"May I have your number?"
She took a pen out of her purse — a Fitch, Morrow and Kale pen, cheap and blue — and pulled his hand across the table toward her, palm up, and wrote seven digits across it in large, confident numerals. Then, after a moment's thought, she wrote underneath, in smaller letters: EVENT TWO. YOU PICK. DON'T BE BORING.
He looked at his palm as though she had written the Gettysburg Address there.
"I won't wash it," he said.
"Wash it," said Gina. "Write it down and then wash it. You're a grown man." She stood up and shrugged into her burgundy coat, and gathered her bags, and looked down at him — this neat, odd, gray-eyed person who picked his job because nobody cried there — and felt that bright, startled lift again, the window thrown open.
"Thank you for the cocoa, sweater boy."
"You haven't let me pay yet."
"That's true," said Gina, and walked away, and left him the check.