“Says Austin’s Entrepreneur of the Year.”

He shrugs. “It’s awkward, too. People try to put forward their best traits, but a lot is at stake, and they are nervous, which is counterproductive. It’s the trial-run nature of it. Like there’s something to prove, a new level to graduate to. The need to discover whether a subeffective dose of someone you barely know might be compatible with your system, then slowly increase the intake, see if your organism tolerates it…it’s the kind of shit you do to get accustomed to poisons.”

“Okay, so…how do you do it, in Ireland? Or did, anyway?”

“Get to know people at work, or school. Within a friend group. Develop an organic attraction with someone. By the time you’re going out for drinks, you already know that you like each other. You do it because you want to spend time together.”

I pull up my knees, distrustful. Hug them to my chest. “What you are saying is that you’d like for us to go on several outings with multiple chaperones, following which we might be able to do something that sounds like a date—but may not be called a date, to spare your fragile European millennial sensitivities.”

He laughs, full of warmth. “I’m saying that I already know I’m in love with you, and that I have little interest in being apart from you. I don’t need you in small doses, because…I want it all.”

His words wrap around me like a hug, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing what his openness does to me, not yet, and try to bite the grin off my cheeks. The problem is, he’s too close. This is too good. “You realize how insane that sounds? That after years of acting like a little shit—”

“A little shit?”

“—yes, precisely like, as I said, a little shit, you have just…changed your mind about us.”

He nods, slowly. Contrite, I think. “You have every right to be apprehensive.”

“Apprehensive? You will have to forgive me if I suspect this to be a case of the amyloid plaques’ buildup doing their thing in real time.”

He sighs. “You’re really having a field day with the aging jokes, huh?”

“You deserve it, since you made it your cause célèbre for this long.”

He can’t quite swallow his smile. And neither can I.

“Is it because of what Rue said?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“This morning, when she thanked Eli for being patient with her…Is that why you changed your mind?”

“No, Maya. Not at all. It was last night. Everything you said, I…” He shakes his head. “I think I knew all of it. The bits and pieces. When I told you that my decision to stay away from you was something that I had to renegotiate with myself every day, I didn’t lie. And every day my brain would come up with new reasons, insist that maybe I could allow myself to be with you, and I’d have to talk myself out of it. I’ve debated us in my head a thousand times, and I always took the side that wanted to shield you from a relationship with someone like me. And then, last night, you made me realize that none of my fucking bullet points mattered. I was trying to protect you from something that you never even considered a threat, when the only thing that really matters is…”