I’d never put more effort into planning a date than I put into my first real date with Kate. The first time around was just a mulligan. This time it was going to be absolutely perfect.

When I picked her up from her little condo in west Austin on the following Friday night, I had a bouquet of yellow and pink daisies in my hand. She grinned when she saw them.

“You remembered!” Kate said, taking them from me and ushering me inside so she could put them in a vase before they wilted. I followed her into her little kitchen.

“Of course, I remembered,” I told her, looking at my surroundings with interest. “I don’t think I could ever forget.”

Kate’s kitchen was as eclectic and quirky as her fashion sense, but just like her clothes, it totally worked. Her kitchen cabinets were painted bright red, and the appliances were the minty green color that was popular during the 1950’s. The countertops were white tile and the floors were stained concrete. Dozens of little prisms hung from the window, filling the whole room with late afternoon rainbows. It was dazzling, and almost tacky, but too charming to be anything but wonderful. Just like Kate.

Tonight, she was wearing a black sheath dress that was nothing like her usual vintage look. It hugged her every perfect curve but was otherwise completely simple. Her hair was free and loose, and she was wasn’t wearing any makeup I could see at all. The look was a stark but lovely departure from what I usually saw her in. Any time I thought I had her figured out, she surprised me.

“Perfect,” she said, setting the glass vase down and smiling at it. The delicate flowers did fit right in on her kitchen island. She’d clearly mastered her look. Everything around us was very Kate.

“Do you cook in here a lot?” I asked, wondering about Kate’s life away from the bar. She shook her head.

“Almost never,” she admitted, looking the tiniest bit embarrassed. “I don’t cook very well and it’s hard when I have all the free food I can eat from the food trucks by the bar.”

“I don’t know how to cook either,” I admitted. “Ramen, sure, but that’s about it.”

“Your mom didn’t teach you?” She looked somewhat wistful. I wondered if her mom didn’t have time to teach her. From what I understood from Ward, before she had the alpaca farm, Ward and Kate’s mom worked her ass off as a nurse. I’d never met her, but anyone who could raise both Ward and Kate must be quite the woman. I could only imagine she had a personality the size of Texas.

I frowned as I considered her question. “We had a cook,” I admitted. The only thing I could actually remember my mom cooking were grilled cheese sandwiches and cookies. However, both were delicious.

She arched an eyebrow at me. “Well aren’t you fancy? I didn’t know you had a cook.”

“Well, I mean, our housekeeper cooked. She wasn’t just a cook.” I didn’t deny my privileged upbringing, but I generally didn’t advertise it either. Usually people assumed that a guy who grew up in rural Arkansas with a weird Uncle Jimmy and a pack of coonhounds lived in a shack in the woods rather than a sixteen-room antebellum mansion, and I was just fine with that. Better that they think me simple than spoiled.

That made her giggle and shake her head. “Ok rich boy. Let’s go before I decide your privilege is too much for me to stand.”

There was the sassy, mouthy Kate I knew. I grinned at her. “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” I asked as we drove.

“Is it a strip club again?” Her tone was suspicious, but her eyes were smiling.

I cringed but simultaneously laughed so hard I nearly choked. “No,” I managed when my fit subsided into coughing. “It’s not. In all fairness, Lucas and I had no intention of ever actually going to that strip club. Amy was a friend of Lucas’ from his women’s studies class. She went along with our plot because he described it as some kind of weird performance art.”

“Oh yeah, that makes it all ok.” She pouted her full, pink lips at me.

“I only bring my dates to the classiest of strip clubs,” I asserted confidently, still feeling internally mortified. Bringing her to a strip club had been a real stroke of asshole genius, but not one I could take credit for. No, that had been all Lucas.

In reality, I was taking her to Uchi, a particularly well recommended local sushi place. According to the internet, it had won practically all the awards a restaurant was eligible for. It was like the EGOTs of sushi places. Kate grinned when we pulled in and she realized where we were eating.

“I’ve always wanted to come here!” she said excitedly. “They have a really good vegetarian menu.”

I looked over at her in surprise. “You’re a vegetarian? Since when?”

She made a face and rolled her big blue eyes. “Since living with Emma sophomore year. She ruined me with her whole sappy but well-reasoned ‘meat is murder’ thing. Now I can’t even enjoy a hamburger without feeling oodles of guilt.”

I briefly reflected on the fact that Ward, Mr. Medium Rare Steak himself, was marrying a vegetarian. His children would grow up eating salads. I couldn’t actually remember ever seeing him eat a vegetable, let alone an entirely meatless meal. It must be absolute torture for him to marry a woman who subsisted entirely off of what I’d heard him refer to condescendingly as ‘sports candy’. I made a mental note to give him shit about it at my earliest opportunity.

“Do you at least eat fish?” I asked Kate hopefully when we settled in at the intimate table. She nodded.

“I eat fish sometimes,” she said carefully. “But I’m not eating any raw fish. That’s an absolute no-go so don’t even ask.”

“Have you ever tried it?”

“Yes, and it was totally revolting.” The expression on her pretty face was firm.

I swallowed my disappointment and tried to look charming. She couldn’t be more wrong. Raw fish the best type of fish. But seeing Kate happy was more important than my need to shovel fatty tuna into my mouth. “Ok, deal,” I told her. “No raw fish.”

If this date went well, and I didn’t blow it, maybe I could slowly ease her into enjoying proper raw sushi. Really, there was nowhere for us to go but up. Even now, I could see distrust and skepticism in her eyes. If I could convince Kate that I wasn’t just a douche-canoe who led girls on to break their hearts for fun, it would be well worth every bite. Even if those bites weren’t full of delicious raw fish.