"Earl Grey. Sometimes chamomile in the evenings if I am having difficulty managing stress levels before bed."
I should not find this as charming as I do. This is a first date with someone I have known for approximately eight minutes in person, and I am sitting here feeling absurdly warm and soft about the fact that he drinks chamomile tea to manage his stress levels like some kind of enormous, anxious grandparent.
"I'm more of a coffee person," I say, because I need to contribute something to this conversation that is not just me staring at him like he is the most unexpectedly endearing thing I have encountered in years. "I have a very elaborate morning routine that involves a French press and a specific bean-to-water ratio that my roommate thinks is unhinged."
His eyes brighten. It is a subtle shift, but I catch it, the way his posture straightens just slightly and his attention sharpens in a way that feels like he has just opened a new spreadsheet and is ready to fill in every field.
"What ratio do you use?" he asks, and he sounds genuinely interested, and I realize with a jolt that he is actually going to listen to my answer.
"One to fifteen," I say. "Thirty grams of coffee to four hundred and fifty grams of water. I weigh it out every morning."
"That is extremely precise."
"I'm an accountant. Precision is sort of my whole thing."
"I can respect that." He takes another sip of his cosmopolitan, as his throat works as he swallows, which is a thing I should not be noticing but I am noticing it anyway because apparently my brain has decided that we are doing this now. "I have a similar approach to my breakfast. I eat the same thing every morning at the same time. Two eggs, one piece of whole grain toast, a small portion of berries. It minimises decision fatigue and ensures consistent nutritional intake."
"That is the most actuary thing I have ever heard."
"It is not a widely appealing personality trait."
"Are you kidding? Do you know how many dates I've been on where the guy shows up twenty minutes late and orders something he can't pronounce and then spends forty-five minutes talking about his podcast that he hasn't actually started yet?" I lean forward slightly, and the candlelight makes his eyes look even warmer, and I am definitely smiling now, I can feel it pulling at the corners of my mouth. "You showed up on time. You researched the cocktail menu. You have a structured breakfast routine. You are literally the first person I've met on this app who has their life together."
He blinks at me. His hands are still wrapped around the cosmopolitan glass, and I can see the faint tension in his shoulders, like he is not entirely sure whether I am making fun of him.
"I was fifteen minutes early," he says quietly. "I have been sitting in the coffee shop across the street for the past half hour running through conversation scenarios."
"That's... actually really sweet."
"It is a function of anxiety, not sweetness."
"It can be both."
He looks at me for a long moment, and I feel something shift in the space between us, something that feels a little like themoment in a spreadsheet when all the formulas finally balance and the numbers start to make sense.
"I did not think you would stay," he says, and his voice is softer now, low enough that I have to lean in slightly to hear him over the ambient noise of the bar. "I calculated the probability of you leaving within the first five minutes at approximately seventy-three percent."
"What's it at now?"
"I am recalculating."
I smile. "Good. Keep me updated."
The conversation unfoldsin a way that feels startlingly easy.
Narod asks me about work, and I tell him about the mid-sized consulting firm I work for, about the endless parade of clients who cannot reconcile their own bank statements and the special kind of hell that is tax season. He listens with this focused, unblinking attention that should probably be unnerving but instead makes me feel like every word I am saying actually matters, like he is taking notes in his head and filing them away in some meticulously organised mental database labelled "Things Livia Cares About."
"Do you enjoy it?" he asks, and the question catches me off guard because most people do not ask me that, they just assume that accounting is accounting and there is nothing particularly interesting to say about it.
"Honestly? Most of the time, no," I say, and I am surprised by how easily the truth comes out. "I'm good at it, and it pays well, and I like the structure, but it's not exactly fulfilling. I spend most of my day fixing other people's mistakes and trying not to scream into the void when someone sends me a shoebox full of receipts in June and expects me to sort it out by July."
"That sounds extremely stressful."
"It is. But I'm very good at being stressed in an organised way."
His mouth twitches, and I realise with a little thrill that he is trying not to smile.
"I understand that," he says. "My work is similar. I spend most of my time modeling scenarios that will almost certainly not occur, calculating risks that most people do not want to think about, and trying to explain to clients why their assumptions about future mortality rates are insufficiently conservative." He adjusts his glasses, and I look at the way his fingers move, careful and precise. "It is not glamorous. But I find comfort in the predictability."
