He didn’t close his door. He sat in his desk chair.

With those two simple things, I could relax. Together they screamed, “I realize I brought you to my bedroom on our first date, but I’m not trying to push any boundaries.”

The night didn’t start off so promising. He had texted to say he’d be 15 minutes later than originally planned, and then was 15 minutes later than that.

Punctuality is extremely attractive to me.

He didn’t play music in his car, which usually makes such an enclosed space feel strangely quiet and like a time machine that transcends all rules, but it wasn’t strange in the slightest. We didn’t need pop songs to fill lulls in conversation, we effortlessly flowed from topics we agreed on to topics we didn’t. All of his opinions were unapologetic and well-formed. I could tell he grapples with his own ideas as often as I do.

He told me about jazz music, and stuttered a bit because he got so excited about it. We agreed that winking is a weird social construct (why do we have a gesture that takes normal phrases and makes them sexual?). We had nothing and everything in common.

He told me I was cool, which is a compliment I don’t hear that often non-sarcastically. I hear “smart” a lot, but less often “cool.” In this case he meant the former, but he said the latter. Clearly he values intelligence.

He respected my self-imposed midnight curfew. We both had 9am classes the next day.