A story I’ve told many times, and will tell in a condensed form here: During my first date with Matt, after an hour or so of intriguing and flirtatious conversation, I wished aloud that we could go make out in an alley somewhere – but it was frigid December outside. Matt said, “That’s a solvable problem,” whipped out their phone, and fired up the Breather app, which allows you to rent nearby office spaces by the hour for meetings and such, like an Airbnb for businesspeople. We made our way to a fancy office building in midtown, took the elevator up 10 floors while stifled attraction pulsed between us, and then we shut the door and kissed for the first time.
Kisses turned to makeouts, and makeouts to spanking, and by the end of our 20-ish minutes in that room, I was thoroughly dishevelled and hooked on this dazzling person, without either of us having taken any clothes off. It was the closest we would get to having sex in-person for another month yet (though we whiled away the meantime with lascivious phone calls galore). Ah, memories.
Matt made the booking under the title “Important Meeting,” a respectability joke designed purely to make me laugh (which it did), complete with a briefcase emoji. As we talked on the phone about this last night almost 3 years later, I teared up. “It was an important meeting,” I said, knowing full well how cheesy the words sounded, “because I met you.”
Matt and I are both overanalytical nerds, so we have returned many times to reread the Breather profile for this small, well-lit room that looms so large in our personal history together. And, y’all… its description is so hilariously, unknowingly on-point that I almost feel like I’m being punked.