“A piña colada would be fine,” Sarah said when asked what she wanted to drink. “Honestly, I can only stand girly drinks—for that matter, I only drink once in a blue moon.”<br/><br/>When  Dr. Hawthorne mentioned liking the way she laughed, and then called her “pleasant company,” Sarah’s exuberance suddenly vanished—though her brain was racing.<em>Oh wait, is he flirting with me? Should I flirt back? I don’t even remember his first name! He is fairly cute, seems nice enough. Wait, was he just talking about those other things just to get into my pants?</em>No, it was not reasonable to assume there was some either/or dichotomy there—it was entirely possible he genuinely cared about those topics but was also interested in taking her to bed. But for that matter, he hadn’t tried any “lines” on her. Really, if you wanted to sleep with a woman, did you open with some comment on nanogyroscopes? Not that she was an expert on sleeping with anyone...<br/><br/>Sarah’s mind worked the way it just about always did—sift through the evidence, codify it into a theory, test the theory. Her working theory was that he was not particularly attracted to her and was just being friendly. The best way to test it was just to continue the conversation and see if he said anything so obvious that even she would not miss the subtext.<br/><br/>All this flashed through her mind with surprising quickness, though it did add up to a bit of an awkward pause before she responded. “It’s umm... I’m sure more people will be along, if there’s someone else you’re looking for...” Now that she was so drastically over-thinking things, she could not come up with anything else to say.