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Or will this be the last straw?

I can just hear it now. The sound of a napkin being thrown down on the table. The scrape of his chair as he pushes back it back. The words You know what? Forget it. You’re not as much of a chump as I thought.

And then he speaks, in reality, out loud.

“I’d like to put in a round of the Yuletide Velvet, or the, uh, non-alcoholic Hearthside Velvet, for all the staff on me,” I hear James call out. “As a . . . Christmas gesture.”

He didn’t break.

I’m the most annoying date on earth, and he still won’t break.

Our server lifts his head. The chef pauses his sharpening of a knife. The dishwasher stops clattering the dishes in the sink. The other staff halt in their movements.

Our server speaks up. “Can you repeat that, sir?” he says for confirmation.

I look at James.

“I said,” he says uncertainly, under everyone’s gazes, “I’d like to put in a round of the Yuletide Velvet or Hearthside Velvet for each of you on staff. On me. As a Christmas gesture.”

I mean, it didn’t bring on a bad moment, actually.

The kitchen cheers.

The mood in the place improves considerably. Everybody relaxes. Ten minutes later, somebody changes the music from eighties hits to Christmas tunes on the wall-mounted unit by the plates near the chef’s head.

James becomes a hero. Admittedly not the goal.

But everyone . . . is happy.

The tension I’m carrying in my shoulders, the massive knots I’ve developed over the past two hours of chronic angst, eases ever so slightly as people look at me and smile.

I’m not a villain.

I mean, I really am not a villain.

But for a few minutes, everybody is looking at me exactly like I wished all people in the world would look at me. With a simple thought: Now there goes a nice person.

Čedomir bursts through the doors and claps James on the back. “A Christmas gesture! What is this I hear about a Christmas gesture! Now that is the spirit! Now this is what it’s all about!”

He wags his finger in James’s face while looking at me. “This, Chloe,” he announces, “this . . . is a man.”

And shoot, I have somehow escalated this narcissistic man to hero territory when he absolutely did not deserve it. I have taken two steps back by giving him the upper hand and have ultimately failed myself. Again.

It was a move I should have anticipated. Clearly I hadn’t been thinking.

Stupid, Chloe. Stupid.

Čedomir has a hold around James’s shoulders and is shaking James over his half-eaten alligator tail well past a socially acceptable limit. “You are not from here. Where are you from?”

“Um.” James clears his throat. “New York,” he says, shifting uncomfortably beneath the weight of Čedomir’s continued closeness.

Čedomir reels back, if only to dramatically clutch his heart. Everybody knows from his stories that when he first emigrated from Montenegro, he lived in New York. “Ah, New York. I should have known. And you are visiting Chloe’s family?” he says, as though this were the obvious answer.

“No, I actually came in to visit my own. We met here,” he says, gesturing to me.

“You met once here?”

“At the airport, actually.”