“What do you mean, you don’t know if it’s a date-date or a friend date?! How do you not know that!”

Bee was sprawled on her back on their couch, arms pressed over her burning face. In front of her, Chuck was pacing the living room, a dress clenched in each hands. One was a nice, conservative burgundy corduroy pinafore with matching silk blouse, and the other one was a definitively more provocative green wrap dress with a floral pattern and a plunging neckline. 

“It’s not as obvious as you seem to think it is, Chuck!”

He huffed at her, and now that was not fair. He didn’t get to be exasperated at her. She got exasperated at him! That was the basis of their friendship! This sudden role reversal was as upsetting as it was problematic.

“There are clues, Bee!” he insisted. “Was she flirting with you?”

“I don’t know, how should I know that?” She removed her arms from around her head to better gesticulate. “We were just talking!”

“Talking and flirting are like, two completely different things.”

“Are they?!”

Chuck completed his turn around the living room, what little space there was left of it after she’d finished setting up her HAM radio equipment, and stopped next to her head.

“Well did she seem into you? What was her body language like?”

“I don’t — you know I can’t read people’s body language.” She turned to glare at him. “My brain isn’t wired like that! She was friendly. She leaned in a lot.”

He gestured at her excitedly with one of the dresses.

“See? That — that’s good! That’s a good sign!”

“Or maybe she just wanted me to hear what she was saying. It’s not clear! Leaning isn’t — ugh, it’s not a declaration of intentions, it’s not clear.”

Chuck tilted his head up to the ceiling.

“I can’t believe that you get to go on a date,” he muttered. “Why can’t I go on a date, but it’s fine if you do it?!”

Bee let out a long, wordless whine that she would never let anyone else than him hear coming from her. It was undignified. She sounded like a boiling kettle. 

“I didn’t do it on purpose! She knows, she figured it out!”

“Right, so it’s fine if she knows but I can’t tell Archie? Aren’t you being a bit selfish here? And after all the fuss you kicked up earlier, too.”

She picked up a cushion from the couch and hurled it at him. “Shut up, Chuck! It’s different! Archie’s your boss! And a Major!”

He raised the dresses up in the air, unmoved by her cushion attack. “Yeah? So?”

“He has a moral duty not to date you, Chuck. And a legal one to turn you in for fraud. He can’t find out! Ever! I don’t know how many times I have to tell you.”

“Ugh. Right, okay, look.” He sighed. “I don’t want to have this conversation with you when you’re like that.”

“Like what?!”

“Get dressed, and when Iris gets here I’ll use my legendary investigation skills and I’ll figure out what she wants. We can revisit the idea of Archie another time.”

He glanced at both of the dresses in his hands then shoved the green one at her before she could tell him what she thought about revisiting the idea of Archie. (It was ‘no’. That’s what she thought about it.)

“Wear that one.”

She sat up and grabbed the dress, then stared at it in dismay. 

“Are you sure? How can you pick a dress if we don’t even know if it’s a date or a date-date! What if I give the wrong impression?”

Oh god, what if she did give the wrong impression? What if she’d been giving the wrong impression all along?

He sighed. “It’s gonna be fine, Bee. Trust me. For a friend date it looks fancy and nice, and for a date-date it looks casual. Best of both worlds.”

After tucking the other outfit under his arm — and probably wrinkling the silk blouse in horrible ways that she didn’t even want to think about — he physically picked her up from the couch, set her on her feet, and pushed her towards her room. 

“Come on!”

“Okay, okay, I’m going.”

But then not three steps later she froze and turned around again, a new concerning thought having just occurred to her.

“Wait, are you saying that if its a friend date I’ll be over dressed and if it’s a date-date I’ll be under dressed?!”

He took a breath to speak, then stopped. He frowned. The doorbell ringed, and they both looked towards the front door in alarm.

“No time!” he yelped. “Go go go go!”

Bee ran into her room to change as fast as possible. Oh god. She shouldn’t have waited until the last minute. This was a disaster. What sort of impression was she going to give?! And with a tailor, too! The woman lived and breathed clothes! If Bee wasn’t impeccably dressed, what would Iris think of her?

On the other side of the house, she heard Chuck clear his throat a few times and open the door. Iris’ voice floated up to her, cool and crisp as if the woman had never even heard about the concept of being nervous.

“Hey bud. I’m here to romance your wife.”

Bee’s hands froze on the buckle of her belt. Oh. Well that was good. That was nice and clear.

She heard Chuck’s booming laugh fill the entryway. “Nice! Come on in.” 

Bee hurried to finish changing, deciding against wearing makeup or doing anything fancy with her hair. She wasn’t very good at the makeup thing, and Iris would definitely notice. Better to have a natural look and pretend like it was on purpose, than to have clumsily applied lipstick and look accidentally bad, right? Right. As for her hair, Bee couldn’t even remember the last time she’d done anything more than brush it flat. She was blessed with the straightest of hair, the type that would actually stay flat all the time without any extra effort, and she had the faint impression that she was probably squandering that blessing with her dollar store brush. Not that she would bother ninety percent of the time even if she did own a fancier brush. She had other things to worry about, and it’s not like it had ever mattered up until now.

