A Happier Ending

Today's post is a follow up to yesterday, where I said there were two that got away.  As I did yesterday, I'm changing the name to protect her identity, but I still suspect that many of my high school friends will know who I'm talking about.

I met Jo my junior year in high school.  She was sweet and bubbly and cute, in that girl-next-door sort of way... alabaster skin, freckles and strawberry blond hair... and she always had a smile on her face.  For some reason, (to this day, I don't exactly know why) she was interested in me.  I, however, was having a lot of fun being single, so we didn't date in high school.  Scratch that.  There was a period of time where I was interested in her, but she was dating another guy.  We still didn't date, but I don't want to make it sound like I was never interested in her in school.

After high school, we stayed in touch, primarily through phone calls, and visits when I came home on leave.  I remember coming home one time and dropping by Jo's house.  She had some friends over.  Jo sent the friends on an errand so that she and I could talk.  Talking became kissing, and I was pretty sure that Jo and I would end up getting together.  Alas, it didn't happen.  The friends returned too quickly.  I guess she should have sent them on a longer errand.

The next time I came home on leave, I brought a friend with me.  I asked Jo to introduce him to a friend of hers.  That friend was Jamie, a mutual friend from high school.  Everything was going well.  Fred and Jamie seemed to be getting along, and I thought that Jo and I would finally end up getting together, after all of these years of innuendo and flirtation.  To this day, I'm not sure how it happened, but I ended up with Jamie, and my friend ended up with Jo.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time with Jamie, but that's not what I wanted.  It was one of those WTF moments I'll never forget.

Fast forward a couple of years... I was married, with a daughter, and I moved the family to my hometown.  By this time, Jo had gotten married as well.  Both of us knew that we had lost our chance to get together, but we remained friends, and we flirted  -- a lot -- in a shameless, but harmless manner.

A year or two after returning home, my wife and I had marital trouble.  I needed a friend, and Jo was there.  She confided in me that her marriage was on the rocks as well.  We bonded over our mutual distress, and we found solace in flirting more shamelessly than we had ever done.  We came very close to breaking our respective wedding vows that night, but in the end we did what was right.

We joked that we were experiencing the seven year itch a little early, and semi promised each other that if we ever did get the seven year itch, that we'd turn to each other, noting that we had too much history, and that we'd missed so many opportunities in the past that we kind of owed it to each other, and to ourselves, to turn to each other instead of some random stranger if we needed to scratch that itch.

Shortly after that, I ended up moving in an attempt to save my marriage.  Jo and her husband parted ways.  Not long after that, I had my second daughter.  Jo met another man and moved far away, but we kept in touch, talking every few months.  The conversations changed their tone... she talked about the challenges of being in love with a military man.  I talked about the ongoing problems in my marriage and the joy of fatherhood.  And the conversations always involved a lot of flirting, though slightly more tame than we used to do.  And there was more laughing... the laughter that mature, platonic friends share.

My first marriage lasted a little over a decade, by which time Jo had married her military man, and had a kid of her own.  I called her pretty frequently when my first marriage crumbled.  I was a shell of a man who needed any support he could find, and she was one (of many) who provided me that support.  I pointed out that I was available and she wasn't, and we laughed at that, remembering how horrible our timing had been over the years.  We spent a lot of time and energy trying to get together, but no matter what we did, something always got in the way.

Time healed the wound caused by my divorce, and I moved on, finding love again and marrying again.  Jo and I remained in touch.  She called me a lot when her husband was deployed.  I think she missed companionship in general.  We laughed a lot, she told me that she missed her husband, and we flirted.

After being married to my second wife though, I started feeling kind of bad about the flirting.  I knew in my heart that nothing would result from it; after all, Jo and I were (and are) both completely committed to our marriages.  But I worried that my wife would be hurt if she knew about my flirtation.  I told Jo about this, and we kind of drifted apart.  The only contact we had for a couple of years was through seeing each other's posts on Facebook.

Unlike my last story, this one has a happy ending.  Jo and I are starting to reconnect, but on a different level.  We are spending time talking about our families and life in general.  There's still a little bit of underlying flirtation, but like I said, we are committed to our respective families.  If we do start flirting though, I know it will be okay.  Over the years, my wife has seen me flirt with many, many women, and I've come to understand that she's truly okay with it.  She has said on more than one occasion that I'll "flirt with anything that moves," and let me know that it doesn't bother her.  It's also okay if Jo and I don't flirt.  I kind of miss it, but I've grown a bit as well.  The barely-contained passion I long held for her has evolved to a warm fondness... a fondness that I doubt would have survived if we had done anything more than shameless yet harmless flirting.