Rummikub to Rivas, Part Two | Amber Rivas Photography

Last we left off (Part One here!), Alex and I had just hung out for the first time together with just the two of us. We played three rounds of Rummikub. I won twice and let him win once. He maintains that he won without me letting him.

Between April 4th and April 19th, we got together a few more times. Once I skipped out on a windy ultimate frisbee PE class to hang out with him and explore the hidden tunnel between Wellman and Hart Halls. Once we fed the ducks at the arboretum (and later found out that my dad and sister were in Davis visiting the arboretum at the same time…). Alex doesn’t like birds, and he doesn’t like feeding birds. Neither of these things were mentioned beforehand.

Here’s where it’s important to bring up Steven and Molly. They were newlyweds at the time, and Molly was new in town. I had decided I was going to be her friend, and she had decided she was going to get me and Alex together. When she found out we had been hanging out, she was elated. She got me alone and asked if I liked him, and I told her, “Well, I don’t really know him, but I think I could.”

Molly told Alex that he should tell me how he felt, and she made plans with me to hang out on April 19th at 7pm. She said, “We’ll just decide what to do once we meet up.”

On April 19th at 9:55am, Alex met me as I was going to MAT 150C in Bainer Hall (Modern Algebra, third quarter). I think I biked to class even though Steven had told me I needed to stop biking. He’s now a doctor, and I had recently injured my knee. I maybe should have listened. Anyway, when I got to the hallway where my classroom was, there was Alex. I remember smiling as I saw him, and he walked over to me and had this short speech prepared, something like:

“I bet you’re wondering what I’m doing here. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I really like you and I was wondering if you’d like to go on a date to Yoloberry tonight at 7.”

Me being clueless couldn’t figure out that Molly had just asked me to hang out at 7 so that I wouldn’t have other plans because Alex was worried I would already be busy. I told Alex, “Well, I’d love to but I’m hanging out with Molly tonight.”

Don’t worry, he told me that he had planned the whole thing and that I was actually free that night. Woohoo! Then I went to math class and filled up three pages of notes that I didn’t know anything about because I was too distracted by my thoughts. And busy texting Molly about how sneaky she was. Alex went upstairs to the engineering lab and freaked out for 15 minutes.

That night I got dressed up all nice and waited patiently for him to come pick me up. We went to Yoloberry (I brought my wallet just in case because you can’t make assumptions! Alex later told me he was frustrated that I tried to pay on our first date…whoops!) and walked across the street to talk and eat our frozen yogurt. We walked around the arboretum and talked some more, and then we ended our first date night by heading over to Steven and Molly’s apartment to tell them about our night! Romantic, I know. 😉

Since this was April 19, we had only 56 days until his graduation and 57 days until mine. Neither of us had a job lined up, neither of us had a plan for what to do. We were both planning on going back home to live with our parents, 387 miles apart. This probably wasn’t the best time to start a relationship, but I didn’t have any worry or fear about the timing or the circumstances. For somebody who over-plans everything, that’s a pretty nice way to be feeling about a potentially big life change!

Now you know how our first date came about…next time: how he asked me to be his girlfriend, and then his wife!