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Esther’s eyebrows shot up. “Yeah?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I already asked her out for next weekend.”
“Nice!” That was excellent news. She was tempted to ask him what time the date had ended, but decided against it.
“Yeah.” He nodded some more. “And she said yes.” His smile got a little wider and…was he blushing?
“Wait, are you actually starting to like her?” Esther asked. “Like, like her, like her?”
He shrugged and looked down at his shoes, embarrassed. “I dunno. Maybe. There’s potential there anyway.”
Look who had mad matchmaking skills! Maybe Esther should go into business for herself. She could get her own reality show, saving women from toxic boyfriends and matching them up with slightly awkward but sweet guys.
“That’s awesome!” Esther gave him a congratulatory punch in the arm. “Good job.”
He was wearing a gray V-neck T-shirt that exposed his biceps, which were surprisingly attractive. As her eyes lingered on them, she wondered again if the date had gone well enough for Jinny to sleep with him.
Nope. On second thought, she didn’t want to know. Definitely not.
“You want some coffee or anything before we get started?” she asked, heading into the kitchen.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, following her. His lip curled into a sneer as he watched her pop a coffee pod into her Keurig machine. “Really? You’ve got one of those things?”
“I know, they’re terrible for the environment, but I like the convenience.” She felt guilty about it, but not guilty enough to give it up. It wasn’t like she drank that much coffee anyway.
“Not only that,” he said, thrusting his chin in the air, “but they make coffee so bad it shouldn’t even be classified as coffee.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not that bad.”
“Yeah, it is, actually.”
“You’re a snob, you know that?”
“I’m not a snob, I just know the difference between good coffee and bad coffee.”
“You want some cream or sugar to dilute your bad coffee?” she asked when the pod had finished brewing—less than a minute later, and with no effort on her part. Beat that, fancy hipster coffeemaker.
His sneer deepened. “No.”
“Your funeral.” Esther pushed the mug toward him.
He sniffed it and made a disdainful face. “Awful.”
“Snob.”
He shrugged. “Fine, I’m a coffee snob, then. Let’s see these notes.” He started to make a move for them, but she snatched them off the table before he could get there.
“How about I walk you through them?” She carried them into the living room and sat at the far end of the couch. If he read them all straight through, she was afraid he’d get upset. He was probably going to get upset anyway, but she wanted to put it off for as long as possible.
“Sure, okay.” Jonathan took the other end of the couch and set his coffee on the table, flipping open his MacBook and propping it on his lap. “Shoot.”
“Um, let’s see…” Esther flipped through the first couple pages, looking for something easy. She didn’t want to dump a nuclear bomb of bad news in his lap right off the bat. “Oh, okay, here we go. Scientists use the metric system, so your asteroid wouldn’t be one hundred miles across, it’d be a hundred and sixty kilometers.”
His fingers flew over the keyboard as he nodded. “Convert everything to metric. Got it.”
That wasn’t too bad, so Esther tried another one: “On page ten, you’ve got a NASA scientist saying they can’t predict the asteroid’s trajectory because of the influence of nearby planetary bodies, which is bullshit. Predicting the orbits of asteroids is easy. The math for it has been around for hundreds of years.”
He frowned, nodding as he typed another note. “Okay.”
