When I parked outside her building, she turned toward me. “Are we dating?” she asked, with such plainness that the answer should have been effortless. I told her we had been on one official date, heard how evasive it sounded, and still failed to correct myself. “That’s not what I asked,” she said, and the disappointment in her voice was quieter than anger would have been.
I explained that I didn’t want to rush into a label before we knew this worked. Maya looked down at the seat belt across her lap, then back at me, and asked what “worked” meant. I started talking about three years of friendship, about how much history we had to protect, and watched her patience thin with every careful word. Finally, she said it felt as though I was testing whether she qualified for an upgrade without damaging the original product.
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I said, too quickly. She answered that it was what it felt like, which was a distinction I would have understood immediately if I hadn’t been busy defending myself. She wasn’t asking for forever after ten days, she explained; she was asking whether I was willing to acknowledge the thing we were already doing. I looked at the steering wheel and offered, “We’re seeing each other,” as if changing the vocabulary could solve the problem created by avoiding it.
