Like a Thief in the Night

Meeting people on the internet is always an adventure. Some sage sources of advice might offer cautious suggestions such as meeting your date in a public place, like a coffee shop, the first time you will have an encounter. Caution is not Gaetan's middle name, either real, imagined or metaphorical.

It should not come a a surprise, then, that Gaetan found himself one night with an interesting request from someone he had set out to meet. Don't come to the door, his date requested, but wait for my signal and come up the back staircase to my bedroom door. It seems he had a roommate and wanted to wait until roomie went to bed in his own bedroom before inviting Gaetan to the party.

The signal was appropriately modern. No 'one if by land, two if by sea' for our host, but an illuminated cell phone waved in the window. Gaetan climbed the stairs, entered the bedroom and did the deed with his lovely host, all the while being encouraged to keep the noise to minimum due to the nearby sleeping roommate.

Well, the intrigue and the constraints seem to have been worth it for Gaetan, because this host merited an encore performance. Would the rules be relaxed a bit? No. Would we find out a few more details about our host and his living arrangements? Well, yes.

Gaetan procured more information by whispering sweet nothings in Chinese into his host's ear, Gaetan knew he was Asian, but wanted to test precise origin in this stealthy way. What was interesting was that our host understood the sweet nothings because he responded to them, but his responses kept being in English or French like he was blissfully unaware that Gaetan was speaking to him in Chinese!

As it turns out, our host's roommate was in fact his boyfriend, albeit one with a separate bedroom, and the furtiveness (as opposed to the furriness, which Gaetan also brings to the party) was an elaborate ruse to keep the boyfriend in the dark.

As Gaetan walked away from encounter number two, he wondered if boyfriend ever had the occasion to look out the back window, as it had snowed and he was not leaving as sneakily as he had arrived.

The glow of the cell phone
Will signal 'coast clear'
But come in the back door
My boyfriend is here.

You'll whisper sweet nothings
But whispers they'll be
Because of my boyfriend

(Snowblind, apparently)