my most enthusiastic contrafibularities

Anyway, he doesn’t require precise numbers.  He knows how he feels:  lonely.  He has his dog but no one else.  He lives alone, spends his evenings and weekends alone.  Spends his holidays alone.  His sole interaction with humans is from his coworkers and whatever paltry connections he can build with customer service employees.

It’s a fellow guard, Mike, at the prison who sets up the blind date.  Mike’s sister-in-law is similarly shy, the same sort of introvert as Richard.

“A real nice gal, Rich,” Mike explains over lunch.  “Smart, has a good job.  Owns her own house.  She just has trouble meeting a nice guy.  Everyone on the apps are either creeps or assholes who ghost her.”

Richard would never agree to it, but then Mike slides his phone across the table to him.  He’s pulled up your profile on social media, and Richard studies your picture.

“She’s pretty,” Richard admits.  He feels a fluttery swooping in his gut at the thought of taking you out, but Mike is something of a bull in a china shop, and before Richard can even stop it, his fellow guard is setting up a double date for him and his wife, and you and Richard.

“Safety in numbers,” Mike says, and it seems that Richard has little to do other than show up and be himself.  As if it’s that easy.

“Dios,” he mutters after his lunch break ends.  Already he’s flushing at the thought, his palms slick with sweat.

-----

The date is supposed to be low stakes:  dinner at Mike’s house.  There are no public spaces to navigate, no random people to throw Richard off what little game he has.  He turns up at Mike’s house ten minutes early with a bottle of wine that he spent far too much time agonizing over at the store.  In his other hand he clutches a mixed bouquet, and that took too much time to choose too.

The zenith of the date is here, on Mike’s front porch, the few moments before he knocks.

It goes downhill from there.

*****

Your sister married an idiot, but Mike has his sweet moments.  For example, this date he set up.  To hear your sister tell it, it was mostly Mike’s idea. 

“He worries about you,” she told you weeks ago.

You snort and shake your head, secretly pleased that your brother-in-law is so, well, brotherly to you. 

“He’s only worried you’ll get stuck with me when I’m old and infirm,” you replied.

“Not true.  Besides, he said this guy, Richard?  Said he’s nice.  Shy, like you.  He thinks you’ll hit it off.”

You can’t quite buy into Mike’s optimism.  Because the guy, this Richard, barely looks at you, and he says even less.

Mike introduces you with an expectant smile.  Richard is cute, you decide, edging against handsome.  You offer him a smile, tell him you’re happy to meet him.  In reply, you get the limpest handshake in the history of mankind, and then Richard winces, swipes his hand against his pants. 

Mike frowns slightly but rebounds.  He claps Richard on his back and tells you about how your date works in the letter room of the prison.

“Tell her about it,” Mike prods gently.

“It’s not that interesting,” Richard mumbles.

Which is about all he says to you all evening.

Bless your sister and brother-in-law, though.  They try to help Richard along.  They do all they can to open up lines of conversation, to sing your praises to him, to sing his praises to you.  They uncork a second bottle of wine.  They put on some low music to fill in the awkward gaps of silence. 

During the start of dinner, you are merely perplexed.  Are you hideous to him?  Do you smell abhorrent?  He’s not even being polite, and as the evening drags on, your confusion cedes to a low-simmering anger—which makes your own shyness fade.

“More broccoli?” you ask him, and you move to hand him the dish.  The motion makes Richard flinch way too hard, and his hand catches the edge of his wine glass.  The deep red merlot splashes on your dress, and you slide back from the table, then stand.  Richard doesn’t turn to look at you; he only stares at the widening stain on the tablecloth, and he hisses out a low, tortured fuck.

Your sister stands too, and she gives a polite ‘excuse us, gentlemen,’ then ushers you to the powder room where the two of you daub at the splash of wine.

“This is not going well,” she finally murmurs to you.

“You think?”  It comes out sarcastic, and you wince when you catch her reflection in the mirror.  She looks apologetic.

“Mike said he was awkward…”  She tries to explain the rude behavior away but then trails off, goes silent.

You sigh.  You tilt your head towards the ceiling and shut your eyes for a beat.  Another awful date, and this one had been served to you on a silver platter. 

“It’s not Mike’s fault,” you finally concede.  “And anyway, it’s almost over.”

-----

When the two of you return to the dining room, it turns out the date is already over.  Mike sits alone, picks at the food on his plate, and he looks at you gloomily as he announces that Richard left.

“I’m sorry,” he says.  “I have no idea what his fucking problem was.”

