Free Love and Miss Communication by Elyssa Friedland

in person,” Mike said, and gave her a light peck on the cheek. He smelled like musky aftershave and powdered latex gloves. “You look great.” She thought she saw relief in his eyes. He probably saw it in hers too. The first interaction was over. No hairy moles. No extra fingers. No need for either of them to feign a heart attack.
    “Thanks. I’m glad we could meet too,” Evie said, and actually meant it. Stasia had been right to make her go.
    The hostess seated them at a corner table, but it only had one bench and they were forced to sit side by side. It reminded Evie of the way her parents would sit when they went for dinner at Hunan Garden every Sunday night, but it seemed so much more awkward to sit shoulder to shoulder with a stranger.
    “So I had a crazy day today,” Mike started, and Evie was grateful that he wasn’t the quiet sort. “My practice is on the Upper East Side and my patients, well actually their parents, are a little high-strung. I had to beg a mother today to let me put braces on her son, but she refused because she thinks Avenue magazine is going to do a spread on her family.”
    “You’re kidding?” she asked, with a casual hair flip. Avenue was one of those magazines given out for free in higher-end co-opsand condos—like the building that housed the one-bedroom apartment she’d wanted to scope after making partner. So much for that.
    “Not at all,” Mike said, taking a sip of his Irish coffee. “But that wasn’t even the worst of it. I did oral surgery on a sixteen-year-old girl today and when I gave her a prescription for Percocet she just laughed and said she had plenty at home.”
    Evie relaxed as she swigged her drink. Mike was growing more entertaining by the minute as the alcohol slipped into her bloodstream. His face blurred when she looked at it through the bottom of her glass. She started to fill in his thinning hair in her mind and plucked a few strays between his eyebrows. She thought he had the sort of face that could be on a label for expensive toothpaste: “Dr. Jones’s All-Natural Gingivitis-Fighting Whitening Toothpaste.”
    “What about you, Evie? Do you like your job at Baker Smith?” Mike asked at just the right moment, when he was teetering on the edge of talking too much about himself. Not that she was eager to have the spotlight shifted to her.
    “Well,” Evie said, with a deliberate head scratch, “I recently left. So I guess I’m not a lawyer anymore. Or at least not an employed one. But I am starting to think I didn’t really like it that much anyway. It was just something I did. Does that make any sense?” It did to her, but it was probably the first time she’d ever articulated her feelings about her job so clearly out loud, or even to herself.
    “It makes a ton of sense,” Mike said, and she remembered that she was speaking to an orthodontist. Chances are he wasn’t that passionate about molding retainers either. She knew from Google that both of his parents were dentists, so he probably fell into his career rather than sought it out.
    Over drinks and a shared slice of key lime pie (which Evieawkwardly split and jiggled onto separate plates), they chatted for almost two hours until the waitress started to hover.
    “Well, I hope we can do this again,” Mike said as he was paying the check. “I’ll be away next weekend for an alumni council meeting at my college, but maybe the weekend after?” He looked up at Evie hopefully.
    “Sounds great,” she said, genuinely pleased. “That’s so nice you’re still involved with school. I guess you liked Penn?”
    “I didn’t go to Penn. Why did you think that?” he asked, seeming confused, maybe even put out.
    Evie racked her brain. Why did she think he had gone there? Hadn’t he mentioned it over the course of the evening? Obviously not. It dawned on her that she gathered that tidbit from the Internet. She flailed trying to cover.
    “Um, I don’t know, I think maybe Annie told me