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Hopeless Romantic's first date. Ever.}

Thursday, June 16, 2011 | 8:07 PM | 1 comment

Internet. You don't know how long I've been waiting to say those words. My first date.

It feels so foreign to say that/type that. Especially in relation to my personal life. But there it is. I'm sorry for the slight delay, as something else has been going on that's pretty related to this, but I'll get to that later.

So. Our date.

Best Friend Rose stayed over the night before, helping me agonize over the perfect outfit (and even lending me a sweater of her own, because I need to go shopping for cuter/more summery clothing). And her staying the night was also a part of this...well, plan that we had.
Yes. A plan. I'm talking a full-on cliche Disney Channel show type plan.

Now, BEFORE YOU FREAK OUT: It wasn't too dramatic. Or weird. Not really. It just involved BFR walking into the bookstore 10 minutes after me, walking around and looking at stuff out of the way and unnoticed, but also staying on location just in case the date went really awful and I needed a backup plan. Of course, I never ended up needing her, and we got to avoid any awkward lines like, 'Oh my god, Rose! I had NO idea that you'd be here! What a complete and totally unplanned coincidence!!"

Immature? Totally. Not even gonna pretend that it wasn't. But I have to admit, knowing Rosie was there helped alleviate my nervousness a little. It helped knowing that if it turned out to be a disaster, I wasn't completely alone and unarmed.

But, don't worry Internet. No convoluted Junior High-like plan next time. Cross my heart!

But anyway, onto the actual date:

I show up a few minutes later than he does, so I have to go find him. For a minute or two, I just stand there, looking lost and confused, and one of the guys working there just kind of looks at me like, 'Are you okay?'

So, I text Drew to ask him where he is in the store, and he tells me he's in Non-fiction. I glance around, and I find that non-fiction is just in the next room over. I try to calm my breathing, ignore the fact that my knees are quivering like leaves in a breeze, and enter the room.

I immediately see a boy sitting in a chair, in a red shirt, jeans and sneakers, reading a book in his lap. My heart leaps into my throat, and I grip my phone in my hand tightly as I start to approach him.
He's so engrossed in his book that he doesn't hear me walking towards him, so as I get closer, I swallow hard and force out a "hey" that I hope sounds nice and relaxed at the same time, all the while realizing that it'll be the very first time he hears my voice.

He looks up, maybe kind of taken aback, and then slowly closes his book and stands from his chair. "Hey," he says back.

I stop in front of him and grope for words for a few moments. I initiate a side hug, for reasons completely unknown to me because I hate side hugs, and the resulting one is really stiff and quick and kind of awful. "So, it's nice to finally meet you." I say, trying to still sound cool and collected even though I'm suddenly terrified because here I am, right in front of him, and I don't know what to say.

He smiles. "It's nice to finally meet you, too."

I smile wider, but it's like my cheeks can't take the exertion from smiling so much, and they start to hurt. After a somewhat awkward few moments, I throw my hands up. "So, should we take a look around?" I suggest.

"Sure," he says, and nods, and then starts to walk toward the door, and I follow.

We go to the fiction section first, and it's huge, so I say 'wow'. And he says something about them remodeling since he'd last been there. For a few moments I'm legitimately distracted by all the tall shelves of books around me, but then I come back to the present and realize that it's very quiet between us. I steal a quick glance at him, and he looks somewhat uneasy. I decide to say something, anything at all.

"Ohh, Stephen King!" I say, pointing to an entire shelf of his books. "They have a lot of his books."

"Yeah, they do." He agrees.

I say something about not reading a lot of his books, although I want to, and he says something about his Gunslinger series. While he's talking, he kind of trips over his words and stutters, and I notice distantly that the way he talks reminds me of Michael Cera.

So he wanders off to one of the other shelves, and I kind of stay where I am, wondering why he decided to walk away all of a sudden, and then my questions are answered when he comes back with the first book of the Gunslinger series. I take it, only really mildly interested in it, and ask him what it's about. He explains it all, and I nod slowly like I'm interested.

"Well then," I say, shrugging. "It sounds really interesting. I guess I'll have to get it!" And I look over and he looks pretty satisfied, so I decide I will get it after all.

After that, we continue looking, and a black cat jumps on top of the bookshelf next to us. I mention how I've always wanted a cat, and he tells me his family has 5 cats as well as 3 dogs and for him, a tarantula (Ew.) I respond jealously, saying that I wished I had that many pets, and he suggested that I could after I move out. And during this, I finally get the guts to look at him more directly, and I realize that he's cute. Like, really freaking cute.
Slight deliberate scruff, hazel eyes, long eyelashes, nice dirty blonde hair(meaning the color dirty blonde, not meaning that his hair was dirty, it was actually really clean. And you probably knew that, but I thought I'd clear that up anyway.), white teeth, and dimples when he smiles. He's so attractive to me and every time I look directly at him, and he looks at me back, it's like I'm intimidated by his sheer attractiveness, and I have to look away.

