Somehow I had been convinced to go on a blind date, and, horrible though it soon became, I had also managed to be convinced that I owed this girl a second date. The second date, I decided would be lunch rather than dinner, and I would also try to make sure we were as far from the bar as possible. I briefly considered telling the waitress that Mandy was an alcoholic, should the need arise.
I had given Mandy the choice of venue this time, seeing as how the last date I took her on ended so horribly, and secretly hoped that she would opt to go dutch. So she chose the place, I chose the day, and I made sure to be as punctual as possible, assuming that the sooner the date began, the sooner the date would end. As soon as I stepped off the bus, before it had even managed to pull away from the curb, my phone started ringing, and, sure enough, Mandy tells me she's not quite ready. "You mind just swinging by my place? By the time you get here," she said, "I'll be ready." Three seconds into the date and I'm already frustrated.
I made my way three blocks down toward her building, and I rang the buzzer, half expecting that she'd answer and say that she'll be right down. Instead she picks up and says "I'll just be a few more minutes," and she buzzes me in. I felt mild relief when I found that the elevator in her building was out of order, which meant I could take a few more minutes getting up to her third-floor apartment.
I got to her apartment, knocked on the door, and she answered, very casually-dressed with a hairbrush still in hand. She ushered me into the living room and heads to the washroom to fix her makeup, projecting her voice toward me the entire time. "So how invested are you in going out?" she asked, and, I admit, there was a very awkward pause here. I was trying to figure out whether she was asking if I was invested in starting a long-term relationship or, instead, if I was still hopeful to go out to eat. As I was debating this in my mind she wandered back out into the open, having discarded her hairbrush, and asked again, assuming that I had been unable to hear her properly. "Do you not want to go out?" I asked her, still unsure of what she was talking about, though if I had given her a truthful answer I wouldn't have been in contact with her at all.
Mandy shrugged her shoulders and played with her hair for a moment, "you know, I'm just not really in the mood for Thai right now," she muttered. I asked her where she wanted to go out to eat, and she still sort of dismissed the idea, having apparently decided that she didn't want to go out at all anymore. She disappeared into her bedroom, re-emerged with her laptop, and sat down on the couch beside me. She typed away for a few seconds and came to a recipe website, which I'm fairly certain she had planned beforehand, because I've never seen anyone find a recipe quite that fast.
My eyes began travelling around the room while I tried to suppress my irritation, and what I found was how unclean her home was. It's one thing to be messy, but to have the nerve to invite a date up into your pigsty is something that would never cross my mind to do. In my wandering I did happen to notice that she owned a copy of "My Stepmother is an Alien," which won a few minor points with me.
She surfed through a few pages before coming to a recipe for chicken curry, for which she just happened to have all of the ingredients ready. To be honest, I'm still not sure what her plan was for this date, but I'm also not prepared to reach out and ask her about it. So she set the laptop on the kitchen counter so we could read the instructions, and we prepared to have our meal in forty-five minutes. It didn't occur to me until much later that she had claimed not to be in the mood for Thai food, and then decided to cook Thai food.
Another surprise: there was no alcohol in her fridge, or in her cupboards.
While the situation was certainly odd, and it was in no way going how I had thought it might, Mandy and I were starting to have a good time together. As we cooked, we started discussing the fact that neither of us were particularly kitchen-literate, and we began to bond over the fact that we were both quite undomestic. As minutes wore on, I didn't even mind anymore that Mandy had completely dismissed the plans we had had, and I was enjoying myself with this girl that I hadn't wanted to see again.
As we waited for our meal to finish simmering, we found that her kitchen timer no longer functioned properly, resulting in a slightly blackened, but still enjoyable, chicken curry. We were also starting to find each other's humour, which was a relief to be able to make her laugh, finally, and I stopped worrying so much about when the day would be over. Soon the meal would be over, and the two of us retreated to the kitchen to clean up after ourselves. With the food gone and the dishes drying, I knew that our day together was coming to a close, both because I had other plans for the night and I felt as though I was about to start tidying up her apartment.
It turns out that we had both had a fairly pleasant time on our second time out, though it came nowhere near cancelling out the abomination that was our first meeting, but when she told me that "we should do this again," I was quick to agree. We weren't quite at the hugging-stage, and hand-shaking has the ability to make any date far more awkward, so I instead put a hand on her shoulder, smiled, and took my leave.
I guess I was wrong about Mandy, we did technically go dutch.
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