"Caesar salad?" He looked up at me, frowning slightly.
"Don't starve on my account," he said.
"Starve?"
"Salad isn't a meal," he said, matter-of-factly. "It's what you put in a burger between the patty and the bun." I laughed a little. He was right. I was past my salad-on-a-date-so-he-thinks-you're-a-delicate-flower days. He had just startled me. A Caesar salad sounded fine, as long as I got some real food after I had had that.
I had grown up in Montana. I had killed my own dinner before, and growing up outnumbered one to four by my brothers, I hadn't learned how to be cute with food. No, I had learned that going to college in Portland and learning that some guys thought girls who could finish a sixteen-ounce steak alone were an honest-to-god turn-off. I was over that now, but I'd never forget the look on Darren Hollis' face when I asked for dessert after eating a ten-ounce steak dinner with fries and a milkshake ten years ago.
"Smoked salmon panini sounds good," I said, looking at him over my menu. I wasn't trying to impress him with my delicate appetite, but I also wasn't twenty anymore. All that food would find its way to my hips and refuse to budge until I completed a harrowing course of calorie counting and exercise.
"It's on me; you can order what you want," he said.
"I'm the one who asked you to come. The least I could do is pay."
He shook his head. "A gentleman never lets the lady pay." I raised my brows, putting the menu down.
"Is this the year nineteen fifty? I thought chivalry was dead."
"If it was, you would have been my dad's secretary. Not his lawyer," he said, lowering his menu and looking at me, "and I just wouldn't believe you if you told me nobody had ever offered to cover the bill when they took you out before."
"On dates, sure, but that isn't what this is."
"Ah," he said, "so the guy pays when he feels there's a prize waiting for him if he does."
"Sounds about right," I said, holding his gaze.
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"How about we change that?" he said. The server showed up, and he broke his stare.
"Ready to order?" the freckled, college-aged server asked.
"Yes. I'll have a grilled Rueben, and she’ll have the smoked salmon panini?" he ordered, looking at me for confirmation. I nodded, a little stunned. He asked for coffee with our order and asked me whether I wanted anything else before letting the guy leave. Okay, Cameron, I thought. Ordering for your date, women probably ate that one up. I was kind of impressed, but I wasn't about to let him know that. I knew next to nothing about Cameron Porter, but I had made my fair share of unfair assumptions. He was surprising me, in a good way.
"So," he asked, leaning forward across the table, "what did you want to talk to me about?"
"Have you ever felt like the things you were doing and thinking weren't your own thoughts or desires?"
Our plates were gone, and my coffee was getting cold. I leaned forward, matching Cameron's pose.
"How do you mean?" I asked. Turned out that brooding thing Grayson Porter had told me his son tended to do? Totally true. When you thought about the thoughtful, deep, tortured type, guys like Cameron weren't the ones that tended to come to mind. It was the other kind, you know, the ones that had a lot less money and a lot more time.
"I mean people don't operate based on what they want. They do what society tells them to do, what they think they have to do."
"Like mind control?" I asked incredulously.
"You could think of it like that. Yeah. Like there are rules and expectations for everyone to follow and nobody realizes that there are other ways to do things."
"Okay," I said, pausing, "so what? Everyone's a puppet, and someone's pulling the strings?"
"Like there's a script, and everyone's an actor, doing what they're told, not what they want."
"Told by who?"
"By the world," he said, leaning back. "Society. All those little rules people live by because they think they have to follow them."
"Like working a corporate job, getting married, and having kids?"