Three weeks later, Eric asked if he wanted to meet.
Eric: Wanna meet?
Ernie stared at the message.
Well. That was a logical next step.
He understood the sequence. You talked to someone, you established that they were not obviously terrible, and then you met them in person to determine whether the internet had been lying to you.
Simple enough.
He typed that he was interested and would pick a time and place.
Then he put his phone down.
Then he picked it up again.
Meeting Eric was suddenly a problem of considerable proportions. Ernie had agreed to it, which meant he now had to think about where they would meet, how long he was expected to stay, what they would talk about, and whether there was a polite way to leave if the conversation became unbearable.
There was also the question of what he was supposed to wear. He knew how to dress himself. He had been doing it for twenty-nine years. The problem was that ordinary clothes and date clothes were apparently two different categories, and nobody had provided a definitive list of the differences.
He could already feel himself getting stuck.
The irritating thing was that Eric hadn't actually done anything wrong. He had asked a perfectly reasonable question. Ernie had given a perfectly reasonable answer.
Now his brain was treating the whole exchange like a hostage negotiation.
He opened Eric's profile again.
Same pictures. Same description. Same apparently nice man who had invited him to get coffee.
Ernie wished his brain would recognize that nothing had changed.
He also wished that wishing his brain would do something had ever been an effective way of making it happen.
It wasn't.
He needed to figure out the date. He needed to choose a place. He needed to stop thinking about every possible way the whole thing could go wrong.
He decided to deal with it tomorrow.
Tomorrow was a perfectly good place to put things he wasn't ready to deal with today.
Unfortunately, tomorrow had a habit of arriving.