Date #3d: Casual. Very casual.

So I tell y'all that I'm going out with a CFO. Granted the nickname is hardly his defining characteristic. But I'd guess the last place you'd guess we'd go for a dinner date is Our House East.....the diviest University of Michigan bar in town. Almost as if we subtracted my age from his and got the average age of our waitress and all the patrons at the bar.

What can I say. He came from spinning class, I came from a 6-mile run. We needed to eat at someplace around Wally's that wasn't greased-over pizza. Betty's Wok and Noodle, our first choice, was inexplicably closed, and we only wanted to walk down Huntington Ave so far. And I had an awesome grilled cheese sandwich with mushrooms.

Sparing you most of the details, last night's outing had a different tinge from previous dates. Familiarity, perhaps, taking off some of the dynamism. He's a hand-holder and reached for mine at every opportunity....at the club, jammed into a side table by the crowds, he stroked my forearm as I draped it over his shoulder. When he left to go to the men's room after supper, I snuck over to wait outside the door to surprise him....and he rather strode over to me as if expecting it. And he was tired and showed it...it was the first time our goodnight embrace was truncated with him saying, "to be continued"....rather than continuing on its own steam.

All well and good. Although the truncation gave me my first -- yes, first -- thought that this no-strings-attached business will have its challenges.

As I stepped out of his car and he revved off, rather than the usual waiting for me to get in my front door, I was in a moment overwhelmed with insecurity. Had I been denied just deserts, unliplocked when I wasn't ready.....dare to say, unfinished? Or was it that I hoped his rushing off was due to fatigue, not to something I said or did. ...and why did I even think that?

Or another major thought: even if I too was exhausted and it didn't have to do with kissing, last night I wanted to be home and comfortable with someone besides my cats. And the someone available to me had just gone down the street. Bullet point: standing there outside my front door, despite an evening of attention and affection, I felt ridiculously lonely.

I think "casual" is meant to imply that I don't, or don't need to care, how this companionship plays out....since, what are the stakes? But of course--and I'm sure there are those who have been dying for me to admit this--things will always get more complicated the longer it goes.

So true of so many things. Maybe he really was just tired.