So we decide to head to the upper level after that, where they keep the older paperbacks, and we wander around looking. It gets quiet at times, but he doesn't seem as uneasy as before, and by then I'd begun to feel strangely...calm. It's like a got all of my nervous out within the first 5 minutes, and then after that it was like I wasn't even nervous at all. For some reason.

So we're looking and occasionally making comments, like me commenting about how they had about 1000 copies of a book called "Easy Spanish" and a car manual in Japanese.

The bookstore cats decided to join us (one was named Pages and the other was named Chapter. Isn't that the CUTEST thing you've ever heard?!) and we pet them and watch them for a while. He picks up a book and starts to read it, and apparently it's funny because he chuckles at it every now and then. I ask him what's so funny, but he won't tell me, so I just smile and shake my head.

By now we're getting along pretty well, and so we decide to go to non-fiction, where I found him first. We look at stuff, and after I pick up a Chicken Soup book, I tease him about how he should get a Marilyn Monroe biography. And then I tell him how it bugs me when celebrities get biographies written about them even when they're still alive. So then he tells me that he'll get a biography made about him now, just to piss me off. I laugh.

Fast forward through us looking at cookbooks (and me telling him I'm not a very good cook--but get this--he is.), me finding a dictionary/thesaurus/common misspellings book and keeping it to buy, and going to put back my Alfred Hitchcock short stories book, and we headed to look at the books at the front of the store.
As I stare at a shelf, he comes up behind me (and scares the crap out of me, by the way) to hand me a newer copy of the Stephen Kind book he found for me earlier. It's newer and sturdier and prettier than the other one, and so I decide to buy that one instead. He offers to take the old one back for me, and I thank him.

So then I spend about a thousand years looking at every book in that section, admittedly trying to stall a little. And during the last hour, we had one of the weirdest 10 minute awkward silences ever. I swear, it was that long. And I tried to seem engrossed in finding a book, but in reality I was poking and prodding my brain for something to say, anything, and I came up with nothing.

Finally, I said something about the Kite Runner, and I guess that just sparked conversation again, but that whole thing was weird.

Near the end, since I had already warned him that I had to leave around 12ish (my mom was providing the ride, and she had to be at work at like 1), he went ahead and paid for his one book. And when the time came for me to pay, as soon as I put my books on the counter, I realized with a horrifying chagrin that I had completely forgotten to bring my wallet.

I forgot to bring my wallet. To a bookstore.

But thank God, Drew had gone to wander someplace else, and he wasn't there to see. Completely red-faced, I told the cashier my situation, and he laughed it off, telling me that he could hold them for me until I could get my wallet from my mom's car. I thanked him, and went to go tell Drew my situation too. He laughed, but he didn't seem irritated or put off by it.

So we looked at children's books for like an entire fifteen minutes (got a bit awkward, considering there wasn't that many books in that section to look at in the first place, but not too bad) while I waited for a signal text from BFR to tell me that my mom was outside and that she was in the car. I finally excused myself and rushed out to the car to grab my purse (with my wallet in it) to pay for my things.

I pay for them, and then it was time to say goodbye.

We both walk slowly toward the entrance. I clap my hands together. "So," I try not to come off so eager. "This was fun."

He's looking down at me and smiling. "Yeah, it was. We should do it again."

I nod, trying not to look excited. He wants to see me again. "Yeah, definitely." I initiate another side hug, but this one was much better, more genuine instead of stiff. And he smells good. After we break the hug, I ask, "So, text you later?"

"Or course," he says.

So I (stupidly) say goodbye and walk out the door, and it's not until I'm halfway to my car that I realize we've done that say-goodbye-and-then-walk-in-the-same-direction thing. I turn and see him almost directly behind me, and I give this embarrassed sort of giggle, and he kind of does too. Then when we part ways, I wave, and he waves back.

And on the way home, I proceed to tell my mom and Best Friend Rose every single detail.

It was so not as bad as I expected it to go. In fact, it went pretty well. Despite forgetting my wallet and some awkward moments, I thought it went pretty dang swimmingly.

And Rose said whenever she saw us together, he was always smiling really big, and he kept staring at me. Which I can attest to, because whenever I'd be studiously looking at shelves of books, I'd suddenly feel him looking at me.

The whole rest of the day, I was so happy. I finally get why people who first start dating someone are so freakishly happy all the time, because that's what happened to me. It was like I was floating. I couldn't stop giggling.

Not to get ahead of myself here, Internet, but I haven't acted that way about a boy in a very long time. I'd almost forgotten what it'd felt like.

I guess all I can do is sit back and see where it goes from here.

xo Hopeless Romantic

Labels: dates, drew, firsts, summer

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"This song is talking to the person you haven't even met yet. Maybe they're rolling around in the hay with someone else, but they're not as good as you're gonna be. You just have to wait your turn. He's out there, she's out there. They're just learning what to contrast you against."

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