When I tell him my love language is Physical Touch he smiles.
“Most women say Words of Affirmation or Quality Time.”
“I like those, too.”
We talk for so long that my nervous sweat dries. I take a sip of my drink and so does he. The waitress is smirky-charmed. First date. How cute. I had dressed up/not dressed up and was wearing red lipstick.
We have already done most of the preliminaries. We FaceTimed each other twice. Once to discuss how we approach conflict, the next to discuss the number-one love song of all time. We mailed each other our nightshirts to see if we liked each other’s scent. Pheromones. There was all this talk of pheromones.
His smell: Clean-cut male raised by open-minded parents. Rumpled cotton sheets.
I ask him what I smelled like.
“Spoiled honey,” he says.
“Honey doesn’t spoil,” I tell him. A useless fact that may or may not help me survive the apocalypse.
Our next date is outdoors. We bike the flat, sandy path along the river, stopping only to drink artificially flavored electrolyte water. We are different in the natural world, awkward in the sunshine. There’s a cramp in my calf. His stamina doesn’t impress me. His ability to ride for hours, so focused on the trail that he barely has time to glance to see if I am still huffing beside him.
In between dates we talk on the phone. We discuss books and our childhood loves. Attachment styles. One night he calls and, out of the blue, asks what’s my number-one fantasy.
“My number-one fantasy?” I think for a second. “Falling through the ice on a lake and having someone pull me out just in time.”
We participate in a polar bear plunge that’s raising money for some rare childhood cancer. Everything seems safe and controlled; the ocean is appropriately chilly. Sand and seawater cling to his eyelashes. Then a wave breaks over my head and when I surface I see I’ve been swept out farther than everyone else. For a panicked minute I wonder if this is an undiscovered love language: lost at sea. My limbs start to go numb and I paddle back right before I lose all feeling in them.
“There you are.” He smiles.
In the car we keep our eyes averted as we fumble into dry clothes. We stop at a quaint roadside diner to eat pie and drink cup after cup of coffee.
The next date we have sex because the restaurant we were both dying to try unexpectedly closed. He suggests his place because he is proud to live in a neighborhood that has moved beyond up-and-coming, a neighborhood that has, in fact, arrived. Yes, I say. I wonder how close he is to the subway. I want to see his houseplants and skylight.
In bed we are chatty and kindly instructive. His sheets are rumpled cotton. My orgasm is subdued, almost polite. That’s okay. The bar should be set low the first time.
Afterward we hold hands on top of the covers. I resist the urge to curl and burrow. I’m tempted to conjure up a crying baby or unpaid bill to gauge his reaction to this vision of shared domesticity. I look around. The skylight above us is small—its darkness broken by flashes of neon lights from the nearby bar. His houseplants are fine, if not overly green and thriving. It’s five blocks from his apartment to the subway. I can make it there in no time.