You return to your seat and try to school the tears that prickle behind your eyelids.  Are you that terrible a prospect?  You know you aren’t some great beauty, but you have a lot going for you—

“I’m sorry,” Mike repeats, quieter, and you glance over to see him shaking his head. 

“It’s okay,” you reply, even though it isn’t.  This hurts, and it draws cracks in your foundation.  You know there will be fallout to your confidence in the days and weeks that follow.

You don’t have the heart to stay much longer, and your sister walks out with you as you climb into your car.  You wave at her and drive off, and you are a block away when your sister turns to go back into the house.  Something bright catches the corner of her eye, and she looks down at the ornamental shrubs that stand beside the porch.  Tangled in the low branches is a bouquet of flowers, tossed aside.  She bends down and scoops them up, notices that they look pretty fresh.  She takes them inside.

“What you got there?” Mike asks when she joins him in the kitchen.  He’s scraping off plates and loading the dishwasher, and he watches as she snags a vase from the cabinet under the sink.

“Flowers.  They were thrown in the shrubs by the porch.”

“Huh.”  Mike looks at them, then pulls together a theory.  “You think Richard brought them?”

“And threw them away before he even came in?”  She shakes her head.  “Why?”

*****

If Richard had enough money, he’d quit his job and move to the other side of the country.  Hell, he’d move to the other side of the globe if he could pull it off.

He’s never been so ashamed.  So embarrassed.  Mortified.  There’s no adjective that can capture the depth of shame he feels at how he acted on his date.

He can’t even really explain it—though he tries, of course, when Mike angrily corners him in the breakroom the following Monday.  Richard tries to explain how out-of-body he felt, how the moment he knocked on Mike’s door and heard footfalls making their way to let him in, he panicked.  He tossed the flowers away, suddenly terrified that the cheerful blooms looked cheap in their cellophane wrapping. 

And it only got worse from there.

He broke out in a sweat immediately.  He felt it trickling down his temples, had to daub it away with his shirt sleeve on the sly.  He felt his armpits growing damp, felt flushed and sickly, feverish.  The air in the room was too warm and too heavy, like breathing through soup, and the shallow breaths he took only made the panic grow.

Then you entered the room and for heaven’s sake:  you were pretty in the pictures Mike showed him, but you looked downright angelic in person.  Dress lightly skimming your curves, gentle smile on your face as you looked at him expectantly.  When you stepped closer to introduce yourself, Richard caught the scent of you—faintly sweet, a warm smell.

How could he feel anything but shame to shake your hand with his own sweaty palm?  You were perfect, and he felt unwieldy, monstrous beside you.

And you had tried to be kind anyway.  Tried to converse with him, asked him questions about his life that he only grunted at.  He asked you no questions in return, and when you tried to pass him some food, he ended up staining your beautiful dress with the wine he brought.

Of course he fled.  Of course he spent the drive home cursing himself, cursing his stupid brain that was always so eager to flood itself with stress hormones the minute a situation got uncomfortable.

“I’m so sorry,” he tells Mike in the breakroom of the prison.  He tries to explain it, assumes he fails like he does everything else.  “Please…tell her it wasn’t her fault at all.”

“Of course it wasn’t her fault!”

Richard flinches at the anger in Mike’s voice, but then he hangs his head.  He lets the fresh wave of misery course through him.  “She was too good for me anyway.”  It comes out a low mumble, but Mike must catch it anyway.  The other man sighs after a long beat, then lays a heavy hand on Richard’s shoulder.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown you into the lion’s den like that,” he concedes.  “But for fuck’s sake, man.  You made her feel terrible.”

“I know.  I mean, I guessed as much.”

“So it wasn’t a love match.”  Mike drops his hand and sighs again.  “But it would help a lot to apologize to her.  She’s beating herself up pretty bad.”

Richard looks up, surprised.  “She’d be willing to see me again?”

“Doubtful,” Mike replies with a shake of his head.

“Then how—”

“Fuck, man.  You work in the fucking letter room, right?  So write her a letter.  I’ll get it to her.”

*****

You’re not overtly depressed over it.

You’re also not okay about it.

It doesn’t help that the days are getting shorter.  It gets dark early, so it’s easy to justify the hermit-nature you’re embracing.  You come home from work, you walk your dog, and then you spend long hours in your pajamas watching trashy reality TV shows before you go to bed.

You sleep a lot.  It helps with the little pit of despair your failed blind date opened up in you.  It shook your confidence harder than you would have thought.  You’re generally pretty sturdy in your sense of self, but each year that passes without any success with the men erodes it more than you care to admit.

You spend the week after the failed date wallowing.  No sense in white-knuckling through it.  You feel bad for yourself, you go a bit maudlin, and you start to climb your way out…

Then your sister stops by for a visit, and when she goes to leave, she hesitates, then reaches into her purse.

