“Work?” I ask.

“I wish.” He shakes his head, resigned. “Way more important stuff.”

Oh. Maybe he wasn’t joking. “Is everything okay?”

“No.” He slides his phone in his pocket and leans back in his seat. “My brother texted that my football team just traded one of our best players. We’re never going to win a game again.”

I smile into my water. I never really got into American football. It seems kind of boring—a bunch of overgrown dudes standing around in ’80s shoulder pads and bashing their heads toward chronic traumatic encephalopathy—but I’m way too soccer mad to judge fans of other sports. Maybe Erik used to play. He’s big enough, I guess. “Then they should really invest in lucky underwear.”

He gives me a lingering look. “Purple.”

“Lavender.”

“Right. Yes.” He glances away, and I think that this is nice. I’m sitting across from someone who’s not Oscar, and I’m not feeling too nervous, or too much weirder than usual. For all that he’s a blond steely mountain of muscles, Erik is surprisingly easy to be around.

“What’s your team? Giants? Jets?”

He shakes his head. “It’s not that kind of football.”

I cock my head. “Is it, like, a minor league?”

“No, it’s European football. Soccer, you’d call it. But we don’t need to talk about—”

I nearly do a spit take. “You follow soccer?”

“An intervention-worthy amount, according to my family and friends. But don’t worry, I do have other topics of conversation. Like pastries. Or the practical implementation of smart factory technology. Or . . . that’s about it.”

“No! No, I—” I don’t even know where to start. “I love soccer. Like, love love. I stay up till ridiculous hours to watch games in Europe. My parents always get me fancy jerseys for my birthday because that’s literally my only interest. I went to college on a soccer scholarship.”

He frowns. “So did I.”

“No way.” We stare at each other for a long moment, a million and one words running through the eye contact. Impossible. Amazing. Really? Really, for real? “You used to play?”

“I still play. Tuesday nights and weekends, mostly. There are lots of amateur clubs here.”

“I know! On Wednesdays I go to this gym near my place, and . . . Soccer was my first career choice. The engineering Ph.D. was definitely my plan B. I really, really wanted to go pro.”

“But?”

“I wasn’t quite good enough.”

He nods. “I’d have loved to go pro, too.”

“What stopped you?”

He chuckles. It sounds like a hug. “I wasn’t nearly good enough.”

I laugh. “So, what’s your team and who did they trade?”

“F.C. Copenhagen. And they got rid of—”

“Don’t say Halvorsen.”

He closes his eyes. “Halvorsen.”

I wince. “Yeah, you’re never gonna win another game, not for all the purple underwear in the world. But you weren’t gonna win much with him, anyway. You need a better coach, honestly. No offense.”

“Plenty of offense.” He’s glaring.

“You follow women’s soccer, too?” I ask.