Like any sweet boyfriend, he just called to say, "Honey, you're so lucky I'm a one-woman man."
It was a frigid December night back in 2008. She and her kids were at home dining on Jack in the Box after an exhilarating outing at the Y when her boyfriend's fateful call interrupted.
"What he had to say just fit his personality," the woman, 35, now recalls.
Her boyfriend went on to describe how he rescued a helpless young woman whose car was in a ditch. The girl was overly flirtatious, he said. But naturally he ignored the advances, being a "one-woman man."
That next week, the start of the new year, the girlfriend picked up a fresh copy of the Inlander. Flipping first to the "I Saw You" section, something peculiar caught her eye. There in black and white, she read an ad that included all the relevant details from her boyfriend's roadside tale.
Stuck in Snow
You: Cutie in white Ford Escort, stuck up side street and Francis. Me: "Bad Ass" going up Francis in reverse. I helped you get on your way, but you have been stuck in my mind since. Can we meet again? Let's go snowboarding.
She knew he would deny it if confronted. So like any intelligent, wronged female, she emailed him using a friend's account, writing something along the lines of "Hey, this is your cutie. It's so good to hear from you. When should we go snowboarding?"
Her guy wrote back, more than excited.
Suspicions confirmed, she let him have it, replying: "Actually, this is your girlfriend. Actually, this is your ex-girlfriend."
After a nine-month relationship, she didn't hear from him for four days. When they eventually connected, he didn't even bother to deny it.
"He said that I misunderstood the tone of the ad," she says.
Looking back on it all, the woman says she never saw their coupling going very far anyway. It was her first after her divorce.
"He was really cute, an ex-hockey player," she says. "He just wasn't the brightest tool in the shed."
She later learned that the "bad ass" and the "cutie" would go snowboarding, but nothing ever blossomed. Today, she still can't believe he thought he wouldn't be caught.
"Everyone reads the 'I Saw Yous,'" she says. "It was stupid to put something in there and assume I wouldn't see it, because he had to assume that. I'm pretty sure he didn't see [my response] coming." ♦
