Kiss Her Once for Me (11)

Caption: My evening plans.

Their responses range from romantically hopeful (Ari) to mildly perverted (Meredith). Andrew grabs our drinks and cuts through the crowd of people around the bar. He confidently seizes a cramped table in a corner from a couple who is getting ready to leave, and I can’t imagine moving through the world like that. He’s so fucking sure of where he belongs.

I wish I could be like that, but I’m overwhelmed by the newness of everything. The newness of this bar, where I don’t know the protocol for finding a table. The newness of this man, who put his hand on my knee and keeps smiling at me. The newness of leaving my apartment for anywhere other than work for the first time in weeks. New sounds, new smells, new social rules. Before we even reach the table, I take three giant sips of my Moscow mule to calm my nerves.

“Is this a date?” I blurt before he’s finished stripping off his jacket.

He raises one black eyebrow at me and smirks. “Is that… relevant to the enjoyment of your mule?”

“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?”

He gives another shrug. “Stanford was always the plan. Business school was the plan. Prescott Investments was the plan.” With that, Andrew launches into several long-winded and involved stories about the local properties he’s acquired in the past five years. Since I’m still unclear as to whether this is a real date or an elaborate prank, I put on a first-date performance, listening and nodding at the appropriate moments as I suck down a second drink. Suddenly, the third round is arriving at the table, and we still haven’t ordered food to go with all this booze. Apparently, Andrew can sustain himself on stories about investment revenues and top-shelf whisky alone.

“I’m very privileged to be able to work for my family’s company,” he eventually says, “even if that has meant, you know, working with my family.” Andrew shifts his weight in the booth. “Do you—do you want to hear the real reason I wanted to get drinks with you tonight, Oliver?”

“It’s not because I’m such a witty conversationalist?”

Andrew scrubs one hand across his face, looking serious. I sit up straight. “Okay, sorry. What is it?”

“I got some real shitty news, and I needed a distraction. The executor of my grandfather’s will called this morning,” Andrew explains. “You see, there’s this trust—two million dollars set aside to become mine on his death, but I found out my grandfather added a stipulation to my trust fund before he died.” He stares darkly into his drink. “I can only inherit once I’m married.”