Stretch Marks

(Warning: This post contains adult content. If you’re offended by the idea of consenting adults engaging in casual sex, normally scheduled programming will resume… um, as soon as I have something to say. Which I have struggled with of late.)

“Did you pick up some disease in all the places you traveled?” B wanted to know. B is a former journalist and now photographer I met on Tinder, where I went – possibly ill-advisedly – after the unpleasant end of a 3.5 month relationship last week.

Last night, B cooked me dinner, which sounds really nice until I tell you that he did it because he didn’t want to pay for dinner out. (He told me this, even going to so far as to go into the costs.) My plate included half a baked potato. (“Do you really need a whole one?” he had asked me while he was cooking. It was somewhat rhetoric, since he didn’t actually have a whole potato for each of us. Anyway, I am not exactly the best judge of portion sizes, not that he knew that.)

If you’re already wondering why I stayed one minute past dinner – let alone ended up in bed with this man – you haven’t been 41 and single. And also in need of some distraction and adventure.

So back to this morning in bed. Or maybe it was last night. There was a lot of red wine involved.

After he made the disease comment, he mentioned that he could do without catching whatever it was, and still I couldn’t tell where this was going. And then – I can’t remember the exact wording of it – he mentioned that I had a lot of “weird lines” on my body. 

Stretch marks.

I thought about how he had undone my entire life’s reading of women’s magazines about how men are so excited to sleep with you that they don’t notice things like that. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say something funny, but instead I looked at this man – who, let it be said, had a bit of a stomach, had lied about his height, and was by no means a male model -- and said: “I lost a lot of weight.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought maybe that was it but I didn’t want you to be embarrassed.”

Um, then why bring it up in the first place? And ask in such a bizarre manner?

I’m actually not remotely embarrassed or even offended by this – I just find it hilarious, which I think is as much a sign of recovery as any other. Nine and a half months (288 days, to be exact) without a binge.