Plan "B"

... but not want what you get.

So, when you board a cruise ship, you're more or less tossed into a salad bowl of different people. Granted, you're not likely to be cruising with the homeless or people who own boom cars (thankfully, they haven't discovered cruising yet), but there's still a pretty wide variety of people aboard. Most are older Americans, but on occassion, you'll get a group of 90 gay guys, or the Swedish Olympic vollyball team, or 20 folks from Romania. This time around, it was the Romanians.

In the months prior to the cruise, I'd been plotting and planning on getting into shape, waxing whatever needed to get waxed, wearing the right clothes, yadda, yadda, yadda. One of my final purchases was a bow tie - a real bow tie. Kim had convinced me that the drudgery of learning to tie a bow tie was worth the look of having the untied bow around my neck while dancing after dinner. Um, o.k.. So, I figured that if I was going to do it - I was going to go all the way. Full vest instead of those dicky vests you get when you rent. The most expensive shirts I've ever purchased. $100 skull & crossbone cufflinks. The whole shabang! I probably spent more money than I should have for two dinners, but at least now I have a nice tuxedo with a few options.

Back to the Romanians. There were two (in my opinion) attractive woman in the group. Alexandra and Colletta. (again, in my opinion) Alex was VERY attractive, friendly, outgoing, and had expensive tastes in champagne. For halloween, she was a playboy bunny and did her best impression of a cat grooming herself for the cameras. It was naughty and enticing, but also put her into the pigeonhole of "adult". I dismissed it as folly and moved on.

We hadn't spoken at all before our second excursion, which was white water rafting, but we had glanced at each other on the ship. Finally, on the excursion, we got to know each other a bit. She works for Air France in Romania, but I don't recall what capacity. She held my attention with conversation and smiles and I was about ready to buy her a house too.

I didn't make it to the nightclub that night due to consumption of rum beyond my control. The next night at 11:30 was the champagne waterfall. Lots of people were there dancing in the atrium. She was there too and we started dancing. Now, it gets a little grown up...

During the dancing, she asked me if I was ready to have some fun. Like an idiot, I was thinking - "hey, more dancing". A pretty dense idiot too. She told me, "you'll have to be relaxed so we can have fun. Are you relaxed?"

"Sure", I responded, still not getting it.

We moved onto the nightclub after the cheap champagne was drunk. We were dancing off and on a bit more. One song ended while we were dancing and some salsa music came on. "Do you know salsa?", she asked. "No, but you can teach me."

She taught me the basics of salsa dancing and I think we did pretty well. Then, in a final move that let me know what was going on, I asked, "How am I doing?"

"You're going fine", she replied, "but in salsa, the man's hand goes here." She pushed my hand from the small of her back to her - um - rump.

My other hand burst into sweat. I think I must have given a pretty clear signal that I wasn't interested in that way - but then felt a little wierd because all the other signals I sent seemed to be willing. At any rate - to make a long story short - she ended up shagging the cruise director.