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Yeah, I know. I’m completely full of shit.
I had held out the stupid hope that when I’d put a clock on how long Taavi’s interest in me would keep, that it actually would keep. And now that it apparently had, I didn’t have the faintest idea what the fuck to do with myself. Or him.
I’d started off spectacularly, by making reservations somewhere trendy, which I’d not only had to cancel, but, because I was stuck in a fucking swamp, I’d basically forced Taavi to have to call them about changing the reservation, and then because the next day wasFriday, we couldn’t actually get reservations there again.
Which meant I had no plans at all for what the fuck we were going to do.
By the time I finished dicking around and going to see Mays, I had an hour to come up with some.
I thought about texting Raj or Ward, but neither of them would ever let me live it down. I thought about texting Doc, but he would probably tell Ward—and see previous problem. And then I thought about Elliot, but it wasn’t like Elliot knew about restaurants and shit in Richmond since he lived a thousand miles away, even though I was sure he’d at least be sympathetic. Not that sympathetic got me anywhere.
And like fuck was I asking anybody from the job I no longer worked at.
So I asked the internet, which gave me a whole laundry-list of things I had very little interest in doing. I didn’t want to go anywhere noisy, which put most bars out of the question. Especially gay bars. I’m fine with the drinking and snacks concept, but I like hearing my conversation and I hate dancing, and the only kind of bars remaining after those get taken out of the equation aren’t really places to take a date, especially if you ever want to see them again.
I wasn’t interested in any currently-playing movies, although I suppose I could have asked Taavi if he was—but I hadn’t, and springing that on someone last-minute didn’t seem like a great way to start a possible relationship.
I did like hiking, but we were going out at night, and while Taavi could probably see pretty well in the dark, my night vision isn’t nearly as good as a shifter’s. Better than a human, but it was still probably a stupid idea to try to go hiking for any significant distance in the dark. That and early-fall sweatiness wasn’t a great look on anybody, even me.
Museums? I had no idea if Taavi liked museums. Or what kind. And most of them closed at five anyway.
One site suggested a roller-rink, and that was the point at which I closed the browser, because I’m not fucking twelve.
I gave up and texted Doc.
Maymont?was the response that came back to me.Canal walk after dark?
They were good suggestions. I then spent another twenty minutes calling different downtown restaurants until I found a place that had an open reservation so that we didn’t spend the night driving all over the fucking place.
And by the time I did all that, I had to change clothes so I looked like I gave a fuck. Unlike my charming boss, I have a sense of fashion, but my closet looked like plainclothes-cop-chic because I’d spent the better part of my adult life working and not going on dates… so I didn’t have date clothes.
Since I didn’t have anything particularly fashionable or sexy, I went for a pair of jeans I’d barely worn, a lavender t-shirt that perfectly matched my eyes, and a grey-and-white short-sleeve button down that I left open. Casual, but definitely drew attention to the unusual shade of my eyes and my milk-pale skin and hair. If I was going to be a drop-dead gorgeous elf, the least I could do was try to punch it up a bit when I wasn’t trying to be professional.
And then I braided my hair and stood in front of the mirror in my bathroom and wondered what the flying fuck I was doing.
I knew literally what I was doing. I was about to go pick up Taavi, whom I hadn’t seen in six months, to take him to a park and then out to dinner and on an evening stroll by the river because he was still under the delusion that he actually liked me. And because I was pathetic and lonely, I was humoring him.
It wouldn’t go anywhere. I knew that.
But would it really be so bad to, just for once, go out on a date without the weight of expectations hanging over my head?
I was forty-one fucking years old. You’d think by this point I’d have gotten over the weird feelings of guilt that always seemed to accompany things like one night stands. Which is why I’d never had one. I’d had offers, but my stupid nice-people Midwestern upbringing meant I came with a pile of hang-ups about that sort of thing.
In my twenties, when I would have been inclined to say yes, I hadn’t been nearly hot enough to get the kinds of offers I’d gotten since my Arcanavirus-induced transformation. By then I’d run through all the really desperate hormones and was starting to want something more than just sex.
I sighed, glaring at my own reflection.
So what if all this date was going to be was sex?
Sex was fun. At least, I had a vague memory of sex being fun. Because self-hand-jobs don’t actually count as sex unless someone else is at least in the room.
I had a date with a man I found almost painfully attractive, and he was also attracted to me. This was a good thing.
So why was the anticipation I felt more like dread than excitement?
* * *
Taavi had also chosenjeans and a t-shirt, his jeans a dark acid wash and his teal t-shirt tighter than I would have been comfortable wearing, although I appreciated it on him. The color offset his coppery skin and the ink-black of the tattoo covering his left arm and creeping up onto his neck—it made me wonder just how much of his chest it also covered.
