"I’ll have a whisker,” I say.

“Whisker?”

“Whiskey?”

“Scotch, rye…?”

Now he is impatient to get back to Tsai.

“Um, rye,” I say, because I heard somewhere it is a thing now.

“Brand?”

“You choose,” I say and immediately feel it comes across as coquettish, something a girl might say to him.

He sizes me up.

“You look like a Crown Royal man,” he says.

It’s astounding how quickly I can go from feeling like a girl to feeling like a big boy, but his calling me a man did just that, which oddly makes me feel like a girl. I am proud. And humiliated. I want him to like me. I would be his buddy; I would be his girl. We could be buddies with benefits.