She looked herself up and down in the mirror and grimaced. Well, it wasn’t going to get any better than that. She supposed that if Iris was interested in her, she’d still be interested even if Bee didn’t look like a model for their date. If not, well. She was about to find out. 

She joined them in the entryway. Chuck hadn’t even invited Iris inside to sit in the living room. He was just standing there, grinning at her uselessly, while Iris pawed with curiosity at the jackets on their coat rack and occasionally shot him an amused glance. 

She was wearing a gorgeous skin-tight minidress made with some sort of holographic silver fabric. It rippled in the light as she moved, a subtle hexagonal patterning in the fabric flashing in and out of view. It had a boob window (nice!) and the miniskirt flared out into ruffles mid-thigh. Her legs were freakishly long, and today her calves were bared. Oh wow, one’s eyes could really just slide right down them like water, huh? Bee blinked and found herself staring at Iris’ silver shoes, some cute little lace-up booties with chunky heels and open toes. 

She cleared her throat. 

“There you are!” cooed Iris, before stepping right up to Bee and pulling her into a hug. 

Huh. Okay. So they were doing hugs now. That was new. Bee hesitantly placed her hands on Iris’ back and blinked at Chuck over her shoulder. He gave her a thumbs up. 

Iris pulled back to hold her at arm’s length. She looked Bee up and down and bit her lip, which was both flattering and also terrifying. 

“You look so good! I love that dress, girl.” 

“Yeah, huh, it’s, you know,” she stuttered. “It’s casual.”

“Yeah, I can see! I like it.”

She winked. Iris winked. Chuck pointed excitedly at her from behind and mouthed ‘date-date’. He even went so far as to repeat it in sign language, raising both of his indexes in the air and bringing the rest of his fingertips together and apart as if they were kissing. Bee caught his eyes and twitched her head towards the living room, hoping that he’d catch the hint and piss off. He gave her another thumbs up but didn’t move. 

“Anyway, should we get going?,” she suggested, turning her attention desperately back to Iris before the woman could turn around and see her fake-husband’s theatrics. 

“So eager,” she laughed, then took a step back and offered a hand to Bee with a bow and a flourish, tucking her other arm behind her waist as if she were a gentleman in one of Chuck’s ridiculous period romance novels.

She hesitantly slid her fingers into the waiting palm. Iris’s hand was warm as it enclosed hers, her grip gentle but firm. She pulled Bee’s knuckles up to her lips and pressed a delicate kiss to her skin. It was nothing more than a soft brush, over in an instant, but the contact felt sizzling. Her warm breath rippled over the back of her hand as she pulled back.

Bee whimpered. Chuck was staring at them with wide eyes. Iris’ smile managed to be both lush and satisfied. When it seemed that no one had anything to say, she pulled on Bee’s hand and guided her out of the door. She let herself be steered, too stunned to even say goodbye to Chuck. She did catch him throw her one last thumbs up out of the corner of her eye before she was pulled outside and into a car.

Iris had apparently arrived in a nice purple magnetic sedan. It smelled like lavender, and as she pressed the button for the ignition, something smooth and jazzy started playing over the radio. The car hummed, hovering beams coming to life smoothly under them. Bee tried to relax into the seat.

“So where do you want to go tonight?”

She blinked. “I thought we were doing coffee?”

Then she froze. Oh no. Had ‘coffee’ been a euphemism for ‘general but undefined date activities’? Of course, it had to have been. People didn’t go get coffee at seven in the evening. Oh, she’d messed up.

“I — I mean,” she quickly corrected herself, “I don’t mind. Anything is fine.”

Except it wouldn’t be entirely fine. Bee’s brain tended to create a constantly updating mind map of her immediate future, which had the advantage of offering her a constant awareness of what she would be doing at any given moment, barring any surprises. It was comforting. However, since she had been under the impression that they would get coffee, then this mind map function of her brain (that she had never asked for but nevertheless was part of her core operating system) had created a sort of ‘Get coffee with Iris’ mental check box in her list of upcoming things to expect. If they didn’t do that specific activity, then it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would still leave an unchecked, unfulfilled item in the back of her brain. Like a little ‘missed event’ calendar reminder that she couldn’t get rid of. Which would bother her.

She also — entirely figuratively mind you — tended to think of her energy as something that her brain assigned to upcoming tasks ahead of time with little labels defining what the energy was going to be used for. Certainly, she could reassign the ‘Get coffee with Iris’ energy to a more nebulous ‘Date with Iris’ category. But she would also lose some of that energy in the conversion, and she would start the evening wrong-footed.

None of that was anything that she could explain and have people understand, though. At least not in her experience. So she just smiled at Iris and waited for her to decide what they’d be doing.

“You know what,” said the woman with a little contemplative half-smile and her eyes fixed on the curve of Bee’s cheek, “I do know a very trendy coffee bar that opens late. The barista does these juggling tricks and sets fire to espresso shots, because why should bars get all the fun, right? What do you think, wanna go check it out?”

“That would be nice,” she immediately agreed, relieved. Once again, it was like the woman could read her mind.

And thus operation ‘Get coffee with Iris (fancy)’ began.