I had a one-night stand. I met him just before the election. Yes, that election. I was dating someone at the time. We were on a break. This one followed an anniversary dinner we cut short after we began fighting over something ridiculous at the table. We were feast-and-famine as a couple.
We kept on dating, but our communication was, to put it mildly, garbage. The heat was still there — it has a way of sticking around when you only see each other at most once a week. Our thing still felt big, even epic, epic for sheer frustration, stubbornness, and fights over the phone this was when texting still required you to triple-tap the keys to get certain letters; neither of us used it much, thank god. It was a relationship that, if I were honest with myself, had nothing going for it.
It was taking the life out of me , instead of making me feel alive. But back to Dangling Chad. But Chad had a deep voice and a rich laugh — and laugh he did. I needed the laughs. My humor tends more to the delivery of a bon mot with a little grin. Chad liked sly wit.
He also liked to talk politics and to tell tales of the human oddities that emerged during election season, showing up at town halls or calling with their odd concerns. Talking to oddballs was half the reason I was a reporter in the first place.
Chad got it and, seemingly, me. Meanwhile, Dick had never once spent time reading the paper I worked for. He never picked them up.
