My gut DOES have a voice!

Yesterday, my love and I lazily wandered over to a friend's yard sale to pick up an office chair and ran into a girl I loosely knew -- a friend of a friend of a friend. She greeted me warmly and it seemed nice to connect until she tossed her hair back and playfully batted my sweetie on the shoulder. "We should hang! We should TOTALLY hang. We can party together!"

Not really my thing.

Not being the "party" type, this seemed more directed at him than me (although without much reason since neither is he). I looked uncomfortably at them both.

BF, ever observant, answered for me. "She's not really into that."

More my thing.

"That's okay," she countered. "YOU don't have to drink. He and I will just have a few." She gestured flirtatiously towards her new potential drinking buddy.

I surprised myself by what I said next. "That's not really that cool with me."

She was taken aback. "What? But it will be so much fun!"

Fun for who?

"I don't know," I said. "It just feels weird. Like, 'Oh hey, how about your boyfriend and I get drunk!' -- that just doesn't feel comfortable."

I didn't recognize myself or the words coming out. Who was saying this?

She looked at me and realized I was serious. "But you'll be RIGHT THERE," she pushed.

BF looked at me, seeing the friendliness drain out of my face. He'd never known me to be jealous or protective before and wasn't quite sure what to think.

Neither did I. I'd never done anything like this before.

The girl tried to save the conversation. "Well, it's good that you know your boundaries!"

I smiled wanly and we all stood in awkward silence.

She turned towards me and smiled. "Well. Anyway. Last time we saw each other, we said we would get together. We should totally do that! I mean, we said we would hang out, right?  This time there should be NO excuses! NONE! When are you free?"

Wait, what? I don't want to hang out. How the fuck do you say, "Can't you just be happy to see me every other year for 5 minutes in passing at some mutual friend's gathering?" Why do we have to be friends??

I mumbled something about being busy (truth) and tried to back away ungracefully to my car, waving goodbye.

I can't think of too many times I haven't wanted to be friends with someone, but this wasn't just because she seemed like the type to strip naked and lap dance on my man in front of me. But I couldn't quite put the unease into words.

Trying to avoid this scenario.

Luckily, Amazing BF trusted me even though I couldn't fully verbalize everything (thank goodness we are not new anymore) and later, I confirmed with a few other friends that she had some issues that made her unstable, toxic and dangerous.

My gut had grabbed me and shook hard, but heeding it made me feel excessively bitchy. But maybe it's important to be bitchy sometimes.