I can still taste the spearmint on my tongue, and I haven’t stopped yawning yet. My biggest fear is that I’ll open my mouth to say hello and yawn directly into her face. This wasn’t the kind of concern I’d thought about the last time I went on a first date, but that was a decade and a half ago. I’ve changed. I’m a completely different person today.

My knees creak when I stand from a low chair, my sciatica is always giving me trouble if I don’t stretch before a workout, the gray at my temples makes me look sophisticated at the best of times and just plain old more often than not, and I don’t dare leave the house without antacid pills.

I am officially and seriously an adult.

Apparently, the dating scene has been growing and changing just as seriously as I have.

The last time I went on a first date, I was nineteen — younger than the woman I’m meeting today— but when I let myself think about our eleven-year age difference, I think she might as well be that young. What do we even have to talk about, really? When I focus on age, all I can see is our many differences. She uses too many emojis when we text, she has three roommates in a two-bedroom apartment, is seriously considering quitting her job because “fuck these capitalist pigs or whatever,” and she was adamant that we meet first thing in the morning because “I don’t want to waste a good Friday evening on a bad date. You understand, right?”

I don’t, actually, but I said I did because I didn’t want her to realize just how boring I am, and she’s cute. No, sexy as fuck. And way out of my fucking league.

“Fuck,” I whisper under my breath. “Don’t think about that.”

We’d agreed on Brews Crews because it’s a popular coffee shop in a new downtown commercial development that might be close to where we both worked or not, but it’s in a central location where there will be people around, but hopefully, not anyone who knows us personally. It’s the kind of place where someone can meet a complete stranger without having to divulge too much about their personal lives and habits. Thankfully, that was something that appealed to both of us because we each had to entertain the possibility that the other was a serial killer, didn’t we?

This coffee shop was also a good choice, according to my date, because if we hit it off, she wanted the option to have a quickie in the bathroom and never come here again. She’d said that. Well, typed that. I’m still kind of in shock at that message nearly twenty-four hours later. It’s not going to happen, but thinking about it makes my dick hard in an instant.