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Still, that didn’t stop his mind from flying to Fantasyville, and in Fantasyville, he licked the foam from Nolan’s lip and Nolan looked deep into his eyes and said, “Eli, my love. I’ve been waiting my entire life for you. Run away with me.”

So. Apparently Eli was Nolan’s love interest in his imaginary Crave TV drama, and that drama was evidently a soap opera. Cool, cool. He was down for that. As long as their arc didn’t take seventeen seasons.

Eli stepped in Nolan’s direction and Fantasyville came crashing down with a literal bang when he walked into a passing server. Plates went flying, a triangular piece of toast landed in a bald guy’s lap, and Eli was pretty sure he elbowed a seated customer in the head as he tried to right himself.

“Oh god. Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” He crouched and began picking up pieces of the wreckage, mostly to hide his flushed face, and tossed broken crockery, dirty cutlery, and food detritus onto a serving tray the size of a dartboard. “At least you weren’t bringing food out to customers, am I right?” He tried a laugh, but it sounded more like a croak.

“No,” the server said with a sigh from next to him. “Just bussing tables.”

“Are you two okay?” Nolan asked, crouching on Eli’s other side.

Of course he’d seen. He’d been sitting right there.

Eli ducked his face and wished spontaneous human combustion was a real phenomenon.

“Fine,” the server said with another sigh. Her name tag read Samantha, she/her. She looked young—younger than him—and Eli made a mental note to send her flowers tomorrow as an apology.

Or maybe chocolate.

All the chocolate.

“Here, let me help,” Nolan said.

“This is like that time I walked into one of my teammates at a party last year,” Eli babbled, throwing a napkin onto the tray. “Except we managed to avoid this happening and successfully deposited the dishes in the sink without breaking anything.”

“Good for you,” Samantha said in a tone that implied I couldn’t possibly care less.

So, of course, he kept talking. “And one time, I had detention lunch duty in high school, and I accidentally knocked over a stack of lunch trays, like, three times. Strangely, I was never given detention lunch duty ever again.”

“Fascinating,” Samantha dead-panned, still singularly unimpressed by him. She rose, hefting the serving tray as she did so, and strode away with a grudging “Thanks for your help” thrown over her shoulder.

“Hey,” the bald guy with the toast in his lap said. “Aren’t you Eli Parker?”

“Ha ha,” Eli managed, a tad hysterical. “Ha ha. Nope.”

He turned swiftly and sank into the second chair at Nolan’s table, angling his face toward the wall. Hiking the collar of his T-shirt up over his nose, he said, “Is my face the color of a tomato?”

“More like a fire engine,” Nolan said, sitting across from him.

Eli groaned. He pulled his collar higher, hiding his face in his shirt.

“Hey.” Nolan tugged it down, laughing. “Don’t sweat it. Could’ve happened to anybody.”

“Did you know that one out of twenty-nine people have a fifty percent or higher chance of having an accident than other people?”

Cradling his mug, Nolan cocked his head. The foam was sadly gone from his upper lip. “And you think you’re one out of twenty-nine?”

Eli blew out a breath and let his T-shirt fall back into place, the collar somewhat stretched out. “I fell down the stairs at the arena in Saskatoon that one time. Remember?”

“You had your equipment bag and several hockey sticks.”

“So did everyone else. But did they trip over their own feet? Nooooo, sir, they did not.”

“At least you didn’t break anything?”

Eli nodded. “There is a bright side, I suppose. So. What are you doing here? Did you have breakfast with Coach?”

Nolan shook his head. “He’s got that training thing that all the non-player staff are doing, so I’m making him dinner later.”