The towel

This report covers a tenth date with the subject referred to here as M., held on Saturday, July 25, at 7:00 pm, at my house. The date ran 210 minutes. The cost was $58.43, for groceries, and I cooked.

It is day 96. It is the first time either of us has been inside the other’s home, the first date to add nothing to my road column, and the first at which an obligation of mine was settled in kind rather than in dollars.

Summary of charges

• Duration: 210 minutes
• Travel, mine: 0 minutes
• Travel, M.’s: 90 minutes
• Questions asked by me: 10, approximate
• Questions asked by M.: 10, approximate
• Phone checks by M.: 1
• Phone checks by me: 0
• Out-of-pocket costs: $58.43, groceries
• Amount contributed by M.: $0.00
• Policies settled: 1
• Follow-up: pending at filing

Cost per hour in person: $16.69. Cumulative: $2,297.07 across 10 dates and 96 days.

She drove

M. drove 45 minutes each way.

45 minutes each way has appeared in this file 8 times and it has been mine every time. Her running total for the road now stands at 330 minutes against my 905, and 90 of those 330 were incurred on this date.

She arrived while I was still cooking. She came in, sat on the couch, and looked around the house.

I stayed in the kitchen. I should have asked her to come and stand in it with me and I did not, and the first time a person sees the inside of your life she spent the front half of it in a different room from you. She was reading the place. This file reads receipts and she was doing the same job with the furniture.

The phone column

While I cooked, M. sat on the couch and was on her phone. The figure is 1.

There is a version of this form on which it is 0. This column has counted checks made while both parties were at the same table, and for 20 minutes of a 210-minute evening we were in different rooms because I had put us there. I considered that reading and I am not taking it. A definition that only gets examined on the day it would lower the number is not a definition, it is a preference.

So: 3 phone checks in 1,680 minutes across 10 dates. The first was a missed work shift. The second was her child calling. The third is this one, and it is the first in 96 days that was not an obligation arriving from outside the evening. It is also the only one that happened while the other person was 15 feet away cooking for her, which is a fact about the host.

The claim

After dinner I settled the massage card. She had redeemed it 3 days earlier, and it is the only instrument in the box that pays out in the currency she named on May 31 as the one she deals in.

It started with her feet. She was wearing a short dress, and when she gave me her foot the gap at her inner thigh was exposed. I offered her a small towel to cover it, and then I massaged her feet and lower legs, and then her shoulders.

I want the towel entered as its own line.

An exposure was presented and I covered it. That is what the word means in the business this file has been imitating since April 20, and it is the second time in 3 weeks that I have responded to an opening by producing an instrument for it. On July 2 I wrote 16 policies against my own future failures. On July 25 I handed over a towel.

I did not move toward intimacy afterward. We talked. Nothing notable was said, and by the standards of this file nothing notable is a finding with a date on it.

The car

I walked her out. I kissed her at her car and we stayed there for a while.

Kissing is not new to this arc. It began on June 9, at Postino, when she asked me to kiss her, and it has happened on every date since. What is new is the duration. This is the first extended one on file, and it took place outdoors, next to a vehicle, at the end of an evening spent inside a house.

The only occasion on which a kiss was declined remains July 4, at 8:00 in the morning, after a 12-hour shift.

She said that maybe we should have made plans for her to stay over.

She said it in a driveway, on her way to a car, having already arranged the evening around being home. It is not entered as an invitation. It is a thing said about an evening that was over.

I offered to take her back inside. That one is entered, and it is mine. It was late by then and she needed to get back to her children, and she drove 45 minutes home.

That is the third occasion in this arc on which something has been named after the window for it closed. The second date she offered on May 8 was recovered 19 days later. The Shakespeare show was scheduled the day after I cancelled it. The overnight was proposed in a driveway, at the end of the only evening in 96 days that had a house and no curfew in it.

Corrections entered after the fact

2, both mine, both on this form: that I should have invited her into the kitchen, and that I should have moved toward intimacy before the evening ran out.

Neither is a rationalization. A rationalization is a story told at the time in order to continue, and this file holds 3 of those. These are the opposite: entries made afterward, by the party who was there, against himself, in a document nobody asked him to keep.

The second of them was confirmed from the other side 6 days later. That is on the form for July 31.

Findings

Travel: first date in 96 days that cost me 0 minutes of road. First date on which the other party traveled further than I did.

Claims: 2 of 16 policies redeemed, both settled. Outstanding: 14.

Kissing: routine since June 9, begun at her request. First extended one on file, at a car, on the way out, 210 minutes after she arrived.

Physical initiation: 3 and 0, being the massage, the towel and the kiss. All 3 were raised by me in the room and carried out by me, including the one she had redeemed a card for 3 days earlier. The running figure is 16 mine and 1 hers.

Limits set: 1, hers. Invitations extended: 1, mine, being the offer to come back inside, which was made after the offer had stopped being available.

Questions: even a tenth time, 10 and 10.

Contributed by M.: $0.00, across 10 dates, 96 days and $2,297.07. She has supplied 330 minutes of driving against my 905. On this date she drove and I did not, which has not happened before and does not happen again.

Costs

• Groceries: $58.43
• Total: $58.43

Cost per hour: $16.69, the second lowest in the arc after the mall. The cheapest evenings on this site are the 2 with the most in them, which is a pattern with 2 data points and is recorded as such.

Running position: 10 of 10 dates held, $2,297.07 out of pocket, 1,680 minutes in person, 905 minutes of road, 420 minutes of manufacture, $0.00 contributed by the other party.

Status

The follow-up field reads pending. A day or 2 later, by text, we made plans for dinner on Friday, July 31.

That is 10 dates and 10 agreements reached by text, including this one, which was agreed by 2 people who had spent 210 minutes in the same house.

The account is open. It records 12 disclaimers, 3 rationalizations, 2 corrections entered after the fact, 14 outstanding policies, 3 phone checks in 1,680 minutes, and 1 towel.