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Jason was impressed that I had guessed correctly. I wanted to tell him it was my job to study people and assess their situations, but I didn’t. Because he didn’t ask me any of the usual first-date questions, like “What do you do?” “Where are you from originally?” “Do you have any siblings?” “Where did you go to college?” And, of course, “What year did you graduate?” which was the polite way of asking, “How old are you?”

And since he didn’t ask me any of those questions, I didn’t ask him. It was like a game of chicken. So by the end of the date I felt I knew him as a person, without any of the details and facts that usually make up a person. I knew he was patient with the waitress, but not overly chatty. He was curious about others, but not judgmental. We told little stories and anecdotes, but didn’t delve into our stats. If someone had listened in to our entire date, they would have thought we had been together for months. I say months and not years because our physical attraction to each other simmered and popped like hot oil, in a way that years tend to cool.

It was one of the oddest first dates I had ever been on, since the predictable first-date script was never recited. I wanted him to know how old I was. That I had an older sister. That my parents lived just down the road. That I had gone to Yale for undergrad and was finishing up my doctorate in psychology at UM. But why? Why did I want him to know these things? Maybe it was because I didn’t know who I was without them.

We each had two drinks at dinner, and once the check came (Jason paid, although I of course reached for my purse to offer to split it), neither of us gave our predetermined excuse as to why we couldn’t possibly now have drinks. So we walked over to the lobby bar and settled in. He had another martini with three olives, and I had a glass of Champagne. He asked why Champagne, and I explained the bubbles made it impossible to drink too fast, it was light and not too sweet and left me feeling buzzed and happy but never hammered, it didn’t give me a hangover, and it made me feel fancy.

Plenty of men had asked me what I wanted to drink, but he was the first to ask why I wanted to drink it. He was getting to know me in a different way from anyone else. It was exhilarating and uncomfortable all at the same time. I clinked his martini glass and made a toast to broken lamps. And we talked for hours.

It’s nearly impossible to close down a bar in Miami since bars never seem to close. But at two a.m. we both called it quits. Work the next morning, et cetera. I thought Jason could be a thing, a real thing, and didn’t want to muddy the waters with sex too soon. I did, however, expect a kiss, but he didn’t even try. Instead he put me in a cab in front of the hotel and watched as I was driven off.

When Jason first met me at the lamp store, I was wearing work clothes. As a therapist I want my attire to portray me as professional yet comfortable, competent yet relaxed, simple but thoughtful, nonsexual yet feminine. That usually amounted to a muted structured but not-too-tight top, dark jeans, and a fun-colored flat shoe. Since he’d already seen me in that type of outfit, for our first date I wanted to show Jason that I was stylish without needing to try too hard. So I wore a thin off-the-shoulder gray sweatshirt à la Flashdance, tight jeans, and extremely high heels.

After the fact, when I got home and called Ellie and gave her a play-by-play of our date, she was horrified to learn I had worn a sweatshirt.

“But it’s a cute one! Off the shoulder!”

“No, Ruby. Just no. That’s not okay for a first date! That’s for a tenth date when you stay in and order pizza in the middle of your sex marathon.”

I turned on the faucet for Mr. Cat and listened to Ellie berate me. And after listening to her, I decided perhaps I had given Jason the wrong impression with my sweatshirt choice. Maybe he thought I wasn’t truly interested. Maybe that’s why he didn’t kiss me.

So for our second date I decided to go in an opposite direction. I wore a tiny black wraparound dress that had a plunging neckline. My breasts were perky enough that I didn’t need a bra, and it was clear by the way the dress clung to me that I wasn’t wearing one. I threw on some flats to offset the sexiness of the dress. A similar approach to putting on high heels to offset the sweatshirt.

Jason and I spent the afternoon looking at art galleries in the Design District. He didn’t comment on my tiny black dress. I didn’t comment on the third blue shirt I had seen him wear. Clearly someone told him long ago blue was his color. It was another odd date, filled with chatting about our opinions on everything from Colombian folk paintings to water fountain germs, but little about our personal backgrounds. He enjoyed lingering on each piece of art, slowly taking it in. I did not. I liked to breeze through, only stopping when something truly caught my eye.

I did learn, as I searched for a café Cubano stand, that he did not drink coffee. Instead he drank diet soda. Even in the morning. Jason gave me a hint into his past and explained that where he grew up they mostly drank sweet tea, and since he was diabetic, it was diet soda for him. I listened to his words and watched his well-proportioned lips as he drawled in his slight Southern accent. But I wasn’t able to figure him out. He was so hard to read, I couldn’t decide if he liked my personality but wasn’t attracted to me physically. Or the other way around. Maybe he just wanted to be friends? Maybe he was gay but not out? Maybe he had an STD he wasn’t ready to tell me about so was keeping his distance? Maybe he was secretly married? Maybe maybe maybe. The date again ended without a kiss.