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“First year teaching?” he asks.

“Second. Unless you count grad school. I was hired at a small college in Portland during my last year of my doctoral program and spent a year out there.”

He whistles softly. “Lucky you! I had to work so many side hustles. At one point I was working for two colleges near DC and two online before I lucked into this.” He smiles, but there is no bite of jealousy or rancor to it. He is, or he seems to be, an entirely sweet guy. I try not to let my impatience show. I want to talk about the food situation and what a disaster it’s going to be if I don’t come up with a plan. Is it too late, for instance, to hire someone to do this for me?

I settle into my chair, debating what to ask him. We could start by a gentle inquiry into our research areas—always a safe space for academics struggling to find something to talk about. I’ve ignited hours-long diatribes simply by asking people what the one thing they would change to their dissertation was.

“Fairhaven is an interesting place,” he says before I can select the next topic.

“How so?”

“Well, I study anthropology, so I’m really interested in how these microcultures can develop. At one point, the town was pretty neglected and shoddy. All the buildings were falling apart, and then we had a very wealthy donor who transformed everything, but she specified that we should build art programs. And that, plus the low tuition, meant that by the end of the ’50s, you had this artistic community really settling in. And that built up over time. Even after the funding ran dry, people still thought of this as a place for artists and dreamers to come.”

“The San Francisco of the South,” I joke.

He smiles. He’s cute when he smiles, with his corkscrew brown curls and his heart-shaped face. There would never be anything scandalous about going out with him. Unlike Levi, Anthony’s acceptable. And it’s tempting. This would be so easy. There would be no rule book, no enforced anonymity, no career and visa hanging in the balance.

Levi sits in the armchair behind Anthony, takes a book from the stack, and opens it.

I snatch my gaze away from Levi, because I’m regretting just about all of my life choices right now. I force a smile. “This is a great bookstore!”

“Oh, I love it!” Anthony says with unfeigned enthusiasm. “Bottom floor’s mostly new fiction and magazines, second floor is mostly nonfiction, and the third floor’s a labyrinth of used books.” He shivers in delight.

“What’s on the fourth floor?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “It’s not open to the public.”

Levi turns his head, looks me dead in the eye, looks at the back of Anthony’s head, and returns to his reading.

I look back down at the coffee in my hands and now all I can remember is the first time Levi and I had coffee together. I need something—anything—to do with my hands.

“I’ve never been outside the South,” Anthony says, oblivious to my discomfort. “I’ve always been fascinated by how you Quebeckers hold onto your culture and language. Are you from Montreal?”

“Québécois,” I say. “Anglos say Quebecker.”

“So you’re really French, aren’t you? You don’t sound French.”

Levi narrows his eyes at the back of Anthony’s head and mouths moron.

I force myself not to look at Levi, but I’m threatening to crush my coffee. “I’m actually very French. My father’s family arrived in the seventeenth century.”

“So, is it true that Canadians don’t wear shoes in the house?” Anthony asks.

Levi wrinkles his face up, like, What the fuck kind of question is that?

I try not to let the fact that I just thought the same thing show on my face. “Yes. We don’t. Force of habit.”

Anthony looks down. Levi puts two fingers at the roof of his mouth and mimes blowing his brains out. Given that it evokes Robby, it makes me shiver. I want to walk over to him and shout at him never to scare me like that again.

“You were going to tell me about my pounding,” I say, while Levi sprawls dramatically into the armchair behind my date. Levi raises his head, puts his knuckles to his forehead, and proceeds to break out into a silent giggling fit. I stretch my arm and give him the finger as casually as I can.

“Of course,” Anthony says. “That’s why we’re here, after all. How freaked out are you, scale of one to ten?”

“I’m numb. I managed to unpack the downstairs and the bed, and the guest room is just where all the boxes I couldn’t deal with go to die. Somewhere in there are cookbooks my mother gave me but God knows where. I would have gotten it catered but that’s some serious money.”

“Oh, no,” Anthony says. “It has to be something that is your signature. Believe me, you’ll be living it down for ages. One of my colleagues is from Iowa and did a Hawaiian-themed luau and people in the department were calling her the Aloha kid for a year. We should plan out your courses.”

“Courses?” I ask. “Oh, God, courses. I was considering giving up and ordering pizza. Everybody likes pizza.”