You Can't Always Get What You Want, But If You Try Sometimes, You Just Might Find You Get What You Need

I'm still pondering all the stuff that happened in Egypt, especially hooking up with that guy the last night of the trip. He sent me a long email last night in which he said he dreamed about me and woke up holding his pillow. Very sweet.

So, more details on this whole hook-up...

The last night of the trip, we had a party at the hotel's outdoor bar and almost everyone on the trip showed up to enjoy one last night together before we went our separate ways in the morning. This guy sat next to me in the outdoor seating area, and he started being affectionate and chatting with me. He's an affectionate person, so I didn't think anything particular about it when he was holding my hand or putting his arm around me. He behaved like that with all the girls on the trip. Then, he started to buy drinks for everyone, and I figured I would use the opportunity to get my fill of free Cokes. (I should note that the alcoholic drinks at this bar were clearly watered down, and I ended up being a lot more buzzed after glugging down one Coke after another than anyone else did after doing shots and drinking cocktails. Sometimes it pays to be the teetotaler.)

So, as the free drinks started flowing, this guy continued sitting next to me and, for the first time on the trip, wasn't annoying the bejesus out of me. As more and more people crowded around our table, our chairs moved closer and closer together. After he got a couple drinks in him, he had his hand on my knee. I said, "You can keep your hand there while I'm drinking this drink, but when I'm done, your attorney-client privileges end and you can put your hand somewhere else." He kept buying my sodas so he could continue inching his hand up toward the promised land. At one point, he got up and was hugging people good-bye, and I turned to my guy friend sitting next to me and said, "If he comes back and I'm finished with this drink, that's too bad." My guy friend put his hand on my thigh and said, "Hey, if you see a parking meter with time left on it, that's where you're going to park."

The evening continued in that same hand-on-the-thigh vein as I started staying longer and longer than I originally planned. A few times, the guy kissed my neck or the top of my ear, but it struck me more as being friendly and affectionate than trying to lay the groundwork for getting down to business. Eventually, the outdoor bar closed, and we were left with the option of going to sleep or going to the hotel's (highly dubious) club. The guy whispered in my ear that we should go back to my room, and I was like, "Absolutely not." And he was like, "It'll be fun." And I was like, "Not happening." So, we went to the club.

Things continued more or less the same way at the club, at least as far as the relationship between his hand and my thigh went, except that his hand was continuing its upward progression to my Nile delta (so to speak) and he was being a little more kissy. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed the attention rather than being put off by it, especially since, as I mentioned, he was not someone I had really enjoyed during the week. I attributed this to the fact that I was feeling hurt and rejected by the semi-closeted gay dude's sudden decision to go from spending every waking minute with me to not talking to me at all even when I spoke to him directly (classy).

Around 2 in the morning, most of us decided it was time to go to bed. The guy said he would walk me back to my room (the hotel was set up so that the rooms were almost like little separate bungalows rather than the more standard arrangement). I knew this would lead to smoochery, but I agreed to let him walk me back. When we got to my room, he confessed that he had liked me all week but hadn't told anyone. I told him truthfully that I was surprised and hadn't had any inkling that he felt that way. He told me that he liked how intelligent I am and how pretty he thinks I am and how good he thinks I smell. This was intoxicating to me because I think that my intelligence is a liability in attracting guys and while I was in Egypt, my skin looked like the surface of a cheese pizza and I smelled like, well, Egypt. We hugged for a long time and kissed, and then I shooed him back to his room.

I got ready and went to bed, and about thirty minutes later, I hear a knock on my door. Guess who was back? Apparently, his roommate had disappeared into the ether, leaving this guy with no place to sleep. I told him he could stay in my room, but only to sleep and not for any other purpose. That is when things hit their nadir. I haven't shared a bed with anyone other than a female friend or a relative since 2001, and it felt unfamiliar (though not bad) to have someone holding me while I was trying to sleep. The bad part was that he kept trying to get things to progress to a more sexual level, and I was getting uncomfortable and told him to go to sleep.

To backtrack a little, I was hurt when the gay dude I'd been hanging around with suddenly dropped me without any explanation. I only found out he was gay because his friend on the trip took pity on me and told me that he didn't want me to go home feeling like I did something wrong and that he thought I should know this guy was gay. I was feeling sad and close to tears most of the last day because someone I thought was really special and possibly a guy I could be with in the long-term turned out to be (1) gay and (2) a dick. I was angry with this dude for not being honest with me, and I felt that I couldn't be resentful of him and not be honest with this guy who was trying to convince me to have sex with him.

To that end, I told him that I didn't want him to take it personally that I wasn't open to being more physically intimate with him because it was based on being assaulted in the past. He told me he was sorry that had happened to me and told me that he had worked in the rape squad in the military police and knew that it was common and that he didn't tolerate it. He told me that it made him like me more that I shared that with him. I was glad that I had because although it is difficult for me to talk about, I thought he needed to know.

Unfortunately, he persisted in trying to move things to a more physical level, so I kicked his ass out of my room. I made him call his roommate and wake his roommate's ass up and go back to his own room. By this point, it was 4:45 in the morning, and I had a 7:00 wake-up call to go to the airport to fly home. He asked me if I was okay about everything, and I said that I was.

After he left, I considered whether I was really okay or whether I had just said that to get him on his way. I decided that I was. I don't think he meant to push me into doing something I didn't want to do -- he was just physically uncomfortable because he, um, liked being around me. When I told him to stop and threw him out, he left.

In the morning, I woke up at 6:45 and brushed my teeth. At 6:50, I heard a knock on my door, and it was the guy. He told me that he hadn't slept at all because he was so sorry about what had happened. As he put it, "I poured my heart out to you, and then I ruined it." I told him that I was really okay, and we talked a little bit. Then I threw him out again so I could take a shower. I should note that he also noticed that he had given me a baseball-sized hickey on my neck that required me to borrow a scarf from one of my friends on the trip to travel in. I was like, "Dude, we are in a Muslim country." (He himself is a Muslim, so he should understand!) He kissed me good-bye in front of the entire bus full of people headed to the airport, which made me a little shy but I kind of liked it.

He already emailed me since I've been home, which is very sweet. I honestly don't see things going anywhere (he's Canadian military police and I'm an American lawyer, so both of us have jobs that keep us in our respective countries), but he made me feel good about myself when I felt bad about myself and I enjoyed getting to know him better, so I'm hopeful that we might remain friends.