I wrap both hands around my mug. The coffee is perfect — he figured out how I take it weeks ago without being asked, and he's never once mentioned it.
The man has no idea what that does, and I intend to keep it that way. It's a small act of consideration — noticing how someone takes their coffee, filing it away, acting on it without fanfare — and it should not be doing what it's doing to my chest. It's coffee. It's not a declaration. I am a grown adult with a functional nervous system and a reasonable grasp on proportion, and I am completely fine. That's what I keep telling myself.
"Okay," I say. "I have a question."
"No."
"You don't know what it is yet."
"Yes I do."
"You absolutely do not."
He holds out for about three seconds — long enough to make his point — then takes a deliberate sip of his coffee. "Fine. What's it about?"
"Coffee opinions."
He sets his mug down. "I knew what it was."
"Milk or creamer," I press on. "Your position."
"Creamer is dessert."
"Creamer is a dairy-adjacent delivery system."
"That's not a defense."
"It doesn't need a defense. It's a personal choice and I'm allowed to make it."
He goes still for a beat. "What flavor?"
"Hazelnut. Sometimes vanilla. Don't look at me like that."
He's looking at me like I've just admitted to putting ketchup on a steak — not angry, just deeply, personally disappointed.
"I'm not looking at you like anything."
He is absolutely looking at me like something. "Your coffee opinions are wrong," I say.
"I have an opinion about putting dessert in coffee, yes."
"Noted," I say, "and wrong."
The corner of his mouth does the thing — not quite a smile, more like the architectural suggestion of one. My pulse does something it has no business doing.
We end up arguing about Wyoming. It starts because I mention growing up watching Westerns with my mom.
"Which ones?" he asks.
"All of them, really. The Big Sky was her favorite. She loved the whole aesthetic."
"Wyoming isn't Big Sky country." He says it the way he says most things — like it's a fact he's surprised he has to share. "That's Montana."
"Wyoming is adjacent to Big Sky country."
"That's not how geography works."
"Wyoming has mountains," I point out.