“This is for you,” she says, but she holds it for a long moment before she hands it to you.  It’s a white envelope, and it bears your name across the face in unfamiliar handwriting.

She takes in your puzzled expression and clarifies.  “It’s from Richard.”

“Ah.”

“He felt terrible, sweetie.”

“That makes two of us, then.”

She studies you for a beat.  “You know, he brought you flowers, but something made him panic, I think.  I found them tossed behind a shrub after you left.”

You furrow your brows in confusion.  “Kinda weird.”

“Kinda.  But not serial killer weird, at least.”

You smile.  “True enough.”  You hold up the envelope.  “At least he didn’t ghost me.”

-----

You’d like to say that you have a certain measure of patience, but the moment your front door clicks behind your sister, you tear that envelope open like a wild animal.  Your curiosity allows nothing else.

It’s a single page, but Richard’s printing is small and tight.  You have to hold the paper closer to the light to read it.

It’s an apology, of course.  A genuine one that goes a long way at softening your heart to the man who had been so impolite at your date.  Because he tries to offer an explanation too—the utter panic he felt, the crippling anxiety—and that softens you too.

You know about that sort of panic, that sort of anxiety.  It used to cripple you too until intense therapy and the right combination of meds helped you tame it.  Still, you can feel it claw at your chest sometimes, so your anger at Richard is replaced by understanding.

Also, he drops this line in the middle of his letter, and when has a man ever said (or written) something so guilelessly sweet?

I think you might not realize how beautiful you are, Richard wrote in his cramped, neat printing.  I was already struggling to breathe from the panic, but the moment I saw you, I couldn’t breathe at all.

“Richard, you surprising son of a bitch,” you whisper aloud in your kitchen, and you reach for your phone to text your sister.

*****

It’s grace that Richard doesn’t feel he deserves, yet Mike offers it:  a second chance.

“It’s a big holiday party,” Mike explains when he hands Richard the invitation.  “My wife fucking loves all that Martha Stewart, Bing Crosby, chestnuts on an open fire bullshit.  There will be a lot of people there, so...”

He trails off, but Richard catches his meaning.  A lot of people will serve as cover for Richard.  He’ll be able to melt into the crowd, peel off into another room if his anxiety threatens to choke him.

He’s not so sure it will, though.  In the month and a half since that terrible first impression, and since he found out his apology letter was well-received, Richard has taken control of it.  For the first time in his life, he got angry—angry enough to make an appointment to see his doctor.  Angry enough for a referral for a therapist.  Angry enough to try out a low dose of anti-anxiety medication.

There was no shame in it, he had decided.  If a person had high blood pressure, didn’t they get medicine for it?  Richard had grown up in a home that stigmatized feelings in general, and he had always taken the ‘ignore-it-and-it’ll-go-away’ approach to his own mental health. 

But when Mike had told him—secondhand, through his wife—how well you had responded to Richard’s letter, he felt that flush of anger.  At himself, partially, but also at the family legacy of suffering in silence.  Why had he suffered so long with no relief?  Why did you offer him more kindness than he had ever offered himself?

Hence the meds.  Hence the forty-five minutes every week where he awkwardly stammered through his overanxious thoughts, his family history, his own history.

And it seems to be working.  The medication seems to drop a thin veil between him and his own head.  It gives him the barest bit of a barrier, just enough protection from himself.  The therapy gives him the tools to understand why he reacts the way he does.  Richard comes to understand that it’s his low self-esteem that drives much of his social panic, and his therapist prescribes him a list of mantras he is to repeat to himself in the mirror each morning and night.

It embarrasses him at first.  His reflection flushes in the mirror as he says nice things to himself…but damned if it doesn’t seem to work.

-----

Who can say why it goes better the second time around?  Maybe it’s the meds or the therapy, or maybe it’s the barest bit of understand Richard has achieved through his letter to you.  Maybe it a combination of all three things.  Richard doesn’t linger over the why because the what is so much more gratifying.

What is it?  It’s…so much better.  Richard arrives at the perfect time—not too early, not too late.  He walks through the front door, and he doesn’t toss aside the bouquet of flowers this time.  His heart hammers in his chest, but he remembers to breathe, remembers to smile.  He repeats his mantras in his head as he makes his way through the growing throng to find you.

I am worthy of happiness.  I am worthy of love.  I am open to new possibilities.

He finds you alone in the kitchen, half-bent in front of the oven and peering at whatever cooks inside it.  You’re just as beautiful as he remembered.  His pulse picks up, rapid, but he swallows.  Takes a breath.

