Ben, some could say, had his own sort of religion. His weekends were usually spent at the school involving himself with a myriad of "extra curricular" work-related activities that didn't generally include XMI. Technically, the word "work" didn't seem entirely accurate, but considering it dealt with his profession it just seemed easier the easier way to describe it. A friend of his from the Anthropology department at UCLA had invited him to a morning lecture entitled "Spatial Population Structure and the Genetic Basis of Adaptation in Human Populations". He'd been to a few of them in the past few years, but this time it appeared that most of the actual students in attendance had just wandered in off their respective planes, trains and buses after recovering from their vacations.
The lecture had ended almost half an hour earlier, though with traffic he was surprised he wasn't much earlier than Adam. He'd managed to snag a table just before a strange mid-afternoon rush had kicked in, but hadn't bothered ordering anything aside from a drink just yet. Sitting outside one of the best fish fry restaurants in town while the line out the door started to stretch down the street, he could at least try to imply that he wasn't simply taking up a table to the onlookers. That single glass of iced tea was more like a safety precaution than an actual refreshment.
"Not at all," he answered back with a smile, closing the newspaper he'd been scanning through. He managed to hide the fact that the only thing that had caught his interest in the first few minutes of glancing at it had been the Dear Abby column. "The beer battered haddock is calling my name. You're lucky you got here when you did." He gestured lightly with an open palm to Adam's attire, though not in any way that would imply the statement was anything but good-natured. "You know, if keep meeting like this you're gonna make me feel shabby. Did service run long today?"