“Date,” he repeats as he’s setting things down and trots back to the kitchen for a corkscrew. “So is this really—are you being facetious, or—”

He cuts himself off with a soft snort. “I just, uh, don’t really know what to expect from you after you ran off from the hot springs like that.”

Hawkeye magnetizes him, with his sly little charming looks and his easy quips and a heart the size of Manhattan, but sometimes Phil finds him nerve-wracking in a way he can’t quite pin down. Maybe it’s how energetic the man is. Maybe it’s how he’s unguarded yet evasive, or the relentlessness of his intellect, and that Phil is afraid he can’t keep up. He’s surprising, in a word.