much for you to handle. A harlot!" I laughed.

"I can't believe it took me this long to figure it out," he said.

After he left Niki's sister and I were sad because his story was one of the most interesting things that had happened all night.

***

This morning I decided to start off the new year by listening to a favorite CD from last year. Really fucking loud. I chose One Beat by Sleater-Kinney.

Happy New Year.

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