My Most Unusual Valentine's Day Ever

A few years ago I bought a package of personal training sessions and was paired up with a trainer named Jodie. Jodie was a great trainer. She always knew the right thing to say to keep me motivated, both when I was doing well and not so well. She joked around with me and in turn I dished it back to her.




Jodie was also fun to look at.


I thought about asking her out, but one day she casually mentioned a boyfriend. So I re-focused on getting into better shape. 


This particular package of sessions ran though February, and soon it was close to Valentine's Day, I had a training session with Jodie and she asked me if I had any plans. This particular Valentine's Day was in the middle of the week and I was single, so I had nothing special planned.


"What about you?" I asked her. She told me she was having dinner with her boyfriend at her place.




I kind of forgot about that conversation, until I was watching TV that Valentine's Day night and my phone rang. I looked at my caller ID. It was a phone number that wasn't programmed in, but looked vaguely familiar. So I answered.




"Hi, Phil?" says the voice on the other line.




"Yes?"




"It's Jodie."


We talked for about 20 minutes. We laughed. We had some really great conversations during my training sessions and this was one of the best. And then there was that lull that inevitably occurs in every conversation, and my curiosity got the best of me.


"So....you having dinner with the boyfriend?"


Pause.


"Oh yeah, yeah," she said, "we're getting ready to eat." And this began the wrapping up of the conversation.


After that conversation, there was that part of me that always wondered if I should've pushed the envelope with Jodie and pursued something.


That said, only she really knows why she called me -- maybe she got into a fight with the boyfriend and everything smoothed over a few minutes later. Maybe she was just being friendly. Or maybe there was no boyfriend. Who knows? Certainly not me.


In any event, at the time my training sessions were about to run out and I was about to move from Connecticut back home to Massachusetts, and I've never been excited about the long-distance thing. We did stay in touch for a little while. But I'm a firm believer in destiny, that if things are meant to be they'll happen, particularly when it comes to relationships.


I woke up this morning and for some reason this phone conversation with Jodie popped into my head. Probably because it's almost Valentine's Day. Probably because I don't think I've ever told the story. I always thought was an interesting one. It's certainly not a Valentine's Day story I expected, even if nothing really happened.