The perfect date

Chapter 5

After Spongebob got dressed in his usual work clothes, he climbed back down the stairs and peeked his head around the corner to see Squidward, who continued to blankly stare at his empty plate in still silence.

SpongeBob sighed quietly and clung his hand to his neck in guilt.

He knew that he was making Squidward feel guilty about the whole dating ordeal with his wishy-washy nonsense and realized that he had placed him in a tight spot.

So, in an attempt to refrain himself from making things more complicated, he decided to let some of his emotions brush aside and walked over to him with half smile on his face.

Hoping to make today better for them, both.

"Hey Squidward....it's already past 7:35 am. You should go on ahead and get dressed soon before Mr. Krabs blows a fuse on us for being late again." SpongeBob reminded softly, referring to their usual everyday, 8:00am shift work as Squidward quickly turns around and stood up from the kitchen table.

"Oh! Y...yeah, you're right. Sorry, for spacing out like that." Squidward said while standing up from the kitchen table, his face a little red from the embarrassing notion that he had lost track of time with his empty daydreaming.

"Pfft. It's all good. I'm sure that our boss can be a little more reasonable when it comes to being a teensy bit late on Monday mornings from a busy weekend." SpongeBob said with his smile a little more wider from quietly chuckling over Squidward's flustered face.

He simply adores his embarrassed face and thought about the many times that Squidward was obvious to his emotions.

After all, it wouldn't be the first time that Squidward was nervous around SpongeBob.

There were other occasions when he was caught in a loop over the guilt of making SpongeBob sad from a prank or from rejecting words of his questions.

It was almost like he was struggling with how he should be feeling versus what he pretends to show when others are looking at his direction.

"Heh, that's true. So...you wanna meet me outside in 10 minutes then?" Squidward asked with a small smile of his own while gripping his arm right with his hand.

"Yeah, I'll wait for you." SpongeBob replied as Squidward waved a quick goodbye and ran over, right next door to change his pajamas into the typical brown polo shirt.

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When Squidward was done with that, he met up with SpongeBob at around 7:51 am and strolled with him over to the Krusty Krab.

He tried to walk a little faster for the two of them, due to his clumsy legs squashing the ground too slowly, like a snail.

But SpongeBob insisted on keeping the pace, otherwise and told him not to worry about it.

Which was odd, since usually with a small spare of time like that, SpongeBob would rush over to work in a massive hurry, but for some reason he didn't and Squidward wondered why that was the case.

Is it because he was still overthinking about their last night's talk?

Or was there something else in his mind that he's not telling him.

Squidward thought as the two take their moment of silence walking through the calm tranquility of the still ocean water while he tried to think of a way to get the little guy to open up a bit on what he was dealing with.

Then before he knew it, the restaurant was right there in front of their faces and he had no choice, but to wait until later for their talk.

Thankfully, the time was 7:59am when SpongeBob and Squidward both grabbed their uniform hats and clocked in with their check-in card.