Grace had told me fifteen people were coming. I was the first. A table for fifteen is a lot of table when you're the only one at it. For fifteen minutes I looked like a man who'd been stood up by fourteen people at once.
While I waited, I thought about how I knew these people at all. Some of Grace's friends I'd met through Char, a girl I went to uni with. We were all part of the same Uni ecosystem, where you see the same people at the same parties, vaguely know everyone's business, and somehow keep running into each other years later. Char was a blast, and her parties had a way of turning acquaintances into people you'd still be having dinner with long after graduation. Sydney has five million people and a dating pool roughly the size of a backyard pool. Sooner or later, everyone you've ever matched with turns up at someone's birthday dinner.
Finally, Grace arrived with the group. I got up to hug her.
And there, just behind her, coming up the stairs, was Steve.
Of all the people I'd expected to see that night, Steve was somewhere around number fifteen on the list. Possibly sixteen, if I'd remembered to include the ex-boyfriend I don't have.
My brain briefly stopped accepting new information. I was suddenly aware of my posture, my face, my clothes, every drink I'd had and every drink I was about to have, and the fact that I would now need to behave like a normal person in front of a man whose sunglasses I was holding hostage. Technically he could have asked for them back at any point. I hadn't sent a ransom note.
There are few things more humiliating than developing feelings for someone who hasn't had time to learn your coffee order.
Steve and I met on Hinge. He was attractive, kind, grounded and, most dangerously, seemed to actually be interested in me. The date was easy. The conversation flowed, the chemistry was there, and for once I didn't feel like I was auditioning for the role of Someone's Boyfriend.
I hadn't expected him to stay over. I very rarely do that. A first date, for me, ends with a hug, a walk home and a full forensic analysis on the couch. It does not end with a man in my bedroom.
Which was a problem, because my bedroom was a mess.
So I did what any calm, mature adult would do. I sat him downstairs with my housemates, like a parent dropping a child at a playdate, and sprinted upstairs to shove an embarrassing amount of laundry into places laundry doesn't belong. I can only imagine what they talked about. I'd like to think it was me. It was probably the weather.
Then came the second problem. He wanted to have sex, and I wasn't on PrEP and didn't have a single condom in the house. I had prepared for a date. I had not prepared for a sequel.
Telling a very hot man that, actually, tonight would be a sleepover is its own special kind of awkward. He was gracious about it, mostly. But at one point he said, "I came all the way to Newtown."
I've thought about that sentence more than I'd like to admit. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Newtown is a trek from most places. But it lodged itself in my brain like a splinter, and it stayed there.
So we had a sleepover instead.
If there's one thing I've learnt about myself, it's that I can turn a sleepover into a five-year plan with alarming efficiency. Waking up next to someone is dangerous for me. By breakfast I'd mentally pencilled in another date, another sleepover, eventually the sex, possibly a relationship, and one day a Charming story about how we met.
Then he left, and there were no text messages to analyse. Only a small reminder of the night he had spent here.
Steve had left his Ray-Bans at my place. I'd tried to return them, but somehow they stayed with me, and a perfectly ordinary pair of sunglasses became a souvenir from a relationship that existed mostly in my head. They were also my ticket to the retry. As long as I had them, there was a reason to see him again. Throwing them out would have meant admitting something had ended, when really nothing had begun.
I had tried to reach out to return them. A day passed. Then two. I waited, and waited. When he finally replied, it said:
"I'm so sorry I've been so rude! Work exploded (luckily not literally) and I'm already a terrible texter. You work in Surry Hills right?"
I can't even tell you what I wrote back. I've blocked it out. I just remember deciding that the Surry Hills question was about the sunglasses he'd left behind. He worked nearby, so maybe I could drop them off. It wasn't romance. It was logistics.
And then, as these things tend to go, the communication faded. Nothing came of it.
Which would have been fine, except I was far more upset than I had any right to be. One good date was somehow outranking several actual problems in my life.
How long are you allowed to grieve a relationship that never technically existed? The usual rule is half the length of the relationship. By that maths, I should have been over Steve by lunchtime.
Instead, I conducted a post-mortem on my apartment. Sometimes I play detective, hunting for clues at a crime scene I helped stage.
