The first time I met my husband, the last thing I thought about him was that we were meant for each other. In fact, I believed quite the opposite. I was a junior in high school when I met Cole, and he was dating my best friend at the time, Gretta. There were so many reasons why I didnt like him. He never took her to our prom, she went by herself. At her graduation he sat in the bleachers as far away from the stage as he could, chewed gum like a cow with cud and did not applaud when his girlfriend won one award after another. At her graduation party, he found it hilarious to throw dead palmetto bugs at me while I was in the pool. I found him rude, his sense of humor childish, he had bleached-blond hair which was awful and worst of all, he was a musician. His only redeeming quality was that he lived over an hour away from us, so Gretta only got to see him on the weekends. Of course that meant listening to her talk about him in our second-period chorus class with that dreamy voice and stars in her eyes.
They broke up that summer, and being young and pretty, Gretta bounced back easily. She seemed to go from bad to worse as far as boyfriends go, but her romantic life was her own. She and Cole remained friends and an on-and-off couple during her first year at College of Charleston. It was that summer after I graduated that I began to see Cole first as a friend, then as more. Gretta and I went to visit Cole one day in August of 1996, and I found him to be quieter, more reserved, his sense of humor and hairstyle matured. I noticed that day how much we had in common, how we liked things and understood things which Gretta didnt.
We were beginning to fall in love. The next week I moved from the sleepy little town of Bishopville to begin my freshman year at USC. I was so overwhelmed by the size of the campus, and being suddenly able to just go out and do something, I put Cole and my feelings for him in the back of my mind. I began to settle into a college routine. Sleep, Class, Sleep, Class, Eat, Study, Shower, Sleep. That was my daily life as a college freshman.
A month went by and I rarely thought of Cole. One September day I was looking for an aunts telephone number and ran across his instead. Jackpot! Gretta would never have to know if I just called him, and even if she did, was it such a big deal?