We owe it all to Givenchy.

This is a story of how two people met, fell in love, and I became excited about Valentines Day for the first time in my life. I'll try to tell the shorter version, but tend to be a bit of a wind bag sometimes. Bear with me.

Kwesi and I met in February of 2010 through friends. Virtually at first - thanks to the vast, and sometimes invasive world of Facebook - he contacted me offering to photoshop and remove the annoying girls who photo-bombed this picture at my friends wedding...

Even giving me his phone number so that I could call and he could guide me through how to send him the original file version of the picture. Or some other tech-geek jargon that I don't understand.

My first thoughts on this guy? Wow! He is, like, SO. NICE. 

And having only just started allowing nice guys into my life, I also thought Wow! He is, like, SO. WEIRD.

About a week later, we met in person for the first time at an 80's cover band show:

(the very first picture of us, and the start of a great friendship.)

It didn't matter how nice he was though, he was also very off-limits. He was married at the time, and despite some past indiscretions of mine, I am no home-wrecker.

Fast forward 1.5 years though, and he is single now. He has dated people that I didn't like, and I have dated people that he didn't like. All the while, we are just friends....becoming best-attached-at-the-hip-friends through late spring and early summer of 2011.

We were road-trip-aholics, and PG-rated sleepover junkies. We drunk dialed each other, and skipped work to spend the day on bicycles, eating lunch on sun-filled patios in the market.

The energy between us was constantly shifting from platonic to potential? Back to platonic again? Back to potential? And in true girly-girl fashion, it was driving me right. out. of. my. mind. 

But I played it cool. Real cool.

Because I AM cool, obviously.

Sometime in mid-June of that year, we were shopping in Montreal together, when a tall, handsome man walked by and he smelled like.....ummmm.......he smelled like sex and love and chocolate. He smelled like everything you have ever loved all rolled into perfect-ass-hugging jeans, and the kind of fitted white t-shirt typically reserved for "handy-man inspired adult videos porn".

I could still smell his cologne when he was 20 paces ahead of us on Ste-Catherine street, and I wouldn't shut up about it. "Oh my God! He smells sooooooo good! Do you smell that?!?! It's that guy! Can't you smell him?!? Jesus, he smells amazing!"

I am the exact kind of girl that these perfume companies go after. The kind of girl who smells Drakkar Noir and goes back to being 15 years old, or remembers an ex-boyfriend every time she catches a whiff of Aqua Di Gio. And, as it turns out, I am also the girl who will chase you down the street to ask what panty-removing cologne you happen to be wearing that day.

Handsome mans answer:  Givenchy Intense Play.

Sweet Jesus. Yes. 

And now it is 2 weeks later. June 25th, to be exact. I am at a wedding in Ottawa, Kwesi is at a party in Vaudreuil. Drunk-texting me, telling me to come to the party. In Vaudreuil!

And while it sounds crazy to some, I agreed to drive over there if my closest friends attending that wedding left by 10:30 p.m. Which is exactly what happened. So I hopped in my little red jet-engine car, with a packed bag in the trunk (just in case), and hit the highway for 1.5 hours.

I showed up at midnight, stone-cold-sober amid the drunken chaos and found Kwesi on the dance floor. Customary hello hugs and lip kisses, and guess what he has on!?!?! 

Givenchy Intense Play.

I playfully punched him in the arm, and called him an asshole. He pulled me close and we danced, and in the very early morning hours of that party, fueled with liquid courage, he finally kissed me. A real kiss! 

We finally moved past my standard lip-kiss that night, and the rest, as they say, is history.

xoxox
~J