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zero.
Niles takes you dancing, though neither of you are quite yourselves. None of it’s real, of course, and none of it can be, but you’ve never had a date like this before. You don’t get the chance to ask what kind of animal she’d be, or the chance to feign embarrassment when your hands graze each other on the table—you don’t need it. There can’t be a second date. If you’re honest, there wasn’t even a first.
one.
It takes all your courage, but you ask Sheila-from-the-bookstore on a date. She’s far more nervous than you’d expected from all the tattoos on her arms. She stutters when she speaks, and each “um” is accompanied by the rubbing of a shaved portion of hair underneath the rest. When you ask her what kind of animal she’d be, she bites her pierced lower lip and grins: “I guess I’d be a stingray.” You go on two more dates, but the awkwardness never does quite fade.
two.
Carolyn drums her fingertips on her coffee cup the whole afternoon, long after it’s cooled. She was the one to ask you, tinted amber in the dim light of the bar, and you suppose she’s got a case of buyer’s remorse. Every time you ask a question, she purses her lips together and hums, like she’s thinking of an answer, but shakes her head each time: “I dunno,” she says. “What about you?” There is no second date.
three.
Gwen keeps a notepad beside her plate. When you first see it, you ask if she’s some sort of writer, a reporter maybe, as her eyebrows knit together and she says, “Why would you think that?” You explain yourself as she takes notes, and you grow to like the way it makes you feel that you have something to say. You kiss her on an impulse at the end of the night, and she freezes in place. Already picturing the notes she’ll make on it, you apologize for your thoughtlessness, and she stops you: “Wait, no, uh—how’s Tuesday?”
four.
It’s your second first date since you stopped seeing Gwen, but the first with a woman. Your nerves are stronger than ever, and you fumble your way through every stock question you’ve committed to memory in the last fifteen years. Still, Judith answers without a moment’s hesitation, and, for the half-second her arm touches yours, you feel a spark that glitters like the silver in her hair. At the end of the date, she empties a notepad from her purse in search of her wallet, and you can think of nothing but Gwen. She calls later that week; you don’t pick up.
five.
It’s a blind date arranged by a friend of a friend of Mr. Crane’s. Seeing her, you know she’s one of two lesbians the man’s met—the other, of course, being Dr. Crane, but she’s seeing some friend of Roz’s. The woman, Mel, is precise, to be kind, though she hardly extends the same courtesy to you. Her eyes—brown like yours, but cooler than you’ve ever seen—follow every movement of your hands, as if she’s waiting for something. “That’s a lovely polish you’re wearing, Daphne,” she says at last, “but I have to ask: does it really chip so easily?”
six.
You know by now you don’t want a relationship to come of it, and you feel almost guilty for saying yes, but Holly’d been so excited to set you up that you couldn’t say no. You’ve met her once before, Sandra, doing tarot readings in the corner of a party that had seen too many bottles of wine. Both then and now, everything she says is accompanied by a sigh, always at the same piercing pitch, but this matters less than the content of it. Always some insistence of fate, but never the kind you know; she looks at warnings as certainties, like there’s nothing she can do to change them. Her kiss is all teeth, and you wonder what her cards will tell her about you in the morning.
seven.
There’s a strained quality in Dez’s voice that you recognize immediately as an attempt at making it sound deeper than it is. Only when she laughs—really laughs, too, not just a chuckle—does the true pitch slip out, and a hand covers her mouth. You talk about your names for an hour straight, so that when you finally have the chance to ask her what animal she’d be, it’s on the way to your door. “Been a long time since I thought about that,” she says. “What if I told you tomorrow night?”
eight.
The woman Annie called Daisy introduces herself as Margaret, and she murmurs something about etymology while studying the tablecloth. When you mention it, she glances momentarily up at you and pushes her dark hair from her face. “Sorry about that,” she says, already lowering her eyes. “I’ve kind of rehearsed it all by now, and I’m a bit of a textiles buff, so...” The first time she really looks at you, she beams and answers, “Easy—Darwin’s bark spider.”
nine.
You ask her this time, too, just like you did before any of it was real, and the way Niles repeats your name—using it to frame her every word, breath shaking—makes you wonder if she knows it is now. There’s this joke she makes (and she keeps making it) where she’s not really herself. It’s nice, really, to have something to soften the strangeness of getting to know someone you already love, until something shifts: You remember the feeling of first calling her Niles and knowing how dear it was to her. When you say her name tonight, it’s like she’s coming out of a trance. “I’m sorry,” she says, still becoming herself as she continues: “It’s just”—a pause—“this is really happening, isn’t it?"