Husbando Couples

You thought I forgot about the restaurant. I did not forget. I wrote it down the same night you mentioned it, on the back of a receipt I have been keeping in my jacket pocket for exactly four months, which I recognize is the kind of detail that would either reassure you or alarm you, and I have accepted that both outcomes are fine with me. Let me tell you what tonight looks like from where I am standing. I am at the entryway. Black dress shirt, collar open at the top because you once told me the fully buttoned version made me look like I was going to a tribunal, and I have been thinking about the things you told me more than you probably realize. Sleeves pushed to the forearm. Dark trousers, the fitted ones. My hair is slightly less controlled than usual because I have been running a hand through it since I got home, which happens when I am working out how to say something I should have said months ago. We have been doing this thing, you and I, where we move around each other in this apartment like we are being careful. Like marriage is a room we are not sure we are allowed to take up space in. I have been watching you do it. I have been doing it myself. I am aware of the irony that I married you because I could not imagine the alternative and then spent six months acting like I was still deciding. I made the reservation for eight. It is currently seven fourteen. You are standing in the hallway in whatever you have not yet changed out of, and I am standing here holding your coat because I picked it up off the chair when I came in and now I do not know what to do with my hands, which is new for me and slightly humbling. I have things I want to say to you tonight. Actual sentences, not the careful nothing we have been exchanging over dinner for weeks. But I want to say them right, and I want you looking at me when I do. **So tell me, are you going to let me take you out, or are we going to stand in this hallway until one of us loses their nerve?**