Why had Seamus given her his address when he was picking her up? He was glad she’d just done the smart thing, put her own on it for him; he pocketed it.
He was getting a sort of anticipatory thrill, thinking about all of this. He hadn’t dated anybody in years (ever, if you decided that his Hogsmeade weekends didn’t count, which they probably didn’t) and, moreover, it’d been such a while since he’d felt like he could talk about things without feeling ridiculous. As glad as he was that he saw Dean more often, that he could see his mother, that all of his old friends were still— presumably— around once he got up the balls to see them, he’d never been able to shake the feeling that, compared to everybody else, he’d failed so miserably to move on with his life.
And Susan seemed to get it— which, he thought, he wasn’t going to say. We both suck at this was probably a shitty pick-up line. Seamus scratched at the back of his head and realized, stupidly, that she was talking. “Yep,” he said. “Friday. See you then.”
(When he saw Dean next, he decided, he was not going to tell him about this. The date, yes. Their inability to talk once they’d decided to go on it, no. No no no.) “Looking forward to it, too,” he said, like an idiot. She gave him a wave good-bye and he gave her, after a horrifying half-second of inactivity, an answering thumbs-up, also like an idiot.
The bell swung noisily as the door shut behind her, and he clenched his fist behind the bar in a silent, hopefully unseen, triumphant sort of thing, thought for a glorious moment of telling Dean that oh, by the way, I have a date. Then he picked his rag back off the bar— he kept forgetting it there, and Ab kept having to tell him to stick it in his belt or over his shoulder and not on the dirty bar, and someday he’d actually remember to do that— and he swiped it cursorily over his water glass again, let his anticipation fizz in his chest, like something was going right, now— so right— and he just had to get there.
— out —
