I still struggled to absorb the fact that after all the stress and work and crisis of courage, he didn’t even feel like I’d picked him up. “What do you call it, then, my leaving you that invitation?”

“Trying to drum up more people to come to your dorm party. You were just being friendly, right?”

Anything I tried to say would come out as a sputter.

“But. . . .” He looked down at the table, rubbed its heavy wood with a finger, and looked back at me under his lashes. He had thicker, darker, longer lashes than I did, it pretty much went without saying. “Would you like to go out?”

I glanced around at our little slice of Down Under and back at him. “This isn’t a date right now?”

He looked taken aback. “No. We’re just having drinks. How could we have a date when we’ve never even properly met before?”

“I’m deeply confused,” I said. I guess it was a good thing I hadn’t worn those leather pants.

He studied his beer, traced the condensation on it, and peeked back at me. “So would you like to do something together Saturday afternoon?”

If we did, would that count as a date, or would it just be doing something together Saturday afternoon? If we hadn’t even gone on a date yet, I could hardly quit now without trying, could I? He wasn’t giving off any arrogant jerk vibes; in fact, the opposite. He was cute, likeable, and terrifying. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that Cambridge was only a couple of months away, and that between its start date and my contract’s end date I had two weeks I’d planned to use traveling to Prague or maybe Italy. How messy could things get between now and Prague? “Yes. Did you have anything in mind?”

“Why don’t we just meet at the fountain again and we’ll figure it out? There’s always something to do in Paris.”

Out in the courtyard of the Maison du Canada, Adela dished her famous ensalada de frutas into plastic cups and plopped me firmly down amid more friends than I cared to share my heart with at the drop of a hat. Maybe I have latent misanthropic tendencies. “Tell,” she said. Adela was wearing orange. I was a laughingstock for wanting to wear blue, but Adela got to wear orange. She claimed it was this year’s black. “How did it go?”

“It went all right,” I said as neutrally as possible. “This is good fruit salad, Adela. As always.” Her ensalada de frutas tasted sweet and fresh, the perfect blend of fresh strawberries, oranges, and apples, with canned peaches for extra sweetness. I copied it so much that people occasionally called it “Laura’s fruit salad,” to Adela’s great indignation.

“Thank you. Notice the use of peach syrup.”