Page 127 of Problematic Summer Romance

“I hate you.” I pop another one in my mouth. “It’s so sweet.”

He pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. Watches me polish off the rest of the branch with a satisfied, smug expression that has me poking his flank.

“And what have we learned?” he asks.

“That we should respect our elders?”

His eyes narrow. “That it’s always a good time for fresh produce.Trouble.”

I laugh. If someone came to me and pried my chest open, they would see light beaming out of it.

I’ve always likedsex. Kissing…Too variable. Inconclusive. Above all, it’s much harder to instruct a man on how to kiss properly than on how to fuck. That’s probably why I used to be on the fence about it.

Conor convinces me otherwise in just a few hours. Then wehave lunch on the second-floor balcony of a restaurant just off Corso Umberto. It’s a nice place, a little fancy, and I’m worried that the strawberry embroidery will get me kicked out, but they must not care. Or maybe Conor has worn so many pairs of cuff links in his life, it’s paying forward.

“So,” I say at the end of the meal—cantaloupe and prosciutto and soft cheese, arugula, crispy focaccia, Aperol spritz. “Is this our first date?”

That’s the thing of sitting across from each other: No kissing. No turning away. No way for him to ignore my signature difficult questions.

Not that he would have, at least going by how laid back his posture remains, hand relaxed on the table.

“I don’t know,” he says, sounding just as curious as I am. “Would you like this to be our first date?”

“Wouldyoulike it to be our first date?”

He mulls it over. “Honestly? No.”

I wait for my stomach to start churning, but it doesn’t happen. I feel remarkably secure about all of this. He said he loves me, which means that an explanation must be forthcoming.

“It’s a very American concept,” he continues.

“What is?”

“Dating. I’m sure it’s popularized in Europe, too, by now. Apps and media. And I know that at this point I’ve lived longer in the US than in Europe, but my formative years were here, and the idea of a formal framework to guide people as they attempt to assess whether they are a good fit romantically is…A little too much like a corporate deck.”

“Says Austin’s Entrepreneur of the Year.”

He shrugs. “It’s awkward, too. People try to put forward theirbest traits, but a lot is at stake, and they are nervous, which is counterproductive. It’s the trial-run nature of it. Like there’s something to prove, a new level to graduate to. The need to discover whether a subeffective dose of someone you barely know might be compatible with your system, then slowly increase the intake, see if your organism tolerates it…it’s the kind of shit you do to get accustomed to poisons.”

“Okay, so…how do you do it, in Ireland? Or did, anyway?”

“Get to know people at work, or school. Within a friend group. Develop an organic attraction with someone. By the time you’re going out for drinks, you already know that you like each other. You do itbecauseyou want to spend time together.”

I pull up my knees, distrustful. Hug them to my chest. “What you are saying is that you’d like for us to go on several outings with multiple chaperones, following which we might be able to do something that sounds like a date—but maynotbe called a date, to spare your fragile European millennial sensitivities.”

He laughs, full of warmth. “I’m saying that I already know I’m in love with you, and that I have little interest in being apart from you. I don’t need you in small doses, because…I want it all.”

His words wrap around me like a hug, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing what his openness does to me, not yet, and try to bite the grin off my cheeks. The problem is, he’s too close. This is toogood. “You realize how insane that sounds? That after years of acting like a little shit—”

“A little shit?”

“—yes, precisely like, as I said,a little shit, you have just…changed your mind about us.”

He nods, slowly. Contrite, I think. “You have every right to be apprehensive.”

“Apprehensive?You will have to forgive me if I suspect this to be a case of the amyloid plaques’ buildup doing their thing in real time.”

He sighs. “You’re really having a field day with the aging jokes, huh?”

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