Chapter 1 - i meet ruby. starts a bit slow, but just wait!

Never be afraid to express your desires. I could never have hoped for a better response from what ultimately amounted to a brief conversation I gave very little thought to having. Allow me to back up and explain.

I proudly serve in my country's Navy. I have been in for 8 years, and have been married for the last 5. I spent my first couple years as a sailor, living the stereotypical sailor's life. Falling in love at every port. Spending money with little regard to my future or retirement. Getting properly "port-call drunk" enough times that I had gotten used to getting back underway efficiently while nursing a wicked hangover. It was a fun life, but even while it was going on I knew it was unsustainable. I had enlisted after graduating college, so I was already a few years older than many of the sailors the same rank as be. After nearly two full years of being a party sailor, I started looking for a more stable relationship. That is not to say I was looking for a wife, but the best things usually show up when you are not expecting them.

Being a sailor, is also like leading two lives: one on land for a few months, and one at sea for a few months more. My average time spent at homeport was about 4 months. This allowed a very active ship some downtime for repairs, and her sailors time to deal with family business and qualifications. It was the week after getting back home from a long patrol that I first saw her. A civilian friend of mine from town took me out to a quiet bar to relax. I was still winding down from our last mission. When our waitress first walked over she had that polite but confident smile of someone who genuinely happy to meet you, but was also used to being an attractive waitress in a Navy town. She was someone who did not suffer fools (or foolish sailors) well. She took our order, paying no extra attention to neither friend nor I, and left to grab our drinks. My friend turned back to me to continue the conversation we had been having, but I was still recovering. The woman had rendered me stupid.

It had only happened a couple times in my life, but every now and then I would encounter a woman that would leave me tongue-tied. Surprisingly this had very little to do with what they looked like physically, although they were all beautiful in their own right. What I mean to say, is that while I do admit to having a type (dark hair, big smile, wide hips, usually heavyset), not all of these women necessarily have fit that mold. I think the one thing that usually gets me is someone that exudes a confidence without conceit, and positivity without naivete. In the first 30-second interaction with this woman, I was hooked. It sounds so ridiculous to say now, but to this day I still find myself captivated by her.

I should also say, that while I just belabored the point about not all of the women that have this effect on me are my physical type, she was in spades. She was 5'5" with thick dark hair that fell past her shoulders. Her skin was slightly tanned, and her bright blue eyes glowed among her freckled face. Her nose was more prominent than average, but complimented the rest of her features. Her chest was average size at a full, perky B cup. Her arms were thin without being skinny, with muscled shoulders from years of being a waitress. Her average size upper body gave way to an ultra feminine, almost exaggerated set of hips that spread wide. Her legs and butt her thick, and ended in larger than average feet. For some inexplicable reason, the fact that her feet were big for her size always got to me. I would later find out that that was the one thing about herself she was self conscience of, and she could never understand why I liked it while claiming to not have a foot fetish. I think to me it was just a fitting part of a whole package, and subconsciously maybe I knew it was foreshadowing her potential.

Given how quickly everything happened after that night, it is amazing we even had time to fall in love, let alone get married a little over a year later. In the beginning she made me work for every detail. I was luck to have left that first night with her name (its Ruby, by the way, because of course it is) and phone number. Again, she was someone who was used to getting hit on by drunk sailors on a nightly basis. Thankfully, as she would tell me later, there was something in me that seemed different than many of the others. It didn't seem like I was just trying to get in her pants, I was genuinely interested in being around her. We went out on a date two weeks after that first night, and saw each other several times a week, every week after that until I got back underway 4 months later. The night before I left, I told her I loved her for the first time. She looked at me, smiled, and said "of course you do. You're going to marry me when you get back." That statement alone would have been enough to carry me through the next 5 month deployment, but her and I emailed each other every night that whole time. Sometimes they were short emails about our days; sometimes they were more in depth conversations about current events, and sometimes they were NSFW pictures that I would print out late at night, and keep under the pillow of my rack. We didn't talk about the marriage comment again after it was made, but I decided in that moment that she was absolutely right, and spent the whole deployment planning.

She was on the pier waiting for me when we got back. As a sailor there is something immensely special about having someone waiting for you on the pier. I had bought a ring on a port call while I was gone, with plans to ask her before our next deployment in another five months. Instead, I ended up asking her that first night back. While we were met with a great deal of hearty congratulations, we were also met with some concern given how quickly things were happening. None of it bothered us. We wanted to be together, and we were tired of living in a world where we weren't married. We planned a small ceremony to be held a week before the next time I left. It was during that planning that the fateful conversation was had.