It’s not the flirting that I didn’t like. It’s the little girl.
Okay, she’s not REALLY a little girl, she’s a high-school girl, and although she may look like a woman, she is in reality a couple of years away from being a ‘legal adult.’
That’s not really my issue either.
She’s my daughter’s friend. THAT’S not even my issue.
HERE’S the problem:
I don’t like her. I can’t STAND her. She makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when she starts talking (always about herself). I’m not ‘jealous’ of her youth, or her beauty, or anything else. I’M ANNOYED BY HER. Anyone who knows me will tell you I like “real” people, and have no tolerance for fakes. Anyone remember Eddie Haskell? She’s THAT type…the I–can-do-no-wrong-look-how-cute-I-am manipulative kid, who, when out of sight of adults shows her true colors. In THIS case she showed her true colors (and then some, it sounds like) in FRONT OF adults.
I think what angered me so much was to see Whitman taken in by her game. I understand he was intoxicated by the attention, the Spring Break atmosphere, the brown eyes and the brown liquor. I KNOW that feeling. I’m okay with it. I APPRECIATE it, even. It’s a high like no other, being desired (at least in ones mind) by someone young, attractive, and unattainable.
But I’m more accustomed to HIM being the flirtER, always in control of the situation. He’s an incorrigible flirt, and it’s actually one of the things I find so very attractive about him as a man. He’s charming, and irresistible to most ladies. But this girl is an attention whore, and to see him paying her full price, just putting quarter after quarter in her ‘look at me’ machine, letting her think she got one over on the ‘old folks’ made. me. nuts.
We weren’t in a bar or a club; I was CHAPERONING this gaggle of girls. Nobody knows the kinky parts of our relationship, so to the other people in the room this looked like him rejecting me for a teenager. The fawning over her like a drunken fool who’d never had the attention of a woman(girl?) while I sat there watching…?
It was totally humiliating (and NOT in a sexy way) to me and I was embarrassed for him, because the reality is, to those kids, he was just another ‘dirty old man’ and I know that’s not true.
I don’t mind playing along, and I can ride Whitman’s “pervy wave” until he drowns.
Wrong time, wrong place, wrong girl, that’s all.