I found out last night

I made Lee upset last night.

I met up with my Japanese friend and we went to a really nice little Mexican restaurant. After dinner, we were both bored and didn't want to go home. We walked to the cinema to check out the movie selection but nothing interested us. So we wandered around, looking for some place with live music where we can get a drink. We stumbled on a blues bar, where they were playing live blues and went in.

The music already started and the place was packed, so my friend and I settled down on the high stools at the bar. My friend got herself red wine and I choose something sweet with little alcohol content, being such a lightweight. We sat there watching the band. Perhaps, it was the darkness, the blue, red, yellow, pink stage lights and the mirrors. Perhaps, it was the drink I had, Or perhaps it was the sensual music, I don't know. But for some reason, I just didn't feel quite grounded in reality.

It was a small jazz bar, the really intimate kind where you can see those on stage clearly just as they can see you. I was looking at the middle age bassist. He was not handsome, not exactly, but very very attractive, in the way mature and experienced men were. He was wearing a light blue shirt, unbuttoned in a causal way. And he was sweating, the entire band was, I could see in the colored lights.

My friend and I were just chilling at the bar, enjoying the music. Until intermission, the band members stopped playing and went for a break. The bassist came over to the bar and sat down next to me. I thought he was cute and smiled at him, which was very wrong in hindsight, because bars are not places where you can smile innocently at someone. A smile becomes an invitation to who knows what? Anyway, he got his beer and left.

A couple of times I actually looked around for the guy. One time our eyes met, and then I knew that whatever I did, and will do from that point on, would not really be that innocent, and something could possibly happen and that possibility was very exciting.

He came back to the bar after talking to his friend. He was old, not some young guy. He was already thinning on the top, but it was very easy to tell that he had been very handsome when he was young, and part of that quiet charm was still there. And he was silent, (always a killling point for me, I can't help being attracted to the quiet guy), and in the midst of his loudmouth jazz members, that was so I can't-even-explain-now.

He sat next to me, smiled at me, and made a passing comment about something irrelevant. I smiled back at him. I felt right then, that if he invited me to anything, I would accept. The sheer weight of possibility was such an exciting and dangerous thing.

But I left before the end. I must still have some sense in me left.

The thing though, was that I was not drunk. I was not.

It has happened before, my desire for adventure and this falling away of the old and the rising of possiblities and my pushing for something I myself wasn't sure I wanted. Was it the setting? Is it something in me that is dark, and hiding during the day? I just thought, how easy, how easy it is for something to happen. All it takes is a couple of glances, and not-so-inocent smiles in a dark place with live music and drinks.

I'm not pretty. Glasses, geeky hairstyle, sitting in the back. I said nothing. All I did was smile, and was open. But I would have been willing--which is very wrong and very dangerous, and which now I am very painfully aware of. I want bad things sometimes. I have a dark destructive part in me that every so often rears its ugly head, and reminds me that it is still there.

And you don't need to be pretty, you just need to be willing and foolish.

I told Lee later, because I was shaken. This was not something that would happen to me, not imaginable. My point is not that the guy was necessarily interested in me ( I don't really care about that), but that I was willing to go somewhere, and do something dangerous. If I was asked, I most probably would have said yes.

I don't believe that I am attractive. I am not the kind of girl that can have guys falling at their feet, but I am the kind of girls who might say yes to the worst of things if the circumstances are right. I just thank heavens that those circumstances are rare, and I still have some sense in me.

I told Lee, which was, of course, another big mistake. He freaked out. And reasonably so, if he told me he was at a bar and would have followed some girl home if asked, I would too. He said he need to be wary of me, and questioned if I am really to be trusted.

I still feel that the answer is yes, afterall, I went home, didn't I? Nothing happened.

But, I also found out about myself. That it is not hard to turn into that girl who followed some stranger home. And it was not the first time I had wanted to. But I never did.

So what am I really? The good girl who went home? Or am I the girl who wanted an invitation and would have said yes? It is not so hard to turn from one into another. And I'm not moralizing, or judging, but it is easy. Oh it's so easy.