It was sixty-four degrees this morning when Nico made his announcement.
I want to be clear about that. Sixty-four degrees. In Tempe. In May. Which, objectively, is not a weather event. It's just a Tuesday that got a little confused. But Nico was standing at the window in his hoodie — his hoodie — watching the clouds roll in over the smoke haze like he was witnessing something prophetic, and he said, with genuine reverence: "Babe. It's shoulder season."
It is not shoulder season. It will be one hundred degrees on Friday. I know this because I have a phone and basic literacy. But Nico has been doing a thing lately where he follows several accounts that are entirely devoted to weather memes and the emotional weight of transitional climate, and somewhere in that algorithm spiral he absorbed the idea that a single overcast morning represents an official seasonal window that must be acted upon immediately or lost forever.
The announcement was this: we were going to do hot pot.
Not just hot pot. A hot pot date strategy, which he had apparently been developing in the background of our relationship for some time, involving a specific seating preference, a broth tier list he'd mentally catalogued, a position on the ideal ratio of thinly sliced beef to vegetables that I did not ask for but received in full. He'd been waiting, he explained, for the right weather. And this was it.
"It's also Cinco de Mayo," I said. "Half of Mill is closed for construction. There's a block party. There's a DJ."
"That's fine," he said. "We're not going to Mill."
I looked at him.
"We're going to the new shabu place," he said. "I found it."
The new shabu place — 212° Shabu Shabu, which I had also seen mentioned everywhere because we live here and it's a local opening — does not open until May 11th. I pointed this out. Nico looked at his phone for a moment that lasted approximately one full business day.
"Okay," he said. "But it opens soon."
"Six days."
"In the context of shoulder season," he said, very carefully, "six days is meaningful."
What followed was a negotiation I was not prepared to have before 9 a.m. Nico's position was that we should still go somewhere for hot pot today, to lay the groundwork, experience-wise, so that when 212° opened we would have recent hot pot literacy and could appreciate it properly. My position was that this was an insane thing to say out loud. We reached a compromise, which is to say that Nico talked for another fifteen minutes and I eventually agreed to lunch somewhere with broth, which in his mind registered as a full win.
He checked the air quality on his phone before we left and announced it was "giving end times a little bit," which I think was a TikTok reference, and then we had to take a weird route because of the Downtown Refresh closures, and there was a moment on the detour where he rolled down the window, took a breath of the mildly smoky May air, and said, in total sincerity, "This is what I mean about shoulder season. It has a feeling."
I looked out the window at Tempe in the flat gray morning light, at the construction barriers and the Cinco de Mayo banners and the ASU kids who were clearly not thinking about seasonal transitions, and I thought: this person is going to monologue about shabu shabu broth ratios for the next six days until that restaurant opens, and I am going to let him, because when we finally sit down there he is going to be so genuinely happy that it will be completely worth it.
He absolutely did the thing where he said "called it" about the clouds burning off by noon.
It was seventy-seven degrees by the time we got home.
He said it still counted.