Ihave made a catastrophic error in judgement.
This is the thought running on a continuous loop through my skull as I approach the booth, because I have been running the numbers on this exact moment for the past six days, and every single projection I produced told me the same thing. The probability of Livia Chordas, who is objectively and measurably the most interesting person I have matched with in three years on this application, taking one look at me in person and experiencing an entirely reasonable fear response was, conservatively, seventy-three percent. I had factored in variables such as the unfortunate fact that my profile photographs were taken by my colleague Drenvig, who has a tendency to shoot from below and at angles that make me look less like a person and more like a geographic feature. I had factored in the ambient lighting of this particular establishment, which I had scouted twice this week at different times of day to assess visibility. I had even factored in the sweater vest, which my sister Marda told me was deeply uncool but which I wore anyway because it was the most non-threatening item in my wardrobe and I have found, anecdotally, that humans respond better to argyle than to the black turtleneck.
None of my projections accounted for how utterly still she would go when she saw me.
She is frozen. Not in the polite, performative way that people sometimes freeze when they are surprised but trying to hide it, the way where they smile too quickly and their eyes do too much work compensating for what their face actually wants to do. This is a genuine, complete cessation of movement, her martini glass hovering somewhere between the table and her mouth, her eyes very wide behind her dark-framed glasses, and every single one of my carefully rehearsed opening lines evaporates from my memory simultaneously like a poorly maintained spreadsheet after a power failure.
"Livia." Her name comes out steadier than I expect, and I hold onto that small mercy. "I am... I apologize for my tardiness."
I deliver the speech I practiced. It is not a good speech. It is a speech that covers logistics rather than the actual problem, which is that I am standing here in a cocktail bar that was designed for humans of average proportion, trying to fold my six-foot-nine frame into a social situation I am profoundly under-equipped for, while the woman across from me has still not fully closed her mouth. But the speech fills the silence, and silence right now feels like a structural weakness I cannot afford, so I continue until she tells me I can sit, and I sit, and I fold my hands together on the table like I am about to present quarterly earnings rather than attempt to have a first date like a normal person.
She smells like vanilla and clean cotton and something beneath both of those things that my biology registers before my conscious mind does, something warm and human and specific to her, and I have to actively redirect my attention before my focus drifts somewhere entirely inappropriate for the current stage of our interaction.
I say things. She says things. I am tracking the words with the surface layer of my attention while the deeper layer is occupied with a full real-time assessment of the situation, cataloguing every microexpression and every slight shift in her posture for evidence of the fear response I have been dreading. She pushes her glasses up her nose. She nods too quickly and then corrects herself. She takes a deliberate sip of her drink in a way that reads as self-soothing, and I recognize that particular behaviour intimately because I do the same thing with peppermints in meetings when my manager says something that requires me to recalibrate all of my assumptions about a project.
And then she says something about drink preferences, about being the first person who asked, and there is something genuine and slightly surprised in her voice when she says it, and the part of my brain that has been running worst-case scenarios at full processing capacity makes a small, involuntary pivot toward a scenario I had estimated at roughly twelve percent likelihood.
The scenario where this goes well.
I am very glad, I tell her, and I mean it in a way that my voice probably does not fully convey because I am still spending enormous cognitive resources on not gripping the table hard enough to crack it. I have already done that once this evening, in the bar's small entrance area, when a man in a leather jacket walked past me too quickly and startled me, and the hostess was very gracious about it, but it is not an impression I want to replicate at the table.
We order drinks. A server arrives, and she is professional and calm in a way that I have noticed humans sometimes perform when they work in establishments that have diversity and inclusion policies, which I appreciate more than I know how to express without sounding pathetic. I order a tonic water with lime because I am already running at approximately four timesmy baseline anxiety level and adding alcohol to this particular equation seems unwise. Livia asks me how long I've been working in actuarial science, and for a few minutes I manage something that feels almost like a normal conversation.
Almost.
Because the silence after I finish explaining my current position at Guumstrop and Varik Actuarial Associates, a silence that lasts perhaps two and a half seconds while Livia turns her glass in her hands, is long enough for me to replay the last thirty seconds of my speech and realise that I have just described, in significant technical detail, a mortality table projection I am particularly proud of, without once checking whether she had any interest in mortality table projections. My sister Marda has told me, on multiple occasions, that leading with work statistics is not an effective romantic strategy. Marda has told me this so many times she has started using hand gestures to accompany it.
