Halfway through dinner, Sarla's stomach dropped, realising that it was unclear whether or not she was on a date.
The afternoon's easy-going pleasantries were certainly typical of time spent with Marina, but upon being seated at the restaurant, Marina's smiles had a coquettish quality that Sarla had never seen.
The hazy fog of the pre-dinner drinks smeared out the scene in front of her; a warm fog like a summer day.
Sarla longed to stand and sprint, in any direction, until her legs grew too tired to move.

Sarla felt her not-atypical post-drink urge to reach into the Meadowlark and burn off the mild buzz, but some foreign thought arrested her as she began.
Marina smiled at her.
The conversation had settled into a lull, and Marina seemed aggressively content to let the comfortable silence between them linger.
Now that Sarla had registered how long the silence had stretched, she felt her mind grapple wildly for something to break it, anything to say.

―I was reading about the codes of the Office of Chastity, she blurted out.

Fuck, she thought.