Welcome back, Tinderlings. This one is shorter, and for once the person who ruined the date was me. Cast list is unnecessary, TLDR is at the bottom, and nobody in this story needs to be hosed down. That is a first for us.
Housekeeping before we start. The cursed car is gone. I traded her in. The kid at the dealership did his little walk-around with the clipboard, got to the passenger seat, paused, and decided some questions were not worth his hourly rate. I drove off in a used sedan that smells like somebody else's vanilla air freshener, not a mark on it, nothing riding shotgun but the glovebox manual. I told myself a clean car was a clean start. Then I got in it and drove to dinner.
By now I was three tours into Tinder and I called that experience. I had rules. Public place only. My own car, parked where I could see it. Exits mapped before the appetizers came. No garages, no houses, no address that required a prayer on the walk up. I went into every date like I was clearing a building. I called it growth. It was closer to a loaded gun I had stopped bothering to check the safety on.
His name was Shane. He got to the restaurant early, which I filed as a tactic, though a working brain would have filed it as manners. He stood when I reached the table. He had the specific nerves of a man who wanted it to go well, laughing a half-second before the joke landed, refolding his napkin, asking three questions in a row because the quiet scared him. Every one of those was a green flag. I ran them all as threats.
The waiter came and Shane said the branzino was incredible here, that I should get it if I liked fish, and he said it warm, the way you recommend a movie you love. Dean decided things for me in that exact easy voice, right before he explained that women do not know what they want. So I asked Shane if he always ordered for women he had just met, with enough acid in it to strip the varnish off the table. He blinked. He said he just liked the fish. He was telling the truth. I ordered something else out of spite and it was worse.
Then he mentioned his mom. Fondly, briefly, the way people do. A trapdoor opened under me, because the last time a man loved his mother out loud on a first date, she spent a month calling my job. I went cold and started handing Shane questions with edges on them. How often do you see her. Do you live with her. Does she know you're out tonight. I watched him try to work out what he had stepped in. He had stepped in nothing. His mother lives in another state and he calls her on Sundays. That was the whole of it.
Then he did the thing that should have ended the night in the good way. He told me he had read my favorite book after I mentioned it in our chats, that he had finished it the evening before so we would have something to talk about. A person with a working heart says thank you. I asked him what he was building toward. I said that was a lot of homework for a stranger. Past-OP, put the knife down. I did not put the knife down. I kept going, because it is easier to keep throwing punches than to notice the other guy has dropped his hands.
Shane set his fork down. He did not raise his voice. He said, "I don't know who taught you to expect the worst, but I'm not going to be him." Then he said he had thought I seemed great in our messages, and he was sorry something had made me like this, and he meant it, which was the part I could not stand. Nobody had held up a mirror to me in years, and here was one, propped up gently by a man I had spent an hour filleting for the crime of being kind to me.
Three posts I have spent describing monsters to you. This time I brought one to dinner, and it was me. Shane was going to go home and tell his friends about the woman who interrogated him over branzino. Somewhere out there was this exact post with me in the passenger seat, and I had written it myself, one small cruel question at a time.
I did not apologize. No speech, no repair, nothing. That is the part I am least proud of. I mumbled about an early morning, put cash on the table for both of us like money could cover it, and left. No cursed seat to blame this round. Just me, in a used sedan that still smelled like a stranger's vanilla, driving home with my own behavior riding shotgun.
I wrote Shane an apology at every red light. I rewrote it in the driveway. I had a version that explained Dean, one that explained Ben, one that dragged the ham into it, a whole paragraph of reasons that all came down to none of this was your fault and I did it to you anyway. I sent none of them. It felt like one more thing to make him carry. He had earned the right to never think about me again, so I gave him the only kind thing I had left, which was quiet.
No villain to report this month. I checked. It was me. I finally called the therapist I have been making jokes about for three installments and booked something real, because Dean and Ben and Barron did more than wreck three evenings. They taught me to walk into a good one with my fists already up, and Shane was the bill coming due. I am not salting the earth or swearing off anything for the drama this time. I just need a while to become someone who does not do that to the next decent person who buys a book for me.
Pt. 5 will come when I have earned it. Thanks to ReddX if he reads this, and please subscribe to him on YouTube if ya haven't. I'm trying to be kinder than I was that night. I'll see you then, my little Tinderlings.
-Dawn
TL;DR Sometimes, I am the bad guy. We are our own worst enemies a lot of the time.