After I got to her city, we met for a quick drink. I’d just finished work and felt relaxed, but she seemed standoffish or anxious to me. I couldn’t tell whether I was picking up on something real or getting in my head after one off-feeling meetup. Later that week, we were supposed to have a private birthday dinner at a restaurant that could cost $1,500 and take four hours. The reservation had acquired a new job: making me wonder what that drink meant.
I’d met her at a bar while traveling about five months earlier. We clicked over food, music, and art, exchanged numbers and Instagram, and kept in occasional, lightly flirty contact. It wasn’t constant communication, but it seemed to leave room for the possibility that we’d want to see each other again.
We were both into food, and one particular restaurant was on both our bucket lists. With her birthday coming up, I planned to visit her city and surprised her with a private dinner reservation there. At the time, it seemed like a thoughtful way to share something we’d both wanted to try. The quick drink didn’t erase that plan so much as make its scale harder to ignore.
I can’t tell whether she isn’t as interested as I thought, whether I misread one meetup, or whether the whole arrangement feels like too much too soon. Those are different explanations, and I have no special access to which one is true. What I do have is an impression from one drink and a reservation priced like it expects certainty.
I could try to find out where we stand before the birthday dinner, which would mean not treating one awkward-feeling meetup as a final answer. Or I could cancel and look for someone else to go with, rather than spend the money and four hours on a date I’m already worried might be uncomfortable. The second plan has its own small complication: this is a private birthday dinner I arranged for her, not a spare table I happened to have lying around.
The dinner is still on the calendar for later this week. I haven’t decided what to do with it.
