Romantic Night

There was a time when a nice evening with my friends involved playing drinking games with cards and forties of Old English HG 800 (.5 more for the same price). This evolved to downing a couple bottles of red wine and then going down to the open mic poetry night to do some heckling.
But oh, how the stakes have risen.
Last night my friend Tony invited 834, that is, Heidi, Charissa and I for dinner and entertainment at his home. We knocked and the door creaked open, much like the beginning of many films in which the protagonists end up bleeding on the floor with knives in their chests. We entered, tentatively, to see candles lit on the dining room table, the fire burning merrily, four empty wine goblets lined up on the coffee table, and some motown on the stereo.
Tony, our host, appeared from the kitchen wearing nice brown shoes and, while he wasn’t wearing an apron, I like to imagine that he was. The menu was seared tuna, cous-cous, and a green salad brought by us. Heidi made the salad while Tony seared the tuna, and Charissa and I leaned on the mosaic mantel, drank red wine and warmed ourselves in front of the fire. It was all pure romance. Yes, the fire alarm went off a few times, and the tuna was apparently purchased from a roving meat salesman, but this did not mar the evening.
After dinner we went for an aperitif at Langano Lounge. Apparently Langano Lounge always has a mystery shot, the bottle wrapped in white paper, and it sells for two dollars. It was very exciting but also very horrible, something with amaretto and Robitussin was the general consensus. Horribly exciting and an official recommendation. Langano Lounge. Mystery Shot. The adult equivalent of the mystery dum-dum.
We returned to the house, it was raining in a soft, mist on the moors kind of way, Tony turned the fire back on (yeah, it was gas with those fake logs) and then we had strawberries and ice cream and Charissa and I sat awkwardly close on the couch. We ended the night with the typical platitudes that follow on a first date in an increasingly amusing and callous manner and then ran off to my car parked under the chestnut tree. I like to think that Tony stood in the doorway and waved, long after our taillights had faded into the night. Romantic Night is now an official Tuesday night tradition.