first date
Do you remember our first date?
We’d got talking after noticing one another for a solid week at the train station. I’ve always been able to talk to anyone and not take a stranger’s rejection personally.
It’s a good thing, too. If I had shit on your shoes, I don’t think I could have provoked a more puzzled, disgusted, annoyed expression from you. All I’d said was that the universe was clearly hinting we should meet. That utter derision on your sternly beautiful face overloaded something in my brain and I just lost it. I covered my face in my hands and laughed, enjoying my own profound embarrassment. When I looked at you again only puzzlement remained, the other emotions banished by the strangeness of the exchange. I probably fell a little for you then.
We exchanged only very brief words, and I made a flowery apology for injecting your morning with awkwardness; and then the train came and you made for the carriage next to mine. I saw you staring at me at one point.
I didn’t see you the next week because I was struck with a strange illness that left me almost paralysed with weariness and depression. But I recovered.
Next time I saw you I left you to your own devices, but part of me was invested in you. I began a campaign of trying to catch your eye, achieved mainly through fucking about. I bought the same phone case I saw you had and stood in the same manner a few yards away on the platform. I think you caught on that I was poking fun after a couple of days. Hey, what better did I have to do, waiting for a train? And I didn’t want to pester you with conversation. You looked so forbidding.
I got more and more elaborate. In was autumn, and you were wearing a three-quarter length coat in black, with little military-style epaulets. I happened to have a similar one and switched to it despite preferring a lighter coat in that weather.
As flirting strategies go it’s not an obvious one. But I think you liked the attention, without me getting in your face. I knew I’d cracked it when you turned up with a coffee from the same place I got my morning coffee. I went to speak with you that day.
Anyway, the date. After talking, sitting next to one another on the train for a few mornings, I’d mentioned I liked hiking. Your eyes lit up. I didn’t appreciate then that I was in danger of my life, but you suggested we walked somewhere together. We made the date.
I chose Ingleborough in the Dales and I drove us. Knowing what I know now, it was the density of people on the trail that kept you from taking me down and giving me the last kiss of my life. Ingleborough is popular, though.
It is also quite a walk, and I don’t think I’d been very clear about that. Sorry. What with your plans constantly frustrated and the three false summits on the hill, by the time we reached the top some two hours after setting out you were in a thoroughly foul mood.
“We reached the top,” I said, taking your murderous frown in stride. I found it adorable. “Biscuit?”
You snatched the proffered packet of chocolate hobnobs and set to munching through them with a determination I found frankly fascinating. I watched you bite, crunch, swallow, repeat, petulantly trying to fill a hole you’d thought would be full of squirming, struggling date by now.
When you finished the pack you handed back the wrapper and took the water bottle I was holding out. You drained it in one, then let out a belch that made several other hikers look around.
“Is there any more?” you said, first words in half an hour.
Wordlessly, I set down my backpack and knelt the by it to retrieve a pork pie. You took it and regarded it with scepticism, then sank your teeth into it like it had personally offended you. It didn’t last twenty seconds.
I was already ready with four ham sandwiches, two bags of crisps, then bananas, then granola bars, then twin pack of sausage rolls. I like pastry and walking burns calories, don’t judge me. Each of them disappeared with the same quiet ferocity.
The last thing I held out was one of two little bottles of cherry schnapps, a tradition from an old lecturer of mine. You took yours, looked like you were seriously considering taking mine too, then clicked bottles with me.
We drank, and again you belched, quieter this time, like you’d less to prove. You hand rested on your belly, a small mound having appeared there. A brief silence followed. You looked at me and demanded, “What?”
I realised then that I’d been staring, and was instantly consumed with worry that I had offended you. I also realised I’d been breathing shallower and moving slower, like a man trying not to scare off a rare bird while he finds a camera or whatever.
I couldn’t put into words how I’d felt, watching you devour two people’s generous rations. I could only notice, as if for the first time, the hard brightness of your eyes, the red of your lips, the way you stood ready to pounce, like a predator. I couldn’t tell you it was okay, because how could anyone have anything to say against your act of consumption? I had nothing, only a thrill of curiosity.
“If we hurry back to the car, there’s a KFC not far from here.”
No one will ever accuse me of being the smoothest operator, but it worked. The appraising way you stared into my eyes appears in my dreams, sometimes. It was the first time you mentally popped me out of the box marked “eat” and into the adjacent box marked “later”.
On the way back, you seemed much happier. We talked about playing the piano, drawing, writing, people; you talked guardedly about your studies in the occult, and I just tried to keep up and sound intelligent. Down a patch of scree I held your hand, giving stability and receiving it. We didn’t let go for a few seconds longer than strictly necessary.
I was smitten.