"Lemonade," Ollie said suspiciously.
"Gotcha. And you?"
"I'll also have lemonade," Tiffany said with a grin, and when the waiter had gone, added, "although maybe I should just assume I'll get to drink yours. It's not going to be fizzy, my man."
Ollie put a hand over his heart. "Don't take this from me. I believe."
"It's your funeral." Tiffany made a face. "That sounds way too dramatic. It's your eternal disappointment?"
"That," Ollie informed her, "didn't soundanyless dramatic."
"No, I guess not." She glanced over the menu, as if she was going to eat something less than a bacon cheeseburger as big as her face. Having determined that was an option, she put the menu down, and when Ollie ordered a Caesar salad, ended up laughing. "I'm sorry, I thought that stereotypically, women ordered the salad on a first date, and guys ordered the huge, meat-heavy meal."
"In this case, I've been sitting around chatting with people all afternoon while you've been doing heavy lifting, so I think in terms of calories burned, it's about right. It's also that I'm vegetarian-adjacent. And also, technically, I think this is our second date."
"Oh!" Tiffany looked after the waiter like she'd call him back. "Sorry, do you mind me having a burger? I can order something else if it grosses you out."
"No, no, I just have an inner koala that lives on gum tree leaves—eucalyptus leaves—alone, so I try to make it happy by feeding it different kinds of leaves whenever I can."
"Oh, right, of course. That sounds cute, an inner koala. I think I probably have an inner…" Tiffany pulled a thoughtful face. "God. I'm afraid it's like an inner corgi. Short but unexpectedly tough, even though everybody just thinks it's adorable. Except the thing about corgis is they're actuallymedium-sized dogs, just with really short legs, and I'm actually small."
Ollie took a deep breath. "If I may be permitted a comment about the visible bits of your body, Boss?"
Laughter bubbled through Tiffany again. She loved the way this man talked to her. "Proceed with caution."
"You've gotincrediblebiceps," Ollie said without hesitation. "And if the way those jeans fit is any indication, your thighs are just as powerful. So I would like to cautiously suggest that 'medium sized in deceptively short package' might actually be a perfect descriptor for you. Not that I think you're a dog," he added with a degree of alarm.
"Well, no, I assumed not, but if we're discussing our inner animals…" Tiffany smiled as a peculiar expression crossed Ollie's face. "You know what, though? I'll take it. There are worse things to have than an inner corgi. So how come a koala? Is it just an Australian thing?"
The funny little expression ran over Ollie's face again. "Um, no, I'm afraid I was born with it. No choice in the matter."
Tiffany ducked her head, grinning again. "Maybe we're all just born with an inner animal and that's what we're stuck with. At least you're not like one of those horrible terrifying jellyfish you have down under, right? Or one of the spiders. Or?—"
"An emu," Oliver interrupted solemnly.
"An…emu? Aren't they…birds?" Tiffany had a vague, ostrich-like idea associated with the word 'emu.'
"Big ones. Kind of like ostriches. The Australian military lost a war against them in the 1930s." Ollie's delivery was perfectly serious, but his eyes sparkled so much that Tiffany looked at him dubiously. He ended up laughing. "Really. They were running and destroying the crops. Local farmers asked for military assistance in culling them, and it just didn't go as planned. It turned out if you shot at them, they all ran different directionsand that hunting them got a lot harder. It didn't play well politically and it ended up being called the Emu War."
"That soundswaymore bad-ass than being a corgi!" Their food arrived and Tiffany discovered she was absolutely starving. Half a burger down, she mumbled, "Food good. Thanks for suggesting I should eat. I get distracted sometimes. Especially in an emergency. So it's your cousin getting married? Iswearwe'll have the gazebo back up and running for him."
"It'll be a good yarn, at least. And yeah, it'll be a real rellie bash."
Tiffany paused halfway through chewing a bite and stared at him. Ollie stared back, then laughed. "'Rellie bash.' Rellie is family, bash is?—"
"Party," Tiffany managed as she swallowed her bite. "That part I know, but you put that all together and it's like you're speaking a foreign language."
He grinned at her. "Right, so translated into American, we're all getting together. Which we don't very often, because—" Ollie made a globe shape. "You know, America, Australia. Long way. But Steve's the first cousin to get married, so we're all making a fuss."
"Mmm." Tiffany shook her head as she drained her lemonade. "You should have arranged it better. Everybody should have gotten married one after another, so you could all go to each other's weddings."
"Nah, yeah, that woulda been good. Would you like to get married?"
Tiffany's heart lurched so hard choked on the last bit of ice in her lemonade. She put it down, eyes watering. "Excuse me?"
"Just checking," Ollie said with a sincerely apologetic expression. "You good?"
"Fine, fine, I'm…" Tiffany wheezed a couple more times, but not really because of the lemonade. It was the extraordinaryimpulse to have saidokay! to that ridiculous question. "Do you often propose on first dates?"
