By eight that evening, I was starting to think she wasn’t going to call. We hadn’t set a time, which did very little to stop me from noticing it.
We’d been talking on a dating app and were moving to the phone. I’d asked her to call me in the evening. That was the arrangement: an evening, a phone, and apparently enough room for me to supply the rest.
I got home around six and spent some time relaxing. When I looked at the clock again, it was eight. There still hadn’t been a call. Two hours had passed since I’d come home, and I was beginning to treat that as two hours she was late. My arrival home had somehow become an appointment neither of us had made.
I was interested in her. Moving off the app felt like a promising next step, and I wanted it to happen. But with no call yet, I started thinking it wouldn’t. Nothing new had happened between us; I’d simply looked at a clock.
That was the slightly embarrassing part. I was already giving the evening the shape of a rejection when the actual arrangement was still perfectly possible. Eight o’clock is, inconveniently for my case, in the evening.
Then I looked at my phone.
Right as I was thinking she wasn’t going to call, a text arrived from her asking whether it was a good time. She wasn’t disappearing. She was checking if I was available before ringing me.
I told her it was. A straightforward answer to a straightforward question, following a less straightforward stretch of thought on my side. Her message contained none of the drama I’d been considering for the evening.
With that small false alarm out of the way, my thoughts were already moving ahead. I wanted to ask her out. I had the impression she might be open to meeting fairly soon, although that was still an impression, not a date on the calendar.
Now I was wondering how long to leave between talking on the phone and suggesting we meet. Several days seemed possible. So did a week. I hadn’t arranged a first date yet, but I was already trying to work out its timing.
