Now You'll Never Forget Her Name

Submitted by Matt:

In my junior year of university, I met Samantha in my linguistics class.  It took several weeks of building up courage to introduce myself to her, but when I finally asked her out, she not only eagerly accepted, but she confessed that she'd noticed me all semester long and had wanted to introduce herself! Ah, I felt romantic stirrings in this, and it was bittersweet to imagine this as a common scenario, and how frequent it was that two strangers smiling at each other from afar never even made it to the introduction.

We met the following day at a favorite coffeehouse of mine on campus on the busiest stretch of road.  I don't know if it's my high cheekbones or what, but I have this uncontrollable superpower to get anyone to open up to me 100%, often on a first outing. In getting to know each other, she confessed very early on that she had a debilitating addiction to crack.

 

I assumed she was joking, and couldn't help but laugh (if not a little nervously). She laughed, too, even while confessing the next piece of grim news: she had some very serious body issues (not to mention bulimia), and had been exercising for three hours a day while on the crack diet all semester long. She asked if I'd noticed how much thinner she'd gotten over the semester. "I, uh..." I changed the topic, and she allowed it. We managed to have a normal conversation... for about 10 minutes.

Soon enough, she was back to confessional mode quicker than I could say "Check, please." No, that's not fair of me. I was actually rather appreciative that she was being so open and upfront, not wanting to deceive me. That's truly a rare and coveted quality. And yet, the nature of the things she revealed was just too much!

She confessed that she'd been stressing out over finals. While assuring her that it's pretty normal to stress out over such things, her eyes widened and started to glisten. She'd not only been stressing out, but she'd been crying every single day and needed to drink herself to sleep because of the overwhelming emotions. As if giving herself the cue, she cried for a moment. She told me it had been this way for her for years, and that she was  an emotional wreck. This time, she was the only one laughing.

She seemed to sense that the date was going sour, so I suppose the timing was right to her to pull out her ace-in-the-hole. "Do you wanna see my tattoo?" Mind you, she was wearing shorts so short that I'm not entirely convinced that they weren't panties, and a low-cut shirt revealing much cleavage and midriff, so I could only imagine where this tattoo might have been hidden.

 

Before I could answer one way or another, she stood up from the table and hastily pulled down her shorts enough to reveal her mons pubis (thank you, Google).

 

In colorful cursive letters, she had a tattoo of her own name written right above her lady parts. Strangely, it was positioned upside-down for her reading convenience. Again, a reminder: we were right by the busiest road on campus, and there were pedestrians aplenty.

Well, I didn't wait around for the "I'm an exhibitionist" confession. I decided to bring things to a close, so we parted ways and never saw each other again. It's been years now, but I can't help but wonder about that tattoo.