Livia is not fleeing the table. But she is not not-fleeing it either. She is sitting in a state of polite neutrality that I cannot parse with confidence, and the uncertainty is worse than a clear negative response would be, because at least a clear negative response would give me an actionable next step.
The actionable next step, I have already prepared. I have a whole framework for it.
"I want to apologise," I say, and my voice comes out carefully modulated, the way I trained it to be in situations where I am managing a difficult client conversation. "Not for the tardiness, though I do stand by that apology as well, but for..." I pause, and I take one of my peppermints from my jacket pocket and then put it back without unwrapping it, because unwrapping it would require me to stop looking at the table. "For the photographs. On the application. My colleague assisted me with them and he has a particular approach to photography that I now understand to be quite different from how the images actually renderon screen. I have subsequently learned that there are various filtering tools that adjust colour and proportion, and I believe the combination of Drenvig's camera settings and the particular lighting in my office on that afternoon may have produced images that were... less immediately representative of my actual appearance than they should have been."
What I am doing is constructing a very elaborate sentence about why my photographs made me look less like an Orc than I am. I am also aware that this sentence is not improving the situation. But I have started and I cannot locate a graceful exit point, so I continue.
"I do not fully understand human photo filters. I want to be transparent about that. I understand risk matrices and I understand long-term liability modelling and I understand statistical variance across mortality cohorts, but social media image presentation remains a significant gap in my competency framework." I finally look up at her, because not looking at her is cowardly and I have enough self-awareness to know it. Her expression has shifted. I still cannot read it with confidence. "I should have been clearer in my profile. That was an oversight, and it was not fair to you, and I am genuinely sorry that you spent your Tuesday evening travelling here under false pretences."
Livia opens her mouth. I do not let her speak, because if she speaks it will be to confirm the outcome I have already modelled, and I would like to get to the end of my prepared statement before that happens.
"Your drink is already ordered and I will of course cover the cost, and the cost of any appetisers you may have been considering, and I can speak to the server about ensuring you are not charged for anything this evening. I do not want you to feel that the circumstances prevent you from having a pleasant rest of your night." I unfold my hands from the table, whichtakes more conscious effort than it should because my grip on the wood has been tighter, a habit I have been trying to address for years. "I hope that you will accept my apology. I genuinely enjoyed our conversations via the application. You have a very rigorous approach to thinking about things, and I found that... I found that very compelling."
This last part was not in the prepared statement. It arrived without my permission, and I feel the faint, deeply unwelcome warmth of embarrassment moving up the back of my neck in a way I sincerely hope is not visible, though I suspect it is, because pale green skin is not a forgiving canvas for emotional responses.
I begin to stand. This is the part of the framework where I extract myself with dignity and minimum disruption to other patrons, locate my coat from the hook near the entrance, and walk back to the tube station where I will spend the commute home doing what I always do when a social situation goes wrong, which is running the same post-mortem analysis over and over until I have identified every decision point where a different choice might have produced a different outcome.
The booth complains as I shift my weight out of it, and I put one hand flat on the table to steady myself and avoid tipping anything over, and I have already mentally composed the apologetic text message I will send her tomorrow, something brief and genuine without being excessive, and I am turning toward the door.
Her hand closes around my wrist.
The contact is unexpected enough that I go completely still, the way I sometimes do during a calculation when a number produces a result that requires me to go back and check whether I have made an error, because the result cannot be right and yet there it is. Her fingers do not go all the way around my wrist, noteven close, but the grip is firm and deliberate and unmistakably intentional.
"Wait." Her voice is different from a moment ago. Something in the polite neutrality has cracked open slightly. "You're an actuary. Like, actually?"
I look down at her. At her hand on my wrist. At the expression on her face, which has moved entirely away from frozen and into something that looks considerably more like someone who has just noticed an unexpected variable in a model they thought they understood.
“Yes,” I say. “Guumstrop and Varik Actuarial Associates. Specialising in longevity risk and pension liability modelling. I have been in the field for seven years."
She stares at me. Her glasses have slid down her nose slightly in a way I suspect she is not aware of. The candlelight on the table makes the amber reflection in them look like something I should not be cataloguing right now.
