THE CONDOM SNIFFING DOG

We had been dating for about a month, already we were having a power struggle. Yes condoms. No condoms. I knew better than to be swayed to the NO side, yet he was freshly divorced, very attentive, and said, “we’re not sleeping with anyone else”.

Shouldn’t you take a man at his word, particularly when he’s trying to have unprotected sex with you? “We’re exclusive!” It’s every girl’s dream. And most guy’s exit cue; hard to have that talk with any man over the age of 12, they find it unsavory. But my new boyfriend was the one to bring it up; did it mean he really wanted to go steady? Would he “pin” me? Give me his high school ring? Bring me to the senior prom? Or at least to Chi-Chi’s for a blooming onion and some serious hand holding?

He had told me on our second date (and after his third shot of tequila) that he was falling in love. The last guy who had told me that had an untreated deviated septum. We had a blow out after my 2nd week of sleepless nights on my sofa, while he slept like a baby in my bedroom on my 400 thread count sheets. His elephant-like emissions cut through walls and rang through every room. I yelled at him, he huffed out, leaving his Jumbo box of Breathe Right Nasal Strips by the bed as a painful reminder of our otherwise pleasant love affair – we never spoke again.

The snorer showed me that true love was possible, albeit noisy, and with my new beau it was apparently inextricably linked to unprotected sex. The road to my Happy Ending may be paved with Herpes, Chlamydia, HIV, even Syphilis was making a what's-old-is-new-again comeback, but I was pretty sure the phrase “love cures all” was coined by the CDC.

He and I were standing in my living room, he was off to a business trip, he snapped shut his briefcase after checking his blackberry, his coat was thrown on a bench in the front hall. After he held me for a moment or two sweetly, we stood chatting with one another before his car arrived to take him on his next business trip, he was on the road quite a bit for his job.

As we stood in a gaze, my little cute dog trotted proudly into the living room and dropped something between us on the hard wood floor, “plink!” It was a red condom packet. Rosie knew how to sit, how to spin around, and now she was exhibiting a talent for sniffing out condoms.

She apparently had gone through the pockets of my new boyfriend’s Burberry jacket and found the evidence and delivered it with the same dramatic effect as the black glove at the OJ trial.

The defendant stuttered with excuses, Rosie sat between us; looking at him, then at me, at him, then back at me with Wimbledon-like anticipation.

I took him at his word. Maybe the condom was left in his jacket from way back in the day before his six year marriage, I didn’t check the expiration date, he had snatched it up off the floor right quick. I wanted to be in love, I wanted to be exclusive. I didn’t want to think about the ramifications of unprotected sex. We hugged, I sent him on the road and he called me every night around 11. After a sweet exchange we’d hang up, contented; and I’d wonder to myself what time the strip bars closed in Detroit.