THE OTHER NICOLE

He thought he was finally about to meet the "wildly out of my league Nicole", then the woman at the table was short, overweight, and not the Nicole he'd spent years imagining.

Years earlier, while working with Chelsey, the same pitch kept coming up. Chelsey would say he would be a great fit for her friend Nicole, and he gradually realized the conversation had happened before. At first, he played along with the obvious stuff. "Is she cute?" he'd ask. Over time, he changed his approach. "What do we have in common?" became the question, and Chelsey's answers got more specific. She stopped rolling her eyes and started saying they were both tall.

Chelsey herself was described as very attractive, and the people around her matched that description too. The narrator says her friends were all attractive, including a "stereotypically very attractive tall blonde named Nicole." He wanted Chelsey to set them up, but while they worked together, it never happened.

Years later, he ran into Chelsey again at a high-end liquor store near his office. She brought Nicole up again and said they would be a great fit. This time, he pushed harder for details. Chelsey said Nicole was tall, shared his sense of humor, worked as a waitress at a nice restaurant nearby, and had other interests in common. She also said Nicole had remembered a conversation he'd had with Chelsey about The Walking Dead.

That was enough. They exchanged numbers, and Chelsey set up a double date: Chelsey, her fiancé, Nicole, and the narrator.

He checked Nicole's social media and decided this was the "wildly out of my league Nicole." The date got postponed that morning, then rescheduled for the following week. When the night finally came, he showed up prepared: new haircut, new outfit, and menu knowledge, ready for the version of Nicole he had built in his head.

Instead, he met someone very different, short, fairly overweight, and working at a daycare. He could tell from everyone's reaction that his disappointment was visible. Still, he went through with the date.

But he couldn't let go of what he thought he'd been told. He kept steering the conversation back to the details he'd been given, asking questions like, "When did you get bored of the walking dead," and "How long have you been a waitress," followed by, "Oh, Chelsey mentioned you have been friends since you were kids!?" Nicole was visibly upset. Chelsey kept trying to smooth things over.

While the women were in the bathroom, Chelsey's fiancé finally asked what he was doing. The narrator said Chelsey had clearly meant to set him up with someone else. The fiancé pushed back: Nicole had kept asking to postpone and clearly wasn't interested, so Chelsey had found someone else "more in my league."

The narrator gave him a sharp look.

"Okay," the fiancé said. "She found another Nicole."