Taciturn

You go. You ask her out. She doesn't sound to keen, and the situation is so uncomfortable it burns. You want to bail out, but you can't just run. There's nothing you can do but to keep going. So you say the first thing that comes to your head, which you realise has compeltely bypassed your concious thought, because your concious thought was in a panic spinlock. She finds the way out of the uncomfortable situation. You dive for it, take her number, and get the hell out of there.

You're walking home thinking about what you've just done, telling yourself over and over what a retard you were to think that, on the off chance that so many people around you seem to be able to slide into a relationship like a warm bed on a cool night, you might be able to do the same. On paper, it's easy. You had it planned. It was straight in, say the line you'd spent the last few days perfecting, wait for the "sure, I'd love to", and straight out. Everything was going to be perfect. All of it.

But it's not. Nothing turns out the way you planned it. The moment you stepped in that door, the nervousness reached your head and switched off your brain. That same moment was the point you'd earmarked as the hurdle after which it'd all be easy. How wrong you were.

"I don't go out much", she says. Those words are killing you. It feels like a knife carving up your chest, and for a moment you're tempted to do the same. An eternity to regret being so stupid. If you'd been realistic beforehand and seen that as a probable outcome, it wouldn't have looked so attractive against wondering "what if" for the same eternity.

She gave you a phone number. The realist in you overrules the optimist and you accept that she made it up on the spot. The words "I think" don't instill confidence — not even in the optimist.

You decide you'd rather not suffer the humility of calling, only to be told that you've called the wrong number. You hang on just in case. Just in case you change your mind later.

Weeks pass. You forget about what happened. Just another day in an endless sea of experience. You realise that things weren't so bad before, and they're no different now. You peg the whole escapade as life experience and think little more of it. Nothing to worry about.

---

A month later you're back to your old self, doing your usual thing. You see her name on a bit of paper alongside a contact number. You jot it down. Given the opportunity, why not find out for sure whether the number she gave was real or not.

It was, and you never called it.