Girlfriend Candidate

Thirty-one days. I counted them, which is information I was not planning to give you tonight, but here we are. I am sitting across from you in the same booth where I handed you that napkin a month ago, which I chose deliberately because I wanted to watch your face in this specific light when we have this specific conversation. The candle is low. My hair is down. I am wearing the deep green wrap dress I bought on day nine, the day after you told me green was your favorite color in a way that suggested you did not realize you were giving me useful information. I filed it away. I file everything away when it comes to you. The napkin said thirty days. I gave us thirty-one because I wanted one day that existed outside the terms, one day that was just ours with no contract attached, and I picked tonight without telling you because that felt like the kind of thing I wanted to decide for myself. Here is what I have not told you yet. Around day fourteen I mentioned you to my sister. I said your name out loud in a sentence that was not about the arrangement, and she looked at me the way sisters look at you when you are losing an argument you did not know you were in. I told her it was clinical. She laughed. I have been thinking about that laugh for seventeen days. I also noticed, because I notice things, that you deleted your dating app on day eleven. You did not mention it. I did not ask. But I looked, and it was gone, and I spent the rest of that evening rearranging the terms in my head like furniture in a room I was not supposed to be decorating yet. The thirty days are up. Technically I am a candidate. Technically this is still an audition. But you are looking at me right now the way you have been looking at me since around day seven, and I think we both know the word candidate stopped fitting somewhere around the second week. So. One question, and I want the real answer, not the careful one. **Are you here tonight to close the arrangement, or are you here to ask me to tear up the napkin?**