I covered up my legit ouch feelings by pretending to have been shot. “Right in the ego. Here I thought you were having me on because we have intellectual chemistry.”
“Oh, we do. I wouldn’t propose a series with someone I didn’t have intellectual chemistry with.” They frowned. “Sorry, did I make it sound like I only want you for financial gain? That’s definitely not true. We have a shocking amount of intellectual chemistry. I mean, in my opinion at least.”
All the saliva in my mouth dried up. I needed to talk. Say something. Anything. Respond. To what they’d said. Except my mouth was too dry.
“Um, right, so do you want to see who you’re going out with this week?” They sounded awkward and a bit self-conscious, like they were also thinking about how they legit just said they wanted me.
My brain whirred in chaos for a moment until I remembered to answer their question. “Um, sure.” But seriously, we had intellectual chemistry, hooray! I wondered how much. I’d put it in the four-to-five zone. How much intellectual chemistry did Sidney need to have with someone before inviting them on the show? A three?
“And sent.”
Sent? Oh right. I pulled out my phone and obligingly checked my email. White guy, maybe a little older than me, clean shaven, short hair, shirt and tie. “Wow, he’s very...conventionally handsome.”
“I tried not to hold that against him.”
I glanced up. “You don’t like conventionally handsome people?”
They shifted, pulling one knee up into the chair and kind of hugging it. “I feel ambivalent about conventionally handsome people on a personal level, but I do think conventional appearances leave something to be desired on both political and imaginative levels.”
“Oh.” I surveyed my own boring work costume.
“Dude.” They eyed me pointedly. “You were wearing sequined ballet flats when we met.”
“Oh my god, those shoes are so uncomfortable, but they make me so happy!” Hello: they’d noticed my shoes. Hello, hi, that totally happened. Add a point to the Sidney’s not physically repulsed by Declan column.
“Consider what picture you would submit if you were volunteering to go on a blind date with someone. Would you be wearing your work clothes?”
“Oh, no, definitely not.” I paused to consider it. “Lime green T-shirt over a black thermal, jeans, beaded rainbow bracelet, and I’d spend an hour making my hair artistically mussed.” I bowed in my seat. “There you have it.”
“You should take that picture, it sounds—um—unconventionally handsome. But anyway, the thing that won me over about Date #2 was that he self-describes as ‘a queer man trying to forge a path through the warring expectations of gay culture.’ Which I thought was rather poetic.”
“Aww. Yeah. Totally is. Okay, sweet. I’ll get in touch with him.” I put the phone away. “Thanks for arranging the actual human component of this. I’d still be going back and forth about even attempting to date if it was all up to me.”
One of their eyebrows twitched above their glasses. “You could always set Mia on the case. I’m sure she’d love to find your one true love.”
I groaned. “You have no idea. Dear Spinster Uncle, how do I make my friend stop trying to marry everyone off? Love, Declan.”
“I’ve addressed that question before. I’ll send you a link.”
“It’s that common?”
They shrugged. “Alas, the marriage contagion, once limited to heterosexuals, has now infected the queers as well. There’s no known treatment for this malady, but in most cases it does eventually run its course.”
“Thank god for that.” I raised my water bottle. “To Mia’s speedy recovery.”
We toasted.
Chapter Seven
Date #2’s real name was Gregory. Not Greg, he assured me. Gregory.
Maybe that was the first warning sign, but I didn’t notice it at the time.
The first very slight tingle that this date might be a mismatch was when he picked the restaurant and the movie he wanted to take me to.
And he said it like that: “I want to take you to dinner and a movie.”
Which I probably should have been into, but I...wasn’t. There’s this funny tension where people are supposed to be proactive and say what they want, but sometimes that can have the effect of sort of...erasing what the other person might want or think about that thing.
Sometimes it doesn’t. Mase and I got together because one night in college when we were walking home from eating dinner he turned to me and said, “I want to kiss you right now.” Which was completely hot and I giggled and he kissed me and I kissed him and we kept kissing (not like continuously, but when it was convenient) for years.
So I don’t find having a bold partner a turn-off. Like at all. But Gregory delivered the line about taking me to dinner and a movie like it had never occurred to him that I might not be into that. He was stating it as if it was simply how things were going to be, which was emphatically not a turn-on.
Also, I don’t think there’s much point to going to movies on blind dates because you’re not really getting a feel for the other person. Not that I have well-developed notions about what does and doesn’t work for blind dates, since this was only my second one, but it never made much theoretical sense to me.
And in practice it was worse.
We went to see an independent film that wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. For me it was a flat line of vaguely interesting scenery and characters, with a plotline that didn’t seem to go anywhere.
Gregory loved the movie. And that’s another reason movies don’t seem like great things for first dates. If I’d gone with a friend, and they loved a movie I thought was mostly blah, we could talk about that. But with a stranger you’re stuck either A) not disagreeing too strongly because after all, they might have connected to the movie on some level you can’t even fathom because you don’t know them. Or B) disagreeing carefully at first, then progressively getting more emphatic as you argue with a total stranger over a movie you probably don’t care that much about.
Maybe there are other options, but those were the only ones I saw, so I attempted to go with option A. After five straight minutes of enraptured monologue on how amazing this mediocre film had been.
“...and then, the scene with the corn field, that huge expanse of sameness into the horizon.” His fingers tapped the steering wheel restlessly as if he was so passionate about the movie he couldn’t contain himself. (I made a mental note to never ever ride with a blind date again.) “The way they expressed the tension between conformity and risk was incredibly poignant.”