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It had felt strangely good to send it without adding anything else. No joke to make the yes smaller. No qualification about my schedule. And definitely no pretending I needed to think about it when I didn’t.

I wanted to go on a date with her. So I’m going on a date with her.

It should be that simple. And maybe it is, I guess.

“I forgot you do this,” Maggie says, unexpectedly.

I glance at her reflection in the mirror. “Do what?”

She gestures vaguely toward me. “This. The shirts. The earrings. You’ve checked your phone four times since I got here, and I know she’s not coming here to pick you up.”

“I have not checked it four times.”

“Five, then.” Maggie smiles, and I wait for whatever comes next.

But nothing does. It’s that unspoken thing between us now, where we know exactly what we mean but we don’t say it out loud. She reaches for the green sweater beside her—an early contender that was quickly discarded—and starts folding it.

And, in all honestly, I’m grateful. For the lack of questioning on her part—whether I’m ready or not for whatever this is.

Perhaps Maggie understands that I have asked myself enough questions already. And maybe she just knows me.

I look at the time again.

“Stop looking at me.”

“I didn't say anything, Flora.”

“You really don’t have to. I can hear you thinking from all the way over here.”

“That sounds like a you problem, girl.”

I grab my coat.

Merry is already there when I arrive.

I see her through the front window before she sees me, sitting at a small table near the back of the restaurant with one hand wrapped around a water glass and the other resting beside her phone.

For a moment, I stay outside covered from the rain under the restaurant’s awning.

Not at all because I’m reconsidering any part of this, but because I like looking at her.

She’s wearing a cornflower blue sweater that makes her hair look even lighter under the warm pendant lights, and she’s watching something happening near the bar with a faint crease between her eyebrows. Then someone passes the table, and she shifts her chair automatically to give them more room.

It’s such an ordinary thing, and it makes me smile.

I pull open the door.

The restaurant is very warm, and I can see that the windows are lightly fogged around the edges from the difference in temperature. It smells like garlic and bread and something buttery coming from the kitchen. Conversations are overlapping around the room, not loud enough that anyone has to compete with them, but enough that there’s a constant cadence of murmurs.

Merry looks to where I’m standing, and the first thing I notice is how her entire face changes.

The second is that mine probably does, too.

She stands before I reach the table.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”