The Kiss

Me: Why the attitude?
Him: I wanted to kiss you goodnight last night but you rejected me.

Sunday was a lovely day. He suggested the movies and yes I wasn't that enthusiastic about it but was glad to be stepping out a tad after being cooked up in my little abode for the entire weekend.

Why skeptical about the date? I have a really terrible reminisce about 3D movies. My real first experience was a disaster ; putting it mildly. The anticipation that there could be a repeat dashed my spirit.

It was a beautiful evening a few years ago when one of my supposed suitors coerced me into a date. Considering I'm not big on outings, we settled for a movie. We were a few minutes late since it was a random plot. 47 Ronin was showing that day.

That fateful evening, I cursed my ancestry and gods for  depriving me of luxuries such as being exposed to these kind of things earlier in my life. Each time the characters in the movie got into a brawl, I felt like the punches, machetes and stones were targeting me. I stopped short of running out of my seat. The first punch got me ducking and shouting "mummy" on reflex. My date was laughing out so loud it was so freaking embarrassing. At some point I held onto him to dodge a spear. I on a number of occasions removed the 3D glasses and that's how I was able to endure the over two worst hours of my dating history! What a date!

Backtracking to Sunday, we got to the mall early. The next movie was in 50 minutes and as providence had it, it was in 2D. Sigh of relief!

To while away the time, my companion volunteered a tour of the mall. I had intimated earlier that I had never been there before. Armed with my favorite ice cream, we wandered. Checking out the massive mall was great lollygagging which doubled as a workout since we had to use the stairs to and from the highest floor. I don't do escalators nor elevators because the mere glance at those moving stairs gets me woozy and my phobia for enclosed spaces is acute. Crazy, right?

Fast forward a few minutes to Showtime, we got our popcorn and occupied seat D9 and D10 as per the tickets purchased earlier at the booking office. A sequel of The mummy starring Tom Cruise is one movie I would never have envisioned watching and let alone enjoying under normal circumstances. I loathe spooky movies. Surprisingly, I loved this particular one; so much so that I didn't realize when my companion stole my pack of the caramel popcorn. That's how captivated  I was. For once I didn't even have nightmares about the walking corpses later that night. It was perfect, save for the little discomfort caused by the AC. God I'm so stone age!

The ride home was the highlight of the evening. His stereo was blaring with Chris Brown and we both lip synced to almost all the tracks. On dropping me off, he tried to steal a kiss as we hugged goodbye and naturally, it was met with rebuff.

I glossed over the episode 'cause in my mind's eye, it was trivial. Evidently, I had misconstrued the situation. My rude awakening came soon enough when I checked in later. His response sent red flags. He was aloof and obviously this was strange considering we had just spent an awesome evening together.

 "What's going on? Are we good?" I asked.

It is then that I learnt that not letting him kiss me offended him and bruised his ego so bad we are fighting to-date.

Guys, for crying out loud; you don't suddenly change zones. If you've let yourself act and treat a woman a certain way, don't hold her culpable if she gets accustomed to seeing you in that light. Yes you hate being friend zoned but assert yourselves. Let it be known how you want to feature in a woman's life to save us all this undesirable drama.

In my books, it's much better to lay all cards on the table and set boundaries from the get go. This way, misapprehensions are easily averted. I don't refute the fact that he's always been overly nice to me, attentive and caring. However, he had never manifested such interest in me to warrant such behavior.

Don't give me the "Ella, you should know how I feel about you by now" talk. No, I don't! You've never told me. I'm not from the "actions speak louder than words" school. Actions could be misconstrued.

Make your intentions explicitly known with an equal measure of both actions and words!