The Infernal Dance of the Onion Ring Thief

Story Submitted by Connie:

Ryan wrote me online while I was in the midst of a long dating drought.  I had been focused on working out some personal issues when he contacted me with a witty first message.  A line that it included was, "I can be a handful, but in a good way."  One thing led to another, and we were off on our first date.

We were meeting up pretty late in the evening.  To start, he showed up in a white jumpsuit, with a large black zipper up the front.  I briefly wondered if it was a work outfit, but he had told me that he did work with linguistics.  I'm normally not superficial, but it's hard not to notice such a thing.

"Let's go dancing!" he suggested.

I asked, "Can we do dinner, first?"

"Let's go dancing!" he repeated.

I told myself that I'd do less than an hour of dancing before insisting that we do dinner.

His dance moves were... well... erratic.  And they involved a lot of squats and bends.  He attracted a lot of looks, as a squatting guy in a white jumpsuit no doubt usually would.

I tried to have a good time and just dance a bit, but I was becoming hungrier, and I didn't think that it was very considerate of him to disregard that.  I asked him after a half-hour if we could grab something to eat.

He nodded and we left the dancing place to visit a pub nearby.  We both ordered sandwiches that came with either fries or onion rings.  I ordered onion rings, he ordered fries.

When our food was served, he didn't eat any of his fries, but he helped himself to plenty of my onion rings.

"After dinner, let's dance!" he suggested again.

I said, "Can we do something else?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know.  Maybe coffee, maybe a movie, maybe some live music somewhere?"

He ate one of the last of my onion rings and said, "I'm just really in a mood to dance."

"Stop eating my onion rings."

"They're really good."

I moved my plate away from him and ate the last two before he could grab them.  He looked at my plate for a good while before breaking his own stare and saying, "Come on.  Let's go dancing."

I said, "If we go dancing again, then I only want to do it for a little bit.  I want to go do something else after."

He agreed to that, and we went back to the dance place.  He even received some applause when he walked in, as some people at the bar recognized him from before.  It was hard not to.

We danced for a bit and I reminded him of our deal.  He said, "Okay.  You can go do something else.  I'm going to stay here."

I left him there.  He wrote me an e-mail to tell me that I missed some great dancing.  I wrote him back to tell him that I didn't want to see him again.