The second date

Fiction, about two adults over 18. Second meeting, notes on her phone, and one sentence in the middle of it that either of them could have got up and left after.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

Everything I had read said negotiate first. Nothing I had read mentioned that you have to do it in a room with other people in it, at a table with a laminated menu on it, while a spaniel sleeps under the next chair along.

I had it on my phone in a note called Sunday, because at thirty-seven I am still a coward about titles. Fourteen bullet points. I had rewritten it four times and the final version was the shortest, which I think is a rule about most things.

He was already there when I arrived, which I noticed and filed, and he had got a table at the back rather than in the window, which I noticed and filed approvingly.

Second time of meeting. The first had been a drink and ninety minutes of ordinary getting to know somebody, and at the end of it he had said, without any particular weight, that if I wanted to talk properly about the other thing we should do it in daylight and sober. So here we were, at half past two on a Sunday, being extremely sober.

I had expected one of two experiences. Either it would be charged, which I was braced for, or it would be mortifying, which I assumed was more likely. It was neither. It was, from about the fourth minute, a meeting.

He had notes as well. On paper, folded into quarters, and he apologised for them and I said I had mine on my phone and we both relaxed by an inch.

We did implements first, which was easier than I expected because objects are easier than feelings. Hand, yes. Hairbrush, yes, and the discovery that we both had the same specific reservation about them, which produced the first genuine laugh of the afternoon. Cane, not yet, and he did not push, and I watched him not push.

Then marks, which is where it got practical in a way I had not anticipated. I said nothing that shows in normal clothes, and he said that was easy, and then asked whether there was anything coming up.

There was. My cousin is getting married in June and the dress is not a forgiving dress. So we worked out, in a cafe, that nothing at all should happen in the last week of May, and he wrote it down, on paper, and that was the moment I started paying a different kind of attention.

Safe word, which was the item I had been most embarrassed about and which took forty seconds. Red. He asked what he should do if I stopped talking altogether, which had not been on my list at all, and I said I did not know, and he suggested something, and it went on the list.

The waitress arrived while he was saying the word bruising and he stopped mid-syllable and asked her, with total composure, whether they did anything with a scone.

Then the item I had put last on my list because I was embarrassed by how domestic it was, which was what happens afterwards. Whether I stay or go. How I get home.

Whether anyone knows where I am, which he raised before I did and said should be a friend with the address and a time, and that he expected me to do it and would not be offended by it. I had written on my phone, in a note called Sunday, the words ask about after, and it turned out I did not have to.

I had been braced for the whole conversation to kill the thing stone dead. That was my expectation walking in: that you cannot take something that lives in the back of your head at three in the morning, put it on a table next to a laminated menu, and have it survive the daylight.

Then I said the thing that could have finished it.

I said: I do not want it to be sexual. Not at the start, and not later on. Not as a direction we are heading in. I want the other thing on its own, and if that is not what you are looking for then this is the moment.

I had practised that in the car. It came out flatter than I meant.

And he sat back and did not answer.

I want to be accurate about how long that took, because at the time it was a week and afterwards I would guess it was about five seconds. Long enough for me to get all the way to the end of the story: he says something kind, we finish our coffee, he texts on Tuesday to say he has thought about it, and that is that.

What he actually said was: "I had assumed it would be. I need to think about that properly rather than tell you what you want to hear."

I have turned that over a great deal since.

It is not a smooth answer. A smoother man would have said of course, absolutely, whatever you want, and I would have walked to the bus stop pleased and would have found out in about six weeks that he had been agreeing rather than deciding. I have had that version before, from someone else, and the discovery comes late and in an awkward place.

So we left it open, which felt terrible for about a minute and then felt like the most solid thing that had happened all afternoon. He said he would think about it and tell me honestly by the end of the week, and that if the honest answer was no then he would say no and we would be two people who had had two nice afternoons.

We finished. We talked about his sister's dog for twenty minutes. He paid for the coffee and I paid for the scones, which took some negotiating of its own.

Here is the part I did not expect and would not have believed.

I walked to the bus stop in a state I can only describe as elated, and what I was elated about was the admin. A man had written down the last week of May. That is it. He had listened to a sentence about a cousin's wedding and turned it into a constraint and written it on a piece of paper folded into quarters.

Nobody warns you that competence is the attractive part. I had spent two years imagining a certain kind of presence, a voice, an atmosphere, and what actually went through me on the number 47 was the memory of a man saying I need to think about that properly rather than tell you what you want to hear.

He rang on the Thursday. The answer was more complicated than yes and better than yes, and it is not the part of the story that matters.

What matters is that I now know what to look for, and it is not what I thought. It is somebody who is prepared to have a boring conversation in a cafe with a spaniel under the next table, and to be honest in the middle of it at the point where honesty is expensive.