Tequila and a Bullet: Our Love Story

No, I'm not talking about some weird Quentin Tarantino rom-com.  As promised last time, it's the story of how M and I met and eventually got married.  Obligatory censor's warning included for sexual content and graphic violence.  Everyone under 18 gone now?  Ok, good.  Let's get started.

Picture it.  Ottawa, 2005.

 

I learned everything I know about storytelling from Sophia Petrillo. 

A beautiful young girl leaves her family and moves halfway across the country to take a new job.  She meets the man who will be her future husband at a mutual friend's housewarming party.

OK, so the story of how we actually met is pretty lame.  Bear with me, it gets better.

M and I hit it off and spent all night chatting, and I had a feeling he might ask me out.  But as I would later learn, my husband is nothing if not a procrastinator, so he took his sweet goddamn time doing it.  So long, in fact, that I had started dating someone else and had to regretfully turn him down.  By the time I was single again about a month later, M was himself taken and would remain so for two whole years.  I moved on, but always kind of thought of him as the one that got away.  When he and his long-term girlfriend finally broke up, I circled the carcass of their relationship like a vulture hoping to pick up the spoils.  But strangely (to me, anyway), M didn't seem interested and ended up in yet another relationship with someone else.  I took my bruised ego and sulked off, vowing never to give him another thought.  Which would be easy, because I had just found out that I would be transferring my organization's office in Toronto in a few months.

In January 2009 I was going on vacation to Mexico with a group of friends, and found out at the last minute that M had split from his most recent girlfriend and had been encouraged to tag along to lift his spirits.  Instead of being excited, I was actually kind of aggravated.  I'd given up on this guy, but I knew that with alcohol comes sluttiness (for me, anyway!) and I really, really didn't want to waste my week trying to get his attention.  Well, that lasted until about the third shot of tequila, and we ended up (finally!) hooking up on the beach on the first night of the trip.  We stumbled back to his hotel room...where I promptly passed out on the bed and he spent the night praying to the porcelain god.

When I awoke the next morning, I felt a) terribly hungover and b) mortified.  I had no idea how M was going to act about all this, or if we would spend the whole next week being completely awkward around each other and ruin the vacation for everyone.  We ended up being cool about it, and then the unexpected happened: after dinner on the second night (a totally sober one since most of us couldn't handle the thought of more booze yet) M asked me if I wanted to come back to his room again.  We fooled around some more, and with consensual faculties intact we ended up having sex.  We had a brief conversation where we agreed that, since I was headed to Toronto in six months, this would be a no-strings-attached situation and we'd just have fun for the next little while without worrying about the future.

Now ladies.  We ALL know how well most women are able to compartmentalize our feelings, and remain completely emotionally detached from a guy that we've been pining over for the better part of four years.  I was pretty sure I couldn't do it, and yet threw myself into the situation anyway knowing that heartbreak was coming in six short months.  M and I went on some dates, watched a lot of Battlestar Galactica, and did the naked tango on the regular for a few months, but never discussed the inevitable.  It was destined to be a bad situation.

And then M got shot.

 

I'm totally resisting my urge to leave you with a cliffhanger right now.

One day in March, after we'd been "dating" for about three months, M went to a shooting range with a couple of buddies who are in the army.  He's a bit of a military enthusiast and though he doesn't own a gun, he'd gone shooting before and is apparently a pretty good shot, so I had no reason to worry.  No reason, that is, until two of his friends showed up at my office to tell me that M had had a small accident at the range and was in the hospital.  One of those fuckers actually said to me, "He's fine, he just needs a few stitches.  You should call him now."  So I, a bit freaked out but reassured that he was OK, called his phone.

A clearly drug-enhanced M answered and when I asked what happened, he slurred: "Don't worry, baby.  The bullet went right through."

I halted, then glanced at "it's just stitches" guy (who looked sheepish).  "The bullet went right through what, M?"

"My leg."

I resisted the urge to punch "it's just stitches" guy and told M I was on my way to meet him at the hospital.  The full story, as I would later learn, was this: after firing a bunch of rounds, M had gone to put the gun back in the holster he was wearing on his hip.  As it was a chilly day, he was also wearing a big fleecy sweatshirt, the kind that has elastic loops at the bottom to cinch it tighter.  One of the loops caught around the trigger as he was pushing the gun down into the holster, and BAM!  The gun fired.  The bullet entered the top outside of his calf, travelled between his tibia and fibula (I'll just give you a second to absorb how absolutely miniscule the chance of that happening was, as opposed to shattering one of his leg bones) and exited on the inside of his leg, just above his ankle.  (Note: for those of you shouting "why wasn't the safety on??" I'll explain as best I can, since I know nothing about firearms, that this type of gun doesn't have a safety as such.  Rather, the pull load on the trigger is so heavy that it by itself is deemed impossible to fire accidentally.  To which I say a big fat HAH!)

The result of having your casual sex partner who you secretly have genuine feelings for get shot is going to be one of two things: either you're going to cut and run because hospitals and surgeries = scary, or it's going to bring you closer together, and damn fast.  In our case, it was obviously the latter.  I quickly leaped into "serious girlfriend" mode, spending days at the hospital while M went through numerous surgeries to release the pressure that was building inside his calf and then do a skin graft to sew it all back up again.  (Warning: graphic content but if you are curious this is the surgery he had and yes, his leg looked almost exactly like those pictures.  It's still a pretty heinous scar.)  It was only after meeting his mom and dad for the first time in a hospital room (fun times!) that it occurred to me that maybe I should ask M for his thoughts on having me around so much and whether or not it was something he actually wanted.  Lucky for both of us, he did.  (Although I did have a laugh later when he told me that, immediately after the gunshot while he was still on the ground being attended to by the range safety officer, he had been asked if he had a wife or girlfriend or anyone who should be notified.  He says that he was verging on answering "it's complicated..." but then just went with "yeah, call my girlfriend".)

M and I were pretty much inseparable during his recuperation, which took several months.  Although his mom had come to town to stay with him and help him out, I headed over to his place after work pretty much every day.  My move to Toronto was looming, but with everything that was going on we still hadn't talked about what was going to happen.  We'd been through so much together that I couldn't imagine splitting up.  I wondered if our planned breakup still stood.  Finally one day I got the courage to ask him what he wanted to do about it, and we agreed to give long distance a try.  Shortly thereafter he proposed, and found himself a position in Toronto and moved to join me.

And that, my friends, is the story of our relationship.  The way I figure it, the moral of the story kind of depends on your frame of mind.  If you're a hopeless romantic, it's this: that true love will eventually win out, no matter how bad your timing and how many obstacles you face.  And if you're a cynic, it's this: don't play with guns.  You might end up shot.  Or worse...married.