Creative!

Luck o' the Irish

So I wrote this piece back in September 2009. It was based on something that happened at my housewarming party with my new housemates just a few months after I broke up with my long-term love. Tom Connolly* was the first guy who showed an interest in me after my break up and the first guy I found myself significantly attracted to. I must admit my insecurities shone throughout the whole anti-climactic experience. Turned out he was a bit of a jerk and I actually haven't seen him again since that party, despite several advances and despite what I initially hoped this would be. I learnt alot of valuable lessons about men, the 'games' of the single world and myself from this experience, even though we only ever messaged. But you've got to start somewhere and it made for a good story! I guess I never really gave it an ending but I felt I'd written enough about it so left it as is.

As she opened her laptop for the final time that evening, she started to feel a bit stupid.

‘You’re insane,’ she was thinking, ‘this is absolutely ridiculous.’

But of course the realisation of her day-long obsession still didn’t stop her from signing into Facebook and email for the 100th time that day to see if he’d taken that first step into her mailbox.

‘I can’t believe I’m letting a guy I don’t even know have this kind of affect on me,’ she thought.
To be honest, she’d barely even spoken to him that night at her housewarming, apart from the brief drunken exchange of a giggle over nothing in particular in the kitchen. Of course she’d drooled over this extremely tall, built, beautiful man and his sexy Irish accent most of the evening. Her heart had dropped though when her tall, thin, beautiful, friend with her perfectly-positioned breasts and gorgeously long legs had gone over to talk to him.

‘But I wasn’t flirting with him, I was talking to him about you,’ Cate* had pleaded later, after being alerted to your annoyance.

Cate not flirting was a social impossibility, it was unfortunately just in her nature to flirt and Elle had known that since they were 16-years-old. She didn’t; however, doubt that her friend was talking to him about her. She’d done this before when drunk, thinking it would be perfect if she walked up to a hot guy, bouncing her beautiful breasts and battering her elongated, pussy-cat eyelashes and then tried to point out her ‘beautiful friend Elle’, the one who was only about half a foot taller than being an actual midget. Yes, the curvy giggle-pot with 12D breasts and a size 12 ass. Yes, grand idea Size 8; he’s really going to want the short dumpy one after he’s spent 10 minutes looking down the shirt of a naturally athletically built 5’10 goddess. Another bombshell with good intentions, but Elle couldn’t help but love her all the same.

When Cate had gotten upset later in the evening over the ‘C-word’ of a boy she’d recently been seeing, Elle, as a good friend does, sucked up her own issues and realised the beautiful Irish man, who’s name she hadn’t even established and who, by the way, did not seem the slightest bit interested in anyone let alone her, was not worth worrying about, let alone worth coming between girlfriends. She pulled Size 8 out of her blubbering mess and onto the dance floor to shake off the tears, kissed her on the forehead and said ‘he’s just another boy,’ like a good friend should. They’d all had a great night and not another word was spoken, nor another thought given to the beautiful Irish man. After all, he was just another nameless boy at a party and she was just another heart-broken girl not ready to move on from her last love.

So when Tom Connolly, friend of housemate Frank, added her on Facebook two weeks later she was a little dumbfounded. She couldn’t quite tell from the tiny thumbnail of his profile picture; a photo of a group of four people, who this Tom O’Rafferty was or why he was requesting her Facebook friendship, but figured she must have met him at the housewarming.

‘Frank, who’s Tom?’ She asked. ‘He just added me on Facebook.’

‘Tom who?’ Frank replied.

‘Connolly,’ She said.

‘Oh, he’s the big Irish guy,’ Frank said, a small grin escaped his lips. ‘Weren’t you guys trying to chat him up all night?’

Her cheeks immediately flushed a bright tomato red, a wonderfully obvious sign of her embarrassment.

‘Well, there wasn’t much chatting on my behalf, but I think a few of the other girls might have been.’

It wasn’t a lie, she had hardly spoken to him, never mind ‘chatting him up’, unless of course wandering around asking people who the beautiful Irish man belongs to counts as chatting one up?

‘I don’t know if he has a girlfriend though,’ Frank added.

It was about the second she clicked ‘add friend’ Tom Connolly into her Facebook friend list that the giddy little school girl who’d laid dormant for the past 6 or so years, erupted in a volcano of random thoughts, emotions and ‘what-ifs’ within her and she’d been checking her mail every hour since then waiting for his first contact.

She still hadn’t let go of the idea though that maybe he had only ‘added’ her by default so that he could then ‘add’ Cate into his friendship list, and his bedroom no doubt, which also meant the frequent checking of his profile to see if they had any more friends in common. But each time under ‘Common friends’, only 1 friend appeared, Frank. So far it was all good news for Elle.

Elle wondered if Tom Connolly had spoken to Frank about her. If maybe at rugby on Saturday he’d mentioned her and Frank had suggested he add her on Facebook. After all, how did he even know her name? She hadn’t known his until he’d added her. But for some reason she couldn’t quite understand what it was that he’d seen in her. And why, if he had seen something in her, had it taken him two weeks to add her on Facebook? Maybe it was that wonderful photo of her enormous round ass someone had taken when she’d bent over to get a tray of wedges out of the oven. She hadn’t been aware at the time that such a photo was being taken. It wasn’t until much, much later in the evening that another drunken Irish man had come up to her with a camera, slurring ‘Is this you?’ and flashed a photo of a rather pronounced derriere beneath a grey skirt and below a green cardigan that she’d realised, just about everyone had appreciated her ass that evening. ‘You’re famous,’ he’d shouted and taken another skull from his beer. Maybe Tom Connolly was an ass man? Although Elle couldn’t imagine hers was anything to rave about. The truth was, she knew nothing about this Tom Connolly, and so far (we’re talking less than 24 hours) he’d not made any other contact with her. So she resorted to what any normal giddy little school girl of this day and age would do, Facebook stalking.