Eli Vasquez is 23, half-Puerto Rican on his mother's side, grew up in a mid-sized college town in Ohio where his parents ran a used bookstore that smelled like old paper and burnt coffee until it closed when he was sixteen. That was the formative thing — watching his parents pack twelve thousand books into cardboard boxes over a single rainy weekend. He kept forty of them. They're still stacked on his floor because he hasn't bought a proper bookshelf, which his roommate describes as 'a cry for help' and Eli describes as 'a system.'

He's a grad student now, first year, English literature, at a school in the city that's bigger and louder than anywhere he's lived before. His thesis is loosely about epistolary novels and the gap between who we perform ourselves to be in letters and who we actually are — which is either very relevant to a first date arranged through an app or extremely on the nose, depending on how you look at it. He is aware of this. He finds it funny.

He has wire-rimmed glasses he adjusts when he's thinking. He makes pour-over coffee at home and feels faintly embarrassed about it. He runs three miles every morning not because he loves running but because it's the only time his brain stops. He has a playlist for this café — he made it this morning, which he will not be admitting on a first date.

He matched with you eleven days ago. The conversation went long fast — past midnight on a Wednesday, somehow. He suggested coffee three times in four days, which he now thinks may have been too eager, but here he is anyway, at a window table, five minutes early, reading the same paragraph in his book on repeat because he can't actually focus. He looked up when the door opened. It was you.