I can't help but think of Tai in Clueless: "He's always finding ways to touch me, or tickle me..."
The quote may not be exact, but it took me all day to come up with that much - and the realization that I may not be as bad at flirting, that this whole thing may not be as desperate and one-sided, as I thought.
I was at a register when Irish came in, walked by, put his hand on my back as he passed. I knew it was him, because I think I'd actually seen him come in a few minutes before, so even though I was talking to my customer, I called out, "Hi!" mid-sentence without even looking away from my work.
Out on the floor later, he was finishing up a load of bread, and I held my hand up for a five. And I guess neither of us wanted to be a passive high-fiver, because what we ended up with was something The Todd would've been proud of. "Good one!" Irish said, as I cried, "Ow!", shaking my hand, which was stinging through my rubber gloves.
"Actually, that did kinda hurt," he said, and the woman working demo - a sweet-as-pie older woman who's kind of a store mom - laughed, having watched the whole interaction. And I wondered how obvious this all is to anyone but me - the worst being that I can't not smile around him.
Near the end of my shift, at a point where I was so exhausted from getting like four hours of sleep last night - thanks to this sort of bullshit over-analyzing - that I felt dizzy and ready to cry at anything, I was standing in the office counting out my drawer, when someone came up behind me and put a hand firmly on the outside of each of my shoulders. This time I didn't know it was Irish until he moved me aside so he could get into a drawer I'd been blocking.
"Aww, and here I thought you were actually being nice to me," I said. (Because the details I'm sparing you are the ones with the same stupid teasing we've been doing since the day we met.)
"I was being nice to you," he insisted. "I could've just opened the drawer and hit you in the knees with it." I thanked him for not doing that, because I'd have probably just cried on account of being exhausted.
When I finally got to leave, I bought some stuff for dinner, then stopped by Irish's register on my way out.
"You're out of here?" he asked.
"Yes. Finally." I held out my hand again, and this time I think we were both careful to be a little more gentle. (What am I, the queen of high-fives? And since when?!) "If you need a couch to crash on, you have my number." He'd been telling me earlier about how his shift ends tonight at 11, and he works again tomorrow at 6 a.m., so he was planning to show up at his friend/future roommate's nearby apartment to crash on her couch, but that she didn't know that yet...
"Yes I do." He went back to what he was doing.
"See you tomorrow," I called over my shoulder.
One of my supervisors stopped me on the way out to tell me that my drawer had checked out perfectly, down to the penny.
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