Fate or Curiosity?

by Gwen Cooper — July 9, 2007

Lunch with Brad turned into a long afternoon. We met at one of my favorite spots down at Chelsea Piers, a little-known waterfront bar and grill that feels as if it were plucked straight out of the Caribbean and deposited in New York City. As the afternoon and our buzz progressed, we caught each other up on what had been going on in our lives in the five or so years since we'd last seen each other.

"You look great," he told me. "But, then, you always did."

New York is as close to being a lazy town on summer Friday afternoons as it ever is. We were so taken with the relatively slow pace of the City that, after we finally finished our waterside activities, we strolled around aimlessly for a while--long enough to end up grabbing dinner someplace else. We finally wandered into Tribeca and ducked into the Raccoon Lodge, one of my favorite dive bars.

The Raccoon Lodge is one of the darkest bars I've ever been in--both from the construction of the building (few windows) and the fact that it's painted completely black on the inside. I've known Brad since college, and we talked about how it reminded us of the dingy bars off-campus we used to sneak into, back when all we had were fake IDs and dive-bar owners were the only ones we could count on to turn a blind eye.

"Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you and I had ended up dating each other at some point?" he asked. We were sitting in a booth in the back corner, very close to each other. I looked at the glass of beer in front of me instead of into his face, but I could tell that it was the first time all day that he was being completely serious.

"We would have killed each other inside of five minutes," I replied, waving my hand dismissively. "There's a reason why it never happened for us."

But is there--I mean, is it really true that if something is "meant to be," it'll happen? How do we know these things? Maybe, sometimes, "the one who got away" is the one you're meant to be with.

I have no idea. But I do know that I wasn't thinking about Robert nearly as much as I should have been when Brad leaned in to kiss me...

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.