I'd always had a feeling it was the room. The mess he'd waited downstairs for me to hide. The balcony with no furniture on it, just concrete and ambition. And the bed, a king single, which is the bed of a man who is either nineteen or not expecting company.
So I fixed it. I bought a queen bed. Bedside tables. Artwork. Chairs for the balcony. I renovated my entire life for a man who had been in it for one night and was never coming back to see the results. One more night, one where I'd be prepared, with the right bed and the right everything, and I could finally sleep with him the way I was supposed to the first time. A second chance to be the version of me that I thought he'd come all the way to Newtown for.
I wasn't so much mourning Steve as the possibility of him: a little future I'd built before he'd even had the chance to disappoint me properly.
Every now and then I'd run to the Woolworths near Central Station and wonder if I might bump into him getting off the tram. It was a humiliating little ritual, as though Sydney's public transport system had been built specifically to test my ability to move on.
As it turned out, the test was going to be this dinner.
----
"Daniel, this is Steve," said Grace.
Steve said something like "I know," or "We've met before." I was not in a position to be taking minutes.
Grace asked how we knew each other.
"We went on a date last year," Steve said.
It had technically been January of that same year, but I wasn't about to correct him. I was just grateful he'd said it, so I didn't have to announce our romantic history like a witness giving evidence.
To his credit, Steve was completely calm. He didn't make it awkward and he didn't pretend I was a stranger. He sat across from me, and everyone carried on.
Later, Kyle arrived. I'd known Kyle for years, and it soon became clear that he and Steve were seeing each other. Somehow it was worse that I knew him. Being replaced by a stranger is a tragedy. Being replaced by someone you've chatted to at a house party is just admin.
Watching someone you once imagined a future with casually occupy the present with somebody else is its own special kind of unpleasant. Nobody had done anything wrong. I had just spent months furnishing an apartment for the two of us, quite literally, down to the bedside tables, and now I had to watch someone else move in.
Steve hadn't promised me anything. We'd been on one date. Still, I was drunk enough to take it personally.
So, naturally, I brought up the sunglasses.
Did he want them back? Did he remember leaving them at mine?
He didn't seem to remember them at all. They were mine to keep, he said.
Mine to keep.
I'd been treating those sunglasses like a family heirloom, and he couldn't even remember leaving them behind.
And if they were mine to keep, there was nothing to return. No drop-off in Surry Hills. No excuse to see him. No retry. Somewhere across town, a queen bed was waiting for a man who had already moved on.
I suspect every single person has a drawer like this. A hoodie, a book with someone else's name in it, a Charger that fits nothing you own. Evidence that something almost happened.
He wasn't unkind. The conversation was perfectly normal. The catastrophe was happening entirely inside my own head, where a familiar question had pulled up a chair and ordered for the table: why was I still single? Had everyone else been issued an instruction manual?
-----
After dinner I need up out on the town, where I continued making excellent decisions.
I kept bumping into a cute guy who turned out to be gay, and eventually we went home together. His apartment was a little messy, I was drunk as a skunk, and somewhere along the way I realised I was too sick to be there. I didn't want sex. I didn't want to get to know a stranger that night. I wanted Uber Eats and my own home.
There was one small problem: my phone was dead. He didn't have a Charger that fit, and made fun of my ancient phone accordingly. Fuck USB-C.
With no phone, no map and no real idea where I was, I left and started walking. The walk of shame has a certain dignity when you at least know which direction you're walking in. I found a road with bus stops and followed it towards the city, trusting that public transport would eventually reveal itself to me. At three in the morning, this felt less like navigation and more like a religious practice. Google Maps would have had me home in forty minutes. Faith took considerably longer.
I'd spent so long wondering whether Steve liked me, whether I'd said the wrong thing, whether I was attractive enough or interesting enough to be kept. I'd turned being single into a personal performance review, every failed date another piece of evidence that I was falling behind.
I still want to fall in love. I want the dates and the sleepovers and the mornings, and someone who chooses me and keeps choosing me.
As for Steve's sunglasses, I still have them.
Throwing them away feels unnecessarily dramatic. Wearing them feels like an administrative error. So they just sit around, waiting for me to lose them somewhere so the universe can finally balance its books.