I finally kissed her while we were waiting for her Uber. She kissed me back enthusiastically, then we kissed several more times. After an evening spent trying to work out whether she wanted me to move closer, this was a fairly substantial contribution to the evidence.
We’d met on a dating app and started with coffee. I was 25, she was 24, and we talked for about two hours. It was one of the best dates I’d had. When I asked whether she wanted to come over to my place and have something to eat, she said yes.
At the coffee place, she’d been chatty. At my place, she went a little quiet. I thought she might be nervous, though that was my interpretation. This was the first time a woman had come home with me straight from a first date. I had no established procedure beyond wanting her to feel comfortable.
I was looking for a relationship, and my impression was that she wasn’t after a hookup either. I offered her a drink, and eventually the conversation found its rhythm again. We opened up, talked easily, and seemed to be having another good stretch of the same date. The change of venue hadn’t ruined anything. It had just briefly exceeded my experience.
While we were sitting beside each other, I put an arm around her and gently stroked her back. She didn’t move away. She also didn’t move closer or make a move of her own. I could see that she was staying there; I couldn’t tell what, if anything, she wanted to happen next.
Later, we moved to the living room couch. We were leaning back with the TV on and music playing. I moved closer until our bodies were touching a little. Again, I didn’t notice her responding by moving toward me. I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable or rush her. So we stayed there, close together, talking, without a kiss.
Eventually it got late. She had work in the morning, so we went outside and I called her an Uber. That was where I went for the kiss, and where she kissed me back with enough energy to leave me reconsidering the previous few hours. I’d spent the evening looking for a clearer response. Now I had one, just as the evening was ending.
I asked her to text when she got home. She did, and thanked me for the night. Instead of simply enjoying that, I began reviewing the couch portion of the evening. Had I missed an opening? Had she wanted me to kiss her earlier? Her goodbye made those possibilities feel plausible, but it didn’t tell me what she’d been thinking back at my place.
We talked for a couple of days afterward. She said the date had been great, that she liked me, and that she wanted to see me again. Then she stopped replying. We never got to the second date. I moved on, with no explanation for the silence and a surprisingly detailed memory of the wait for her Uber.
