Peter is my ex. You’ll see him mentioned a lot on the site—and coming…a lot…on the site. I won’t bore you with the typical meeting, first-date, first-kiss stories; for Peter and me, those moments were about as predictable and DC-centric as you can imagine.
Peter is an oil and gas lobbyist specializing in companies that invest heavily in fracking (charming, I know). If you’re wondering whether this bothered me—a card-carrying liberal—the answer is yes. But there was something about Peter that made me wildly trusting of him. He’d plan our next date before the last one had even ended. When we walked together, he’d always step behind me to position himself closer to the street. And when he spoke, he smiled. Bespectacled, tall, and strawberry blonde, he gave “Chris Pine” in the face while his monstrous yellow-gold watch whispered “Irish mob kingpin.”
He had the spending habits of a Catholic, with a WASP-like humility and discretion. Dangerous. Every Friday, he’d go to a two-star Michelin restaurant. When he mentioned this on our first date, I nodded, thinking, “This is just some line a full-of-it lobbyist would use to get me into bed.” Spoiler alert: I was wrong—and I’ve now dined at nearly every ostentatious restaurant with an infinitely-coursed menu that exists within the DC city limits.
After dinner, we rendevouzed to Tune Inn, a gritty little dive next to The Hill. Inside, we sat between a group of Midwestern tourists and two Republican staffers who I was 90% sure were in the midst of a gay awakening.
I wasn’t in a hurry to sleep with Peter, and—despite his shockingly amoral client roster—he seemed to genuinely respect that. But I knew the time was coming. As I wondered about the where, when, and how it would all go down (or who would go down, rather.) And yet, after a steamy sidewalk makeout, I hopped in my Uber Black to journey back to Georgetown.
A few days later, I felt my phone vibrate. It was Peter. He had a client meeting on a Friday; his firm wanted him in Austin to assess their financials and take the execs out for dinner afterward. Did I want to tag along and make a weekend of it?
Before I knew it, I had a plane ticket in my inbox for seat 1B. Even on a PR director’s salary, I knew that meant the front of the plane. I thought about Jack, the artist I’d ended things with just weeks before. A helicopter pilot turned artist/tech bro, Jack was spontaneous—until it came time to split the Uber, a task he always remembered to do with meticulous promptness. All that to say, Peter’s dating style was a refreshing change of pace in more ways than one. And five weeks in, I was all in.
More soon. xx
The Encounters 