Grace Hotel Foyer, Rosebank

Friday, May 21, 2004

Service: * * *
Food: N/A
Ambience: * * * *
Babe Count: * * * * *

Jacqui and I have sat in this very sofa, sipping tea together. But I'm not with Jacqui tonight.

Bianca and I are on our first date, and we're curled up on the sofa together, very intimately indeed. There's a group of schoolkid types sitting across the room, and they keep looking at us and giggling. They think we're having sex or something.

We started out at Sophia's, which was lekker, apart from them getting our tea order wrong. It tasted like dishwashing liquid mixed with pool chlorine. And then it took them twenty minutes to bring a replacement pot, cos they had to use a different kettle, seeing as the original one seemed to have chlorine in it or something.

Anyway, here at the Grace, everything's very civilized, apart from the way Bianca and I are entwined.

"It's WAY too early for me to be thinking about a relationship," I said earlier, while we were strolling around Rosebank, chatting.

"I'm afraid of being hurt," she had said.

"Me too. But one of the things I'm trying to do is get out of this celibacy/slut/monogamy cycle I've been in," I tell her. "It's one of the things I'm working on in therapy. I think that's what happened with me and Jacqui... I was IN relationship mode when I started up with her, and just leapt in, assuming that this was a relationship. With you, I just want to be, and let you be, and explore this with you."

"Sounds good," she says.

She's also just ended a relationship. When we met at Memar, the Ethiopian educational tv project, we were both still involved. And while I found her attractive, I'm an ardent monogamist when I'm in a relationship, and I had no reason to believe that within a few weeks I'd be hitting the tarmac without a parachute, dumped by Jacqui like a Ugandan war prisoner flung out of a helicopter.

So we'd been polite with one another, and Bianca and I passed like ships in the night.

Until we both got dumped.

So I gave her my card in the parking lot one day, and said, "When are we going on a date?"

And she said, "Once I'm out of this project. I don't do work colleagues."

"Neither do I," I said. "But we're not really colleagues, seeing as you're on the biology team, and I'm on the chemistry team. But it's better that way. Call me when you're ready!"

So here we are at two in the morning, causing matric students out on the town in their uber sophistication to crane their necks and giggle.