Our six-month anniversary was, according to Marcus, going to be "handled." That was the word he used. Handled. Like a business merger. Like a controlled demolition.
He had a spreadsheet. I only found out about the spreadsheet later, but apparently it had tabs. One for restaurant options with Yelp scores averaged against Google scores. One for "outfit notes," which I'm told just said "nice but not too nice, she'll know you tried too hard if you try too hard." There was a third tab I was never allowed to see, which honestly worries me more than the others.
The restaurant he chose was this tiny Italian place called Fortuna's, tucked into a neighborhood neither of us lived near. He'd read about it in a food blog from 2019, cross-referenced it with two Reddit threads, and called ahead to confirm they still had the corner booth, which he had specifically requested because, and I quote, "corner booths are romantic because you're protected on two sides."
I did not ask him to elaborate on what we were being protected from.
He picked me up at seven looking genuinely handsome — he'd ironed his shirt, which for Marcus represents a kind of spiritual effort — and announced that he didn't need GPS because he'd "studied the route." He said this the way people say they've trained for a marathon. With gravity.
Forty-five minutes later we were in a mall parking lot in a completely different part of the city. He was holding his phone up like he was trying to commune with a satellite. "Okay," he said. "Okay. The thing is, the route was right, I just think the city was slightly wrong."
The city was slightly wrong.
I had to put my window down so he wouldn't see me losing it.
We found Fortuna's eventually, only twenty minutes late, and the corner booth was waiting because Marcus had also called that morning to "reconfirm" and the host looked at him with the specific recognition of a man who had dealt with a lot of phone calls this week.
The food was incredible. Genuinely, embarrassingly good. He'd gotten that part completely right. We had pasta that tasted like someone's Italian grandmother had made it specifically to fix all your problems, and a candle that kept almost going out from the air conditioning, and Marcus kept cupping his hand around it protectively every time it flickered, totally unconsciously, just not wanting the little thing to die.
That's the part I keep thinking about, actually. Not the spreadsheet or the wrong city or the outdoor navigation confidence of a man who once got turned around in a Costco. Just him, quietly guarding that candle like it was his responsibility, like he'd also done a tab on that.
For dessert he produced, from his jacket pocket, a card he'd clearly written and rewritten because you could see the pressure marks from the previous attempts ghosted underneath the final version. It said, among other things, that I made ordinary things feel important. That he wasn't sure he was good at this but he wanted to keep trying. That he knew the drive was "a little long."
A little long.
I kept the card. I also took a photo of the mall parking lot when he wasn't looking, for the archives, for posterity, for the next time he tells me he doesn't need GPS because he's "studied the route."
Six months of being loved by someone who builds spreadsheets about corner booths and gets the city wrong and still somehow gets everything right. I'll take it. I will absolutely take it.