"Miss Swan, what are you doing here?" Regina asked, clearly not amused.
"I am here to take you on a date."
"Did Will put you up to this because a practical joke isn't how I had hoped to start this date out?"
"No, he had nothing to do with this; if you don't count the fact that I sort of left him locked in his car so I could hijack this date."
Regina paused as if she wasn't sure what Emma had said. "Wait, what?"
Emma smiled. "We're going to be late for dinner if we keep this conversation going much longer."
"I am not going to dinner with you," Regina said. "Did you really do something to Will?"
"Come with me and we can talk about it."
Regina sighed. "Miss Swan …"
"You could start by calling me Emma."
"What have you done with Will?"
"Wouldn't a better question be why did I do something with Will?"
"Um ... fine, whatever, just tell me what is going on here."
"Ok, in the interest of this not taking anymore time than it already is, I am here to take you on a date. In order to do that I had to use some tactics that I am not overly proud of including using magic to temporarily, I repeat temporarily, keep Will out of the picture so that we can go on this date. So can we go because I sort of made reservations out of town which means we really need to get moving."
"Maybe you aren't hearing me well, I am not going to go out with you."
"Please."
"Miss Swan, even if I didn't already have a date with Will, what makes you think I would go out on a date with you?"
"Well I was hoping we could discuss why later, but I can see you are going to be stubborn, so here it goes. You are my soul mate."
Regina turned and slammed the door shut.
"Damn it," Emma said frustrated with herself. She went up and rang the door bell and then knocked on it when Regina didn't answer. She waited for 30 minutes before finally giving up and leaving.
She drove to where she had left Will, who was now napping in his car when she arrived. With a little touch of magic she unlocked the car and he got out.
"Shouldn't you be out on a date?" he asked, leaning against the car. She joined him next to it.
"Yeah, it didn't go well. She didn't seem to appreciate the gesture of me intruding on your date and the knowledge that I was her soul mate didn't go well either."
"You told her that you were her soul mate?"
"Yes."
"Wow Swan, you are an idiot."
"What?"
"Come on, let's go have a drink and I can explain it to you."
They went in to the bar and Will got them a couple of drinks. They were sitting at the same table they had previously.
"Where were we? Oh that's right, you are an idiot," Will said lifting his glass as if to toast with her. Emma didn't return the gesture and Will took a drink. He took another drink and Emma was quickly losing her patience.
"What? Whatever it is that you want to say, say it."
"Ok, I will," he said. "Did you really think telling her that you were her soul mate was the best play?"
"I didn't see much in the way of a choice. She wasn't going to let me take her on a date and I don't know, I thought maybe if she knew that then it would entice her to go with me."
"What was her reaction exactly?"
"She slammed the door as she went inside."
Will laughed. "I can't say I am surprised by that. Still this isn't a totally insurmountable position you are in. First of all, what you did with me out there, not cool and I can't imagine it made Regina all that happy. Secondly, you just saw what she went through with the whole Robin soul mate thing so mentioning that in the first five minutes is what made you an idiot."
"I wasn't thinking."
"That's your problem. Look, I know what people think of me – they think I don't take things super serious. When I wanted to open this place I am sure there were people who thought that it was the perfect business for me to open up or expected me to be drinking in my bar more than actually running it. Regina looked beyond all of that to help me get this started. Now you have to try and get her to see beyond you being an idiot in order to get her to date you. Lucky for you, I think I can help."
"And why would you do that, help me?"
"Because if Regina is your soul mate I wouldn't stand in the way of that. If you have had perhaps been upfront with me from the beginning we could have avoided that little bit of unpleasantness from earlier."
"Sorry, but I didn't really want a lot of people to know it. I told Henry of course because it's him mom and if he had a problem with it then that would be something I would have to address first before going out with Regina. Tink warned me that just because I found out who my soul mate was, it didn't mean that person would know I was the one for them. I guess I believed that showing up at Regina's door like I did tonight would be the sort of grand gesture needed to tell her that."
"What makes you think a grand gesture would work on Regina?"
She shrugged, "I don't know, I guess because she's a woman and we women tend to like it when someone goes out of their way for us. That and she was a queen so she is probably used to grand gestures."
"I think in this case, we're going to have to start simple and build from there," Will said. "The first step is an apology."