Labour'd and Laugh'd

I wanted to write a story tonight but have been feeling incredibly uninspired and this was all I came up with. Enjoy.

“What?”
“What?”
Oh my God, this is awkward. The first what was hers, the second mine. As far as first dates go, this one could certainly have been worse but that’s hardly consolation to me right now. I had made a joke. It was self-effacing, wry, and would’ve been funny only in that immediate context, if at all. She didn’t hear me though. She said “what?” It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Why did I say “what?” That’s the real question. It just came out. I mean, I couldn’t repeat the joke, it would just fall flat. In fact, she probably hadn’t even noticed the context in which my joke was made so I’d have to explain it to her, turn back the clock and not only repeat myself but recreate the entire environmental situation in which I was able to make the joke.
And now she’s just staring at me. And not in that good way where she looks deeply into your eyes, one eyebrow slightly cocked, the tip of her pink tongue poking out and sliding smoothly across a pair of perfect lips. No, not in that way. In that moderately confused way, mouth slightly agape, eyes narrowed in a weird mixture of suspicion and a complete lack of humor.
“Hah,” I said. Yeah, that fixed it. Well done, man. I didn’t know what else to say, how do you come back from the double what and save face? “Um…”
“I think I’m going to head home,” she said.
“That’s okay. I don’t think I like you. And I don’t mean that I think we’re not going to work as a couple, which, to point out the obvious, we’re not, I mean I don’t think you’re a very good person. You’re not curious about, well, about anything apparently. You have the cultural awareness of a goldfish and you have about as much charity towards others as a betta fish. And frankly, I don’t think you even understood that insult. You’re painfully self-conscious, self-absorbed, and self-serving. You have seemingly no sense of humor, and less sense of creativity, and I think that, as a human being, you’re not very good. I don’t want you in my life. I want go out to a bar with a girl and we’ll be sitting there laughing about wind farms in Greece when some guy in a pink polo comes up to me and calls me gay for wearing a satchel, then I’d turn to her and say ‘Honey, am I gay?’ and she’d look at me and say ‘Yeah, you are,’ and then we’d laugh for some reason even though no part of that interaction was particularly funny but we’re kind of buzzed at the time so everything is funnier. So yeah, you can head home and I’ll just go to the movies by myself. It’s really just easier for everyone this way. It wasn’t that nice meeting you, I’ll probably forget you pretty soon, and you’ll tell your friends that I was pretentious and not funny, which may very well be true anyways. In short, bye.”
Man, that’s what I should have said to her. Instead I got really awkward, looked just left of her head and mumbled, “Oh. Yeah, okay. It’s pretty late anyways but it was really great meeting you. You have my number, right? Yeah, alright well text me sometime if you’re bored.”
And thus ended yet another first date, just like all the others. One day, I’ll find that girl though and we’ll get buzzed and she’ll call me gay and we’ll both laugh for some reason. Somewhere that girl is out there and someday I’ll meet her. I hope she has a really nice ass.