Tanner meets me at a wine bar in the West Village.
He’s waiting at the bar when I walk in, and he stands up when he sees me, and his face does the thing a man’s face does when he’s happy about what he ordered, and for a second, I feel it. That little flicker. The reminder that I’m still a person men look at.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” He leans in to hug me. He smells like cologne and Tide laundry detergent.
We sit down, and he orders a bottle of red without asking what I like, which—fine. Okay. I can work with that.
He’s nice. That’s the problem. He’s fundamentally, fine-ly, pleasantly nice. He asks about my job and listens to my answer. He tells me about his job, and I listen in return. He completed a marathon last year, has a dog named Chip, and mentions he’s allergic to shellfish, which he tells me unprompted. Okay.
I drink my wine. I laugh when I’m supposed to laugh. I make eye contact. I do all the things a person on a date does.
And I feel nothing.
Not a flicker. Not a hum. Not the faintest electrical charge. Tanner is a perfectly good man having a perfectly good dinnerwith a woman who is mentally at home in her best friend’s kitchen, wondering if he’s put the twins to bed yet.
By the time we’re an hour in, I know. I know the way you know a pot’s about to boil over. This isn’t going anywhere. It was never going anywhere. I’m not here, not really, and no amount of blueberry muffins or black silk tops is going to change that.
He walks me out at 9:15. We hug goodbye on the sidewalk. He says we should do this again sometime, and I smile and say something noncommittal, and I think we both know it’s a no.
I stand on the sidewalk watching his cab pull away, and I check the time.
9:16 PM.
Too early. Way too early. If I go home now, Archer will know. He’ll do the math, and he’ll figure out this date was a dud, and I don’t want him to have that information. I don’t want to walk into that house feeling like I failed at something I wasn’t even sure I wanted.
So I don’t go home.
I walk three blocks to a little ice cream place and I get a cone—a scoop of mint chocolate chip. I eat it walking down Bleecker Street in a black silk top and my good jeans, and the city is doing its Saturday night thing around me, all sidewalk music and laughter and couples arguing about where to go next, and I feel—not great. But better. Better than the wine bar.
I stop at a bookstore on the way back to the car. I’m not looking for anything. I just want to be somewhere warm and quiet for a while. I wander through fiction and end up in memoirs and pick up a book about a woman who walked two thousand miles because her life was falling apart, and I read the first page standing in the aisle. The first page is about how nothing in her life was working and she didn’t know how to fix it, and I almost put the book back on the shelf because readingabout my own life in someone else’s memoir feels like a little too much.
I buy it anyway.
By the time I get back to the car, it’s 10:02. Late enough. Late enough that a woman might come home from a good evening with a man she might see again.
I drive home.
The house is quiet when I let myself in, and most of the lights are off. I drop my bag and walk into the living room.
He’s on the couch.
His phone is on his chest, the TV is on low, and his eyes are closed. His breathing is slow and even.
He’s asleep.
He fell asleep waiting for me.
I stand in the doorway and look at him. His legs are too long for the couch—one foot hangs off the end, his sock dark against the pale fabric.
Something in my chest caves in.
He was worried. He made himself stay up until I got home, and when the couch and the game and the day caught up with him, he fell asleep anyway, waiting.
“Arch.”
Nothing.
