Dating Diaries 14

SO the kiss. I'll talk about it in a sec. First, I remembered an important event that happened over that Christmas break. I was having a party at my house for my 20th birthday. I offhandedly invited Raimo, more as a joke really, since he would be in Utah and I would be in California. Well Raimo showed up. He just happened to visit his brother in Yorba Linda over the date of my party and drove out to see me. In fact, we went salsa dancing the night before the party. When he showed up at my house the next day, he looked so cute in a blue polo, gift and pink roses in tow. My mom, who had never met him, knew this must be Raimo because he had brought roses. I had rented a castle bounce house and invited a big group of friends over. A few previous boyfriends/boys I still went out with showed up. In fact, Marc came over early and we had a really nice time together that day. I even kissed him goodbye (Raimo noticed I spent a little too long saying goodbye to him on the porch). But I was really glad to see Raimo too!
So back to Valentines day. Three different people asked me for a date for that night (as I said before, something weird happened sophomore year and I was dating all the time). I turned down the first two, hoping that Raimo would take me out. Take me out he did. I had had a lot of amazing Valentines in my life, but nothing could prepare me for being romanced by Raimo. There were roses everywhere I went that day, starting at my apartment, on the car windshield, delivered to me in each of my classes that day by his trusty friends, with love letters attached to each one. That night he showed up at my door with a dozen more roses and took me to Ottavio's for Italian food. We loved that restaurant so much! From that night on it was the place we always went when we had something to celebrate. After that we drove to his brother's house in Harriman for a double date. We all made valentines together, then as everyone else was setting up to watch an action movie in the family room, we snuck away and Raimo pulled out a surprise--my favorite Disney movie, Sleeping Beauty. (Funny note, Raimo actually OWNED the movie because his mom gave it to him for his 17th birthday. Thanks a lot, mom. He jokes it was inspiration so it would be in his collection when we were dating.) We watched the whole thing snuggled in the spare room. Raimo was fun to snuggle with. He had the nicest bod and he always smelled good. And during the credits of that movie we had our first kiss (kisses actually) to the tune of "Once Upon a Dream." He is a sneaky little romancer! You want details? I'll just say the credits finished but we did not :) We never made it through a whole movie without kissing after that. After all, what are movies for!? When we finally got back in the car to head home, he pulled out a present for me. A pink BYU sweatshirt. It was around 3 a.m. by the time we finally got home. About this time in our dating, things started really heating up. I never wanted to be apart from him. I thought about him all the time. We spent all of our free time together. He was my first official boyfriend in a while, and I stopped going out with other guys around that time. I was "in like" with him.