“Um, yeah. Actually. I tend to do better if I have clear parameters for the social situation.”

He slides elegantly into the booth across from me and studies my nervous sweating over the rim of his old-fashioned. “Do you want this to be a date?”

“Honestly?” I exhale. “I almost always want to be home under a weighted blanket, not at a bar with an attractive man who’s looking at me like I’ll make an amusing anecdote when he recounts this story to his gym buddies.”

Andrew’s smile widens. “Okay, well. What if I want this to be a date?”

“I’d be inclined to accuse you of lying. I’ve seen the people you date on Instagram. I’m not it.”

He takes a self-congratulatory sip of his drink. “You’ve been stalking my Instagram?”

I take an evasive sip of ginger beer and vodka and admit to nothing.

“Oliver,” he starts, “that’s your last name, right? Can I call you Oliver?”

“No,” I answer.

“Oliver,” he continues, “ever since you started at Roastlandia, I’ve been wondering why you choose to work in a—what did you call it? A shithole? With a dickweed? When you so obviously hate it.”

So he did hear that. Damn. I glug down my mule. “That was a… a joke. I don’t think your investment property is a shithole.”

“But you do think Greg is a dickweed?”

More glugging.

“It’s okay.” Andrew shrugs. “You’re allowed to hate your job. Plenty of people do.”

“It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with working as a barista,” I rush to explain. “It’s just… I moved to Portland a year ago to work at Laika Studios as a character animator. That’s the animation studio that made Coraline and The Box Trolls and—”

“Yeah. I know what Laika Studios is. Phil Knight—the founder—he’s a family friend.”

Half a mule in, and I can’t suppress a massive eye roll. “Of course he is. And Phil Knight didn’t actually found Laika, you know.”

“What happened? At Laika, I mean?”

I’m not ready to open up to this man about any of that. “It, uh… it didn’t work out.”

With that, I slurp down the end of my first drink and a waiter instantly appears at the edge of the booth with a second round. I’ve never seen such customer service in Portland, but for all I know, Andrew’s daddy owns this bar, too.

“What about you?” I ask as Andrew tucks into his second drink. “Did you dream of working in real estate investments as a kid?”

“Let’s see, I wanted to be, in this order… a firefighter,” he counts his dream jobs off on his fingers, “a fashion designer, Cristiano Ronaldo, a member of a Korean boy band, a model….”

“So practical. Where did it all go wrong?”