After our first date, things took an unexpected turn when I didn’t hear from Graham for weeks. I’d texted him the next morning, the classic I had a great time, we should do it again that always leads to a second date. I even left a pair of socks, clean and nicely folded, on the floor just under the side of the bed I slept on. I figured if nothing else, the next time Patricia, his six-foot-five hockey-playing cleaning lady vacuumed, she’d pick them up—white with BOMBAS written in pink—and leave them on the end of the bed. You left your socks here, Graham would inevitably text. No wonder my feet have been so chilly, I’d play. I can warm them up for you, he’d respond coyly.

Instead, I sat at my desk or on my mattress or at a bar stool, waiting. There’s nothing more desperate—even suspicious—than a girl overzealous for a second date. And Walkers don’t do desperate.

I’d fielded texts from Lena—and others—asking how the date went, when we were hanging out again, if I slept with him, and it was hard to play it cool. To shrug it off. To tell them, He’ll come to me, I’m irresistible, when I felt incredibly far from it.

Truthfully, going on that date was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. There was an odd permanence to it that I’d never felt before because I’d never really dated anyone before. Not in the same way. From the moment I saw Graham in the bar, I felt my life shift on its axis. My five-year plan was starting. And once you’re on that train—once you’re spending your days with him, your nights with him, moving in, getting engaged, planning a wedding—there’s no getting off. There’s no going back. I was in or I was out.

And I needed to be in.

“I’m in the mood for a margarita,” I told Lena, sidling up to her in the kitchen after the longest and most boring client lunch-and-learn I’d ever attended. “Tonight?”

She rolled her eyes, seeing through me immediately. “Graham went home for the long weekend,” she said. I swallowed the need to defend myself, to tell her that’s not why I was asking. She knew it and there was no sense convincing her otherwise. Plus, she reveled in the power she had over me. I might have sucked Graham’s dick, but she knew his weekend plans, she has reactivated their college group chat, she needed to introduce me.

“He might be at that gallery opening on Monday, though, if that’s of interest.” She dropped a dollop of soy milk into her coffee and left me there to think about it.