The name on the cup
It is only a name on a paper cup. Your date sees your face when you read it.
The café is loud in the way good cafés are, with the milk steamer shouting over everyone. Your date offers to order while you find a table, and you let them, which is its own small act of trust.
You watch them at the counter. They lean in to spell something. The barista nods.
When the cups arrive, yours says your name in thick black marker. Your name, the one you chose, spelled the way you spell it, with the letter most people get wrong. You look at it a moment longer than a person looks at a cup.
Your date sits down and pretends not to have seen. Then they give up pretending. 'The barista at my usual place wrote the wrong name for two years,' they say. 'I never corrected him. The day a new guy wrote my actual name, I took a photo of the cup.'
You laugh, and it comes out wetter than you meant it to. You tell them you still have a cup somewhere at home, flattened in a drawer, from the first time. They say they do too.
The rest of the date is about other things: a film you both walked out of, a flatmate who labels the butter, the best route out of the city on a bike. But something settled at that table in the first two minutes, and you both know it.
When you leave, you take the cup with you. Not to keep, you tell yourself. You just have not finished it. It is still in your bag when you get home.