Question: Do I give off creepy stalker vibes?

Hit me again: Am I delusional?

So I’m on the ferry back to the mainland after spending the day on an island off the coast (acquiring along the way a most hideous skirt tan that I must try to remedy once back home). Gorgeous weather, lovely beaches and a great ice-cream place in the town centre. The waters were calm, but just as I settled down to gaze out the window, the voice of the captain (a man lacking in skill of the PA system), blared into life from the speaker placed directly over my head. And it must have been loud too, I had my music plugged in at a volume level of about twenty, and I could still hear him. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard the blah blah blah… a member of the crew will show you how to use the lifejacket so if we could have your attention for the next few minutes.”

As the loudspeaker crackled back into obscurity a harried looking guy strode to the centre of the deck with said lifejacket in hand. The first thing I noticed about him was that he looked far too young to be one of the cabin crew. As in could I really trust this guy with my life in the very unlikely but also very possible instance of the boat crashing into an unsuspected iceberg, plunging us all to our watery deaths among the fish and coral. And if he was the representation of the rest of the cabin crew, so help me god but we’re all going to die. Just when my seafaring paranoia kicked into full-fledged mental hysteria, I kind of… stepped back from my imagination and noticed his more physical attributes. (Not to mention the fact that the worst of my fears were allayed by the reassuring sight of a capable-looking, much more mature man, also wearing the uniform of the ferry company.) Well, let’s not keep you in suspense here – brown hair, great cheekbones, average looking but my!, what a smile – the last of which I got the full dazzling extent of when I approached the refreshments counter for my complimentary cup of coffee.

It just so happened that the refreshments counter was in my direct line of sight and the certain young cabin crewmember had been stationed at the post for the duration of my ferry ride. (What? I’d picked my window seat before I even knew he was there…) As I swirled my coffee, waiting for it to cool, surreptitiously eavesdropping on the conversation of the two Billabonged girls sitting next to me (“And then I was like, NO WAY…”), my eyes kept wandering back to Young Crew Guy. (I can’t possibly imagine why.) What was really strange was that every so often his eyes seemed to dart in my direction too… (Well, either at me or at one or the other of our two Miss Billabongs. But I’m pretty sure it was me. Several times he seemed to have seen me seeing him and looked away.)

Thus we continued this strange charade of “Are you looking at me? Yes, but are YOU looking at me?” until I finally decided to put everyone out of their miseries and go indulge in a Kit-Kat, using that as an excuse to strike up a conversation with him. Just as I had begun to get out of my seat the infallible ferry captain once again activated the PA and informed us all at 25 decibels that we were approaching the shore and would dock in approximately two minutes. Lovely. Regrettably bowing out of my Kit-Kat purchase, I sat back down in my seat. Purely unintentionally, I happened to catch the eye of Young Crew Guy, again, and he seemed just about to acknowledge me as he smiled and opened his mouth as if to say something… and my eyes kept moving to fix on some unnamed spot outside my right-hand window. (Hey, so I don’t usually make conversation across a room with random hot guys I’ll never see again. Can you blame me for panicking?)

When I sneaked a peek back at Young Crew Guy the smile had disappeared off his face and he was wiping down the bench with a look of abject misery. So at least I could confirm that he HAD indeed been looking at me unless he had just been simultaneously snubbed in exactly the same way by Miss Billabong 1 sitting next to me (who at the time was still engaged in passionate conversation with Miss Billabong 2.) Just for the hell of it I started smiling really slowly, looking all the way around the room, making sure I caught his eye and just kept smiling and looking out the window until I felt the smile edge past Subtly Intriguing to Deranged Lunatic. Then I decided to stop. And yes, poor Young Crew Guy looked utterly confused.

Odd. Maybe I should have bought that Kit-Kat after all.

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