I woke up at 3:14 a.m. because a street sweeper decided to audition for a drumline under his window. He reached for me in his sleep, found my hand, didn’t let go.

At 3:15 a.m. I took a photo of our clasped fingers and sent it to Coco with zero context, because I am chaotic and she deserves it.

At 3:16 a.m. she sent back ten screaming cat emojis and PINEAPPLE???

I put the phone face down and pretended the world didn’t exist.

~ ~ ~

The morning was rude. The sunlight came in at the exact angle to expose all of last night’s decisions. He stood up and left me in the room and I followed him out as he went to the kitchen and began to make coffee like a person who believed in rules. I wore his shirt because… comedy.

“You look unfair,” he said, handing me a mug.

“You look smug,” I said, accepting it.

We tried to have a normal conversation while the elephant of “we slept together after our friends set us up” sat in the kitchen eating toast.

“So…,” I said. “Blind date.”

“So…,” he echoed. “Would rate highly on the app.” he smiled

“Five stars. Would recommend to a friend.”

“Please do not recommend me to your friend,” he said, deadpan.

I choked on my coffee. “Too late. Coco collects data.”

He arched a brow. “On me.”

“On everything.”

He looked briefly alarmed in the way men get when they realize women run shadow governments. “Noted.”

We ate toast standing up like people who had somewhere to be and no idea how to get there. He reached for the jam and bumped my hip; I bumped him back. We conducted a full slapstick routine over butter without speaking. It felt absurd and… nice.

And then my phone buzzed with the kind of ferocity that means group chat.

Coco: how was it????????

Tari: 1 to 10…. gimme a number I’m dying here

Coco: did he read?

Tari: did he bring a ring light???

Me: good night, ladies. I sent it and chuckled

Coco: SHE’S AT THEE MAN’S HOUSE!!!

Tari: BRUNCH. noon. details or we unionize.

I glanced up. He was watching me with tolerant amusement. “You have to go report to the committee?”

“They have bylaws,” I said, grim. “If I don’t show up, I have to write a formal apology and listen to a wisdom podcast.”

“Terrifying.”

“Come with me,” I said, because sometimes I jump off cliffs. “No, not to brunch. I’m not suicidal. But...meet me after. We’ll… figure out the messaging.”

“The messaging,” he repeated, like it was a flavor of ice cream.

“Yes. ‘How to tell your friends your blind date was with the man you were already not-dating and also oops.’”

He leaned a hip against the counter, considering. “We tell them the truth.”

“Which version.”

“The one where we were set up and decided not to be idiots,” he said. Then, softer: “And the version where I like you.”

I stared at him over my coffee and did not swoon. “That one.”

He took the mug from my hand, set it down, and kissed me like a punctuation mark. “Go,” he said. “I’ll text a time and a place later.”

“For soup?”

“For whatever you want.”

~ ~ ~

Brunch was a courtroom. Coco and Tari had chosen a place with plants and pancakes and zero mercy.

Coco took one look at my borrowed shirt tucked into my skirt and choked. “You… did not.”

I pretended to study the menu. “We had soup.”

“You had soup last night,” Tari said. “Anddddd…You had something else after.”

The server arrived just in time to save me from answering. We ordered aggressively and waited for food like it could shield us.

“Okay,” Coco said as soon as the server left. “Tell us everything but in a way that doesn’t ruin my appetite.”

I told them… some. The blind-date reveal. Our weird little soup omen. The walk. The car. The part where we’re trying to be precise.

Coco listened with the expression of a woman who has both loved me and bailed me out of mistakes. “I’m going to say something that is both supportive and annoying, she said. “I like him for you.”

I blinked. “That’s… annoying?”

“It is because if he hurts you I will have to fight a man who can buy the building,” she said, then softened. “But yes. I like him for you.”

Tari stirred her coffee with unnecessary force. “I like him because he has forearms.”

“Science,” Coco said, nodding.

“Are we finished,” I asked.

“No,” Coco said. “How are you going to tell people at work that you are… seeing someone.”

“We’re not,” I said. “We’re going to not feed the noise. Ken’s on our side. We’re careful. We don’t… make out near cameras.”

“Great plan,” Tari said dryly. “Foolproof.”

