Up A Mountain With An American

Nothing (salacious) to see here

last Saturday I went up a mountain. and thank god for that, eh? could not have picked a better day to have relocated to the middle of nowhere and, subsequently, up in the sky.

I got the train early in the morning and met my fellow mountain-walkers at the station. we were doing an organised charity walk and we all live in various different places all over the country so none of us had met before. we travelled nearer to the bottom of the mountain by bus, on which I happened to sit next to an American man. we hit it off right away, immediately chatting and joking. this is the kind of thing I mean when I say I need to experience the person in 3D to be able to have an idea of whether I could even potentially like them. that I need more of a vibe than a picture and info, hence my aversion to dating apps. maybe i’m not great at explaining this. i’ll spare you any further attempts by stopping now.

to give you a bit of a mental image, he’s 32, has blue eyes and kind of sandy coloured hair. he also, unfortunately, says things like ‘bro.’

to further aid your mental image, I look exactly like 1995 BBC Elizabeth Bennet. :)

it’s not difficult for me to surmise why the American was instantly attracted to me. it is because I was wearing the sexiest accessory on the market: the travel sickness wristband. who amongst us can resist a nauseous wannabe emo?¹

in all seriousness, we did click straight away, and we spent the journey on small talk (love to see it) and small jokes, him behaving like a normal person, me staring straight ahead, eyes fixed to the road in front of us, so as to avoid vomiting on the American.

it’s very difficult to go up a mountain ten abreast so we mostly split off into pairs. and while I spoke with everyone at some point on the walk (it was a long day. a loooong day.), I did spend most of it with the American. he’s considerably taller than I am (easily by a foot, probably more. I can’t estimate heights with any kind of accuracy when they're much taller than me. i’m approximately one whisper over five foot, if we want to use technical measurements) and I am extremely stubborn and very competitive so I was never going to ask him to slow down, instead trying to match him stride for stride. although trying to match his stride looked a bit like me travelling up the mountain by way of lunges, as I was practically doing the splits with each step. unbeknownst to me, I would be paying for this move for the following three to four days.

once we’d exhausted our respective ‘personal life’ and ‘career’ sections of our hypothetical Wikipedia pages (loooong day), we moved on to hobbies. when I told him about this blog, he said something along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t mind helping you with that project.’ and I thought to myself I don’t really want an editor, actually so I just laughed it off.

needless to say I didn’t think at this stage that there was anything more to it as being out of breath and a bit sweaty, lungeing up a mountain is not my peak attractiveness state. and I wasn’t going to wear makeup to climb a mountain so I would imagine my face was a particularly luminous shade of red, clashing with my bright pink rain jacket.

later in the pub, he told me he was being serious when he said he’d be interested in participating in my project. when I still evidently hadn’t taken that as a statement of interest, presumably made clear by my easy-to-read face, he leaned forward and said ‘I. like. you.’ which did get the point across (third time lucky). so I kissed him in the pub. and outside the pub. and in the smoking area.²

I probably wouldn't have found his forwardness so endearing were it not for the inherent confidence and suavity implied purely by his americanness. (I wonder if this sentence is insane to read for the Americans amongst us?)

before the night had reached its natural conclusion, I was going to have to leave for my train(s) home. he lives a reasonable taxi ride away from where we were so he said I should stay at his and go home tomorrow.

I responded with a straight ‘i’m not going to have sex with you.’ I think the directness of that took him aback slightly. but that was probably the bluntness of the statement coupled with the fact that I have an accent which, although many people find it charming thank you very much, can come across quite abrasive (feel free to guess where i’m from lol). and I think that can be quite jarring for people who aren’t from here. I mean, I am a small woman. a small woman who startles easily. (like, if you want to give me a fright, i’m going to get a fright. even if you don’t want to give me a fright, I will still probably get a fright.) I also happen to sound a bit like I wouldn’t turn down an invitation to fight you on a street corner.

he then kind of laughed and was like ‘…that’s fine??’ so I did stay with him and at no point did he make even the suggestion of trying anything beyond what I was comfortable with. and I hate to say I found that to be particularly gentlemanly or gallant, but, you know…

for completeness’s sake (because if a friend was telling me this story I would ask her), he lives in a little semi-detached two bedroom house, relatively modern. one bedroom is his office. it’s very neutrally decorated, but it is decorated, and very clean.

we had a really lovely night, actually. we stayed at the pub until closing, got a taxi back to his, then sat in his living room for a couple of hours before going to bed. I could see us doing the whole staying-up-all-night-talking-and-stuff thing were it not for the fact that we were absolutely knackered after having done the whole walking-up-and-down-a-mountain thing.

the next morning, he made breakfast (croissants with cheese and tomato, the components for which he just had in his cupboard/fridge as a normal breakfast which is quite extravagant, imo). then I headed home. I was starting to feel the mountain in my leg muscles. I had also slept in my contact lenses so by this point they were practically welded to my eyeballs, to the extent that I thought I might have to employ a wallpaper scraper when I eventually had the opportunity to remove them. worth it, though.

I don’t necessarily think I’ll pursue this any further. I think it was just a lovely standalone incident. also, he lives so far away. we have been texting all week though, and he keeps asking if i’ve written about him yet. I shan’t be sending him a link (actually maybe I will, new thought as I read this back for typos), but I will probably keep talking to him until it inevitably peters out.

thanks for being here! <3

1. maybe I mean punk. I don’t know. I googled it and I still am not sure what subculture I want to refer to.

2. I don’t, if you’re curious.