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“What do you want?” he asks.
“Gin and tonic, please.”
He waves to the bartender and asks for a G&T. I swallow hard. Should I offer to pay?
“How are you doing?” he asks, raising his voice above the sound of the music and conversation.
“Good, thanks.”
He nods and looks at his phone. I wonder whether he’s double-checking my profile on Tinder, but when I glance down, he’s checking his messages.
I stand there awkwardly, waiting for him to finish. When he’s done, he pulls up Google, and I see the cricket score of the Black Caps match against Sri Lanka on the page.
“Two hundred and eight for two last time I looked,” I tell him.
He glances up, surprised, then pockets his phone. “You’re into cricket?”
“Yeah. I think they’re going to cream Sri Lanka in this ODI.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know much about it.”
Oh jeez. This is going well.
The bartender passes me my G&T. “I’ll pay for mine,” I say to Tim.
“Okay,” he says.
I touch my credit card to the keypad. Then I wait for him to suggest sitting at a table, but he doesn’t. He has a mouthful of beer and looks around the bar.
“So you’re a dentist,” I say, determined to have a conversation with this guy.
He looks back at me then. “Yeah. You’ve got good teeth.”
I laugh, then sober as he just raises his eyebrows. Oh, he wasn’t making a joke. “Thank you. I’ve always thought the front two were a bit big.”
“They’re large, but they’re not buck teeth. I’ve seen much worse.”
“Oh. Well, that’s something.”
“Yeah.” He eye-dips me then as he takes another sip of beer. Wow. That’s obvious. My face is up here, bro. Maybe I should check out the size of his knob and see what he thinks of that.
I have a large mouthful of G&T, glad of the burn of the alcohol down to my stomach.
“What do you do?” he asks.
“About what?”
“As a job.”
“Oh. Didn’t you read my bio?”
He laughs. “No.”
“Right. I’m a book reviewer.”
“Oh, cool. What kind of books?”
“Sci-fi and fantasy novels.”