Our pancakes arrived like a truce. We ate. We laughed about past horrors. We pretended none of us had ever cried in a bathroom over a text.

My phone buzzed. A message from him.

2pm. Bookshop on Danfo. Back room has bad lighting.

I smiled into my coffee.

“Soup?” Coco asked.

“Books.”

Coco’s approving noise was almost maternal. “My work here is done.”

We paid. We hugged too long in the doorway while a couple tried to get past us and pretended not to be annoyed. On the sidewalk, Coco squeezed my hand.

“Please be happy,” she said. “Even if it’s weird.”

“It’s very weird.”

“Good,” she said. “Normal is for people who own matching lunch containers.”

~~ ~

The bookshop smelled like paper and dust and ambition. The owner gave me a nod that said he approved of my childhood. I wandered toward the back. He was there, leaning against a bookshelf with his hands in his pockets, trying not to look like he was posing for a magazine.

“You came,” he said.

“You keep saying that like I’m not the one who texts you pictures of my hand holding yours at 3 a.m.”

He froze. “You...did that?”

“Maybe.”

He looked somewhere between endeared and personally attacked. “I was asleep like a normal person.”

“Gross.”

We let the quiet close around us. He reached for a book and handed it to me. “This one?”

It was a collection of essays on desire and boundaries. The universe has jokes.

“You’re unbearable,” I said.

“You like me,” he said.

“Unfortunately.”

We stood close enough to be accused of things and flipped through pages we couldn’t actually concentrate on. A customer coughed pointedly and we separated like middle schoolers. He paid for the book with an apology that somehow included a tip.

Back on the sidewalk, we paused, not ready to break whatever spell the bookstore had put on us.

“I have an hour,” he said. “Then I have to be boring.”

“I have emails pretending to be urgent,” I said. “They can wait.”

He nodded toward the corner. “Walk?”

We walked. The sky had decided to be gorgeous. A vendor tried to sell us socks. A kid on a scooter almost took me out and he reached for my elbow in an instinct that was more tender than protective.

“Last night was reckless,” I said.

He winced. “A little.”

“It was also… good.”

“It was,” he said, voice low. “Better than good.”

We stopped at the edge of a park. People were performing their weekend rituals...jogging, shouting at dogs to stop eating mysterious objects, failing.

“I don’t want to make this heavy,” I said. “But I don’t want to pretend either.”

He considered. “Okay. Here’s not-heavy honesty. I like being with you. I like how you look at me right before you say something I’m not prepared for. I like that you send illegal cat emojis at 3 a.m. I like that soup keeps following us around like a guardian angel.”

“And the heavy version?”

He met my eyes. “I don’t do halfway with you. Even when I try.”

It landed in the center of me like a stone into a lake. Ripples and all.

“Okay,” I said. “Then we don’t do halfway. We do careful. And honest. And maybe sometimes… dumb.”

“Occasionally dumb,” he agreed. “With helmets.”

We smiled like fools. Someone’s dog barked at us like we were suspicious. Fair.

My phone buzzed again. An unknown number, not the one from before.

Cute blind date. Try not to trip over your own story.

...X

He saw my face change and lifted a brow. I showed him. He scanned it, jaw tightening, then handed the phone back like it was evidence in a case he fully intended to win.

“We don’t feed it,” he said. “We don’t respond. We make our choices in rooms where the lights are bad and the soup is good.”

I laughed, relief and nerves mixing into something reckless and bright. “Fine by me.”

We turned back toward the street. He reached for my hand in the most unremarkable, ordinary way, like we were the kind of people who did that on Sundays. We were not that kind of people. We did it anyway.

The wind lifted, the day behaved, and for the first time in a week the noise in my head went quiet. It didn’t last. It never does. But it was enough. And when Coco texted Pineapple? just to be dramatic, I sent a photo of our shadows holding hands on the pavement.

No pineapple. Just pie. I typed. We accidentally actually like each other.

Coco’s reply came fast: Ewww. love that for you.

Tari added: tell him i said thanks for his forearms

I snorted, choking on nothing. He looked at me like I was the best joke he’d heard in months.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, leaning in, lighter than I’d felt in forever. “Be natural.”

“I don’t know how,” he said.

“Me neither,” I said. “Let’s fake it.”

We did, hand in hand, into the ridiculous, hopeful afternoon.