I am worthy of happiness.  I am worthy of love.

“Hello,” he says.

You stand up and turn; at the sight of him, you smile.  At the sight of the flowers in his hand—a wintry mix of white roses and sprigs of cut pine—your smile grows wider.

“Those would look better in a vase than tossed in the azalea out front,” you tease, but you say it gently with that smile on your face, and Richard shakes his head ruefully.

“I thought I might wait at least a few hours before I throw wine on you, too,” he jokes back.  The joke lands because you laugh—a merry sound that makes him chuckle.

You reply that you specifically wore black in case he turned up, and he chuckles at that too, but then he turns serious.  He apologized by letter, but he knows he has to say it to your face as well.

“I am sorry about that evening,” he says now.  “I’m m-mortified…”  He trails off when he stammers, and he feels his face flush hotly.  Dammit, he thinks, but then he realizes what he’s doing—he’s falling back into the deep rut of old behavior, so he thinks an abbreviated mantra over and over to steer himself away from the cliff’s edge where he stands.  I’m worthy, I’m worthy, I’m worthy—

His thoughts are interrupted by your soft hand, tentative, on his arm.  Just for a second you touch him.  Just enough to reassure him, because he looks into your eyes and sees only understanding. 

“You don’t have to apologize again.  It’s in the past.”

“I just—”

You shake your head, cut him off with a smile.  “I have an entire lifetime of awkward social moments.  I get it.  Really.”

What else can he do but gaze back at you, to return your smile with his own?  To finally nod his head, to consider himself forgiven?

“Good!”  You break away with a little clap of your hands.  “Now let’s get a vase for those flowers, and then you can help me with the mini quiches my sister has baking.  I forgive you, but your penance is being a fellow cater-waiter for the evening, okay?”

What else can he do but laugh at that, then give you a little salute?  How can he resist your charm as the two of you take orders from your sister, the hostess?  The two of you spend most of the party in the kitchen together, running the dishwasher, drying glasses, uncorking bottles of wine, refilling trays of food.  You take turns rejoining the party proper, but when you regroup in the kitchen after each excursion, you share little jokes about the other guests, observations and gentle teasing, and Richard realizes late that the entire evening passes and he hasn’t broken out in a cold sweat once.

He realizes that he hasn’t overthought anything either.  Hasn’t ruminated over his words.  He’s at ease, and he’s enjoying himself.

-----

Which means that the night ends far too early. 

His role in the kitchen gives him a bit of a reprieve:  when the other guests leave, Richard stays behind and helps clean up.  Not that you or your sister asked—he volunteers to stay, and he misses the bemused look that passes from your sister to Mike.  You miss the look too.

You and Richard tidy up as best you can.  The bulk of the cleanup will be in the morning, but you put away the leftovers, you set the dishwasher for one last load, and you sweep away the crumbs. 

The cleanup ends far too early too.

You get his coat for him from the guest bedroom, and then you walk him to the door.  Mike had said you were shy too, but Richard has never seen it—until now.  At parting, you turn shy.  You don’t quite meet his eye, and you stammer out how you had fun, as you thank him for his help.

It’s funny how much your sudden shyness endears you more to Richard.  He recognizes the emotion in you, and it makes the kinship between you feel stronger.  You understand him and he understands you, and when was the last time he felt that sort of connection?

That must be what gives him the mad bit of courage as he stands at the threshold.  You remain indoors, he stands just on the other side of the doorway, and he feels a surge of bravery that makes him lean forward, quick, and brush the gentlest of kisses across your warm cheek. 

“Oh!” you say, startled, and Richard suddenly thinks he’s overplayed his hand.  He feels his own flush creep up from the collar of his coat.

“Sorry, I—”  He starts to say.

“No.  No!  You’re fine!  You’re—”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You just surprised me.”

“Oh.”

You smile, your eyes finding his.  “A nice surprise.”

-----

The entire drive home, Richard can’t stop grinning.  He smiles so much—and has smiled so much throughout the evening—that his cheeks hurt, the muscles so unused to so much effort.  It’s only once he’s inside his own home that he kicks himself; he didn’t get your number or give you his, so there’s no way—

“Just ask Mike for it, dummy,” he mutters to himself, but then he recognizes the negative talk, so he amends it.  “I can just ask Mike for it.  No worries.  Of course I didn’t think of it in the moment.  I was enjoying myself so much.”

But maybe he wasn’t the only one with the mad bit of courage in the end.  When he goes to shed his coat and hang it up in the hallway closet, he checks his pockets for his wallet…and finds a small scrap of paper, folded into fourths.  It’s like a passed-note in school, though no one ever passed him a note during his school years.