You order a double even though the doubles here cost double, unlike where you’re from, because you need it to steady your nerves, because he’s sat right there opposite you, perfect in every way except all the ways he isn’t, on the surprise trip he booked for your birthday to the city where you always wanted to go, which he knows full well because he knows you so well, your wishes and goals and dreams, and you want so badly to be having fun but really you aren’t, because he is so gentle and so kind and so patient and you haven’t had sex in months because you don’t want to fuck gentle and kind and patient, and even kissing him makes every cell in your body burn with want, not want for him but the want to run, and you’re putting off going back to the hotel with its little glass bottles and white-as-white towels because your room is so small and that means he will be so close, his look his smell his everything, might be so close he can read your thoughts, and you already had a near miss tonight when he took you to the theatre to see this mind reader type, and you didn’t know how this woman did it, this woman in her purple silks, told yourself it must have been staged because how could it not be, but even still you wondered, wondered if it was real, because the people whose minds she read seemed so stunned and she gave that disclaimer at the start of the show about uncovering the long-covered so we all ought to be careful, and then oh god the cold panic set in and it stuck to your skin like sweat or like cellophane, the blood red fuzz of your theatre seat sharp against you, and you had seen on the poster outside that on stage the night before there had been folk dancing, just folk dancing, how fine it would have felt to watch some two-step, but no, you were there on this night, in front of this woman who might somehow pluck you from the audience, ripe as a cherry, sense with her abilities that you were brimming with something that needed to be expunged, let like a blister, but maybe she didn’t need abilities in order to see what was going on here, maybe it is as obvious as the mole on his face, maybe the man with the mole who brought you to this city, this bar, that theatre on this trip for your birthday knew all along, brought you to that theatre on this night so you would have to confront it, finally, have it cracked open to the world like a walnut or a skull, but that didn’t happen, it never does, and despite all the fear, the slick-sheen blood-runs-cold sickness of it all, you start to think it never will, because you are a coward and he must be too, and maybe that makes you perfect for each other, two little cowards stuck in a cowardly little dance, stumbling over each other’s toes as you two-step your way into eternity.