The best night I've had on the app came with an own goal, a supply problem, and a woman heading home to Shimane two days later for three months. I'd take it again tomorrow.

Yura was one coffee and one dinner, which by the Board's standards is fast, and the coffee told me everything the way Hina's told me nothing. She was warm from the first minute – not the app kind of warm, the actual kind, where she leans in when you talk and laughs before the end of the joke because she's already got there. She'd been to Akihabara the week before and I asked about it as a callback afterwards, and she answered in the same register she'd used across the table, which I've learned is rare: most threads cool by half a degree between the café and LINE. Hers didn't.

Dinner was a private room at a kaiseki place, on a day I'd landed from a business trip at two in the afternoon and sent the luggage ahead so I wouldn't turn up with a suitcase. It's the kind of thing I do now. Ten weeks ago I turned up to a coffee with a guitar.

She talked about the hotel at dinner. Openly, over the second course, with a phrase I'll be using for the rest of my life: our workout after dinner. Not a hint, not a maybe. A plan, stated, by her, while a man in a white jacket was sliding a bowl of something onto the table and pretending to be deaf. I've had women agree to a hotel. I'd not had one look forward to it out loud.

The own goal We got to the room and I realised I'd forgotten to take the thing you take. I'll be writing more about that in another entry, because it deserves one, and because most men my age would rather be seen dead than write it. For now: I took it there and then, and the maths didn't work, and the evening was mostly over before it started working.

Then the second problem, which was that the only thing in the bag was the wrong size. This is a stupider problem than the first one, and easier to fix, and I'd not fixed it. So we did everything short of the thing, and we both very clearly wanted the thing, and at some point we looked at each other and agreed, without saying much, that the wrong size failing halfway was a worse ending than not starting. Cooler heads. Mine, mostly.

None of which is the point. The point is that she was, by a distance, the best I've been in a room with. Proactive, unhurried, aggressive in the good way, open about what she liked and interested in what I did. Warm in the exact way Miho wasn't: I never once felt she was performing an evening. She was having one. And I finished, which after the Miho night felt less like a detail and more like a verdict overturned.

After

She went home to Shimane on the 4th, as planned, and won't be back in Tokyo until late November. She told me the dates at dinner, which is the Kurumi thing again, the thing I now weigh more than anything said in a hotel. We'll pick it up when she's back. She's the first name I've pencilled in for something regular, and the only one where I don't feel I'm guessing.

The bag now has the right size in it. I check the morning of, not the door of the room. Yura taught me both, and neither was the thing I'll remember.