I woke up on Saturday morning in Fletch’s bed. He was cooking at the stove with the sunlight from a skylight turning his hair from auburn to flame. His cooking smelled good.

“Good morning,” he said, humming as he flipped over what was in the pan. He favored me with a smile that turned me into a puddle of goo.

“You look happy,” I commented as I searched for my bra on the floor by the bed.

“Yeah, well, there are few sights more satisfying than seeing you wake up in my bed.”

“Yet, you didn’t stay in bed with me.”

He chuckled. “I couldn’t. My phone has no alarm on it on a Saturday morning.”

“Mine doesn’t either.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, his teeth cutting diamonds out of the morning light. “Cause your phone made about a hundred sounds.”

“What time is it?” I asked as I reached for my phone.

“Ten.”

He was right. I had fallen asleep early and slept late. It was all because I had woken up in the middle of the night with a million thoughts, worries, the pounding of my heart, and Fletch’s irresistible conversation. When I finally did fall asleep, why had I slept so deeply? On a normal day, I got up at seven-thirty and on the weekends, I got up at the same time whether I liked it or not. Why had I slept like a dead person?

I looked around at the bed and everything around me. The answer was everywhere.

I had finally been able to relax. I never relaxed. Tension was the most common thing I experienced on a date. I was always so worried about everything. Thoughts rammed through my brain like express trains passing through a train station. What if I did something stupid? What if I did something I’d regret? What if something happened that I couldn’t undo? What if I got hurt?

Across the apartment, Fletch was pulling toast from a toaster and buttering it. “Do you like marmalade?” he asked.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Ninety-Nine Ways to Please Your Lover with Orange Peels. I assume they must have an entire section on marmalade.”

“They do, and an entire section on how to peel an orange in various romantic and sexual ways.”

He chuckled and brought my plate over to me. “How do you peel an orange in a sexual way?”

“Well, when kids peel the orange and get the whole peel off in one piece and they say it looks like an elephant with two big ears and a trunk. Adults say--”

He covered his face with his free hand and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. I get it.”

He handed me my plate. It was an omelet with onions, mushrooms, red peppers, and cheese with a piece of marmalade toast on the side.

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“I love it. Thank you.”

He looked at me. “You should check your phone. There were a lot of text bings.”

I glanced at it. “They’re messages from my sisters. I’m supposed to be going shopping with them in two hours and I haven’t confirmed, so they’re getting antsy and asking me how our date went last night.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“That you didn’t think my dress was very pretty and replaced it with sweats.”

He reached for my phone. “Don’t tell them that.”

I pulled it away from him. “One of them is single,” I explained.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Listen to me. I am the type of woman who put a fake gun to a stranger’s back and told him he had to come with me--”

He interrupted. “I know. I was there.”

“Yes, but what do you think makes a person able to just do that on a whim?”

Leaning on his elbow at the end of the bed, he munched toast triangles. “Practice?”

“Exactly.”

He almost choked on his toast. “How many times have you done that?”

“Okay. I hadn’t done that particular thing before, but my family is into pranks, jests, tricks, sarcasm, stories that don’t go anywhere, and saying the most outrageous thing a person can think of just to get a reaction.” I took a breath in. “I stopped bringing my dates home after the eleventh grade. My date never wanted to see me again because my older sister put her tongue in his ear just to watch him jump. I’ve never seen anyone jump so high. He was sixteen years old and an only child.”

“Okay,” Fletch said, rolling his tongue around the front of his perfect teeth. “Let’s say a person can rise to the challenge of suddenly having a tongue in their ear. What is the correct reaction to that?”

I smacked his knee. “There is no correct reaction to that. That’s why she did it. It’s undefeatable, though it was utterly misplaced on him. If she had looked straight into his eyes and said, ‘You’re cute,’ she would have undone him. Seriously, if you let her continue to lick your ear without giving her the reaction she craves, it’ll become like a staring contest. She’ll just keep on licking your ear until you crush your ear into your shoulder. She’d never quit. It’s not a fair situation.”

“And if a person licks her ear?”

I shook my head and stuck out my tongue. “She knows you want a reaction and she’ll give you one, but she’d make you sorry by saying the worst thing that pops into her head. She’d yowl that you’d licked her brain and you might not be able to keep it together. And there’s not one of them who wouldn’t get involved once they started. My married sister-in-law would join in as well as my mother and my grandmother.”

“So… if this is a game your whole family plays, why are you telling me the backdoor? And why did you tell them you had a date?”

“I didn’t tell them I had a date. My sisters like to go shopping together. We go almost every weekend, and one of them realized I was shopping for a dress. Then she made up a story that I was buying a dress to wear on a date, which I denied emphatically, but it wasn’t good enough.”

“Because they saw our pictures on social media?”

I frowned deeply. “Yes. I have put up lots of pictures with guys before, but I don’t usually get a lot of notice from my family because they know the guys I see are tissue paper… I’m not going to keep using them. Except, when they got the idea that I had a date I was buying a dress for, they looked up my feed and found the picture of us making out against the side of the wall.”

Fletch smiled broadly.

“Funny. I didn’t think you liked that picture.”

He continued smiling. “The content of the picture is not what I’m enjoying at the moment. I’m just interested in the backlash you experienced. When I had to explain that photo to my mother, I thought I was alone. I had no idea your family would come after you for it. What did they think?”

“They thought it was a prank,” I admitted.

“Wait. Wait. Wait,” Fletch said, sitting up all the way. “You’re telling me this because you’re thinking of introducing me to your family?”

“It’s not so much that I’m thinking of introducing you to them as acknowledging that I might not be able to protect you from them everlastingly.” I filled my mouth with omelet and waited for Fletch to answer.

He nodded. “Sounds fun.”

“It won’t be,” I assured him.