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I tried to be excited, but I really don’t like surprises. Jasmine gave me a heads up in a beautiful email a few weeks ago that she wanted time away together, which I was down for. Then she called yesterday to say we were “going out of town for a ‘fall getaway.’ Ugh! One, it was still hot as hell even though it was supposed to be fall, the temps are still hovering around the high nineties most days and two, I don’t know where we are going. Chalk it up to my innate impulse to be in control. Plus, I was feeling kind of apprehensive. Jasmine implied she wanted to be more exclusive, although she hadn’t come right out and said that, and I refused to even attempt to read anyone’s mind.
Truthfully though, I had not been seeing anyone else with any regularity although the opportunity had presented itself. Just last night I was out to dinner with John and Dre and a gorgeous woman with the smoothest dark chocolate skin I’d ever seen sent a drink to the table. I raised the glass and mouthed “thank you” without engaging her in conversation. Ugh, I was losing my edge.
All of this ruminated in my mind as Jasmine and I made small talk in the car on the way to God knows where. I tried to relax and put on a happy face as we headed out Interstate 70 in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But when she took an exit headed towards Virginia, I found myself instantly irritated. I’d never been a fan of the more remote areas of Virginia, hadn’t even wanted to drive through them. There was not enough melanin out here for me. And there was too much talk about family values and being Christians with inconsistent evidence of either.
Once we passed I-66 and started seeing signs for Luray Caverns, Jasmine announced that that was our destination. I’d heard of Luray Caverns of course, the stalactite formations were beautiful on brochures, but they weren’t necessarily on my bucket list of places to see.
“You know we’ve passed that same gas station three times now,” I informed Jasmine.
“Yes, I know. I’m a bit turned around,” she admitted.
“And when were you going to say something?” I asked, amused by her being so headstrong.
“I don’t know. Ah!” She exclaimed as we turned into a motel driveway with pine trees and a bear on the modest welcome sign. Jasmine actually looked excited, and I tried to match my facial expression to her mood but was having a hard time catching up. “Wait here,” she told me, “while I go check us in.” A woman with the motel’s logo on her shirt walked past the car, glanced, and lingered slightly longer than I thought necessary. I was not generally a suspicious person, but my intuition was already hyper-vigilant. The woman turned to enter a sliding glass door.
Jasmine came out with keys, and we drove around the short, squat building that needed a paint job twenty years ago. We gathered our bags and upon opening the door, Jasmine looked puzzled. “This can’t be our room, I requested a king room,” she said. The room we were standing in had two double beds. Uh oh, here we go. “Wait here, I need to rectify this,” Jasmine instructed and went back to the registration desk. I stayed put in the dank-smelling concrete box, knowing this was going to be ugly!
Jasmine came back cussing! “This is bullshit! I paid for a king room!” She said she ended up having to speak to the manager who said there were no king rooms left, but also threw in that king rooms were for “couples.” She said their argument escalated when she asked for a refund of the difference. She informed the manager she would take it up with her credit card company and would not be staying the second night. Secretly, I was relieved that we wouldn’t be staying any longer than necessary in this one-star room.
The next morning didn’t go that well either. Before heading to the caverns, we went into the little office to return the keys. “Ma’am, we have to charge you for leaving early.”
“Excuse me?” Jasmine questioned.
“You reserved the room for two nights. We charge for early departures,” the lady behind the wood-paneled, Formica-topped counter said.
“Have you lost your ever-loving mind? You will NOT disrespect us!” Jasmine responded.
I fully expected to see the local sheriff show up. I had never seen Jasmine so much as raise her voice. By the time the manager was called again, there was no doubt he was glad we were leaving because somehow the fee immediately disappeared, probably because it didn’t exist in the first place.
Needless to say, by the time we finished with Bob and Becky and all of the extracurricular activity, I wasn’t feeling the tour, especially since I was unprepared for the drop in temperature inside the caverns. It was dark and freezing down there! I really couldn’t appreciate the rock formations—although I must admit, they were stunning—and Jasmine knew I wasn’t listening to the tour guide. She offered to buy me a sweatshirt and I foolishly exacerbated the already tense situation when I responded that I didn’t want anything with this place’s name on it.
We rode back to Baltimore in virtual silence. I didn’t want our first trip together to be our last... the traffic, getting lost—apparently Jasmine’s sense of direction was a bit skewed—and having to deal with other people’s perception of how they viewed love were all a bit much. In my mind, if my money was green, I should get respectable and appropriate service. What was Jasmine thinking? It may as well had been 1952 because that was what western Virginia felt like to me.
I wasn’t very cordial when she dropped me off. Jasmine had tried to do something nice, something different. I should have asked her to come in, but I was grouchy and tired and just wanted to take a shower and rest. I jumped out the car, grabbed my bag from the backseat, and said, “Let’s chat soon.”