If he didn't shut up and stop attacking that plate, I was going to hurl myself across the table, grab his fork, and stab him with it. I coughed to sneak a glance at my watch. I'd been smiling non-stop for exactly one hour and forty-three minutes. The longer I maintained this false bonhomie, the crankier I got. By this point, it didn't feel like a smile so much as a bad case of lockjaw. Benson kept scraping his fork across his plate in a precise effort to capture every milligram of his dessert. He'd been prattling non-stop for the last fifteen minutes, only pausing to make determined grooves on a plate that couldn't have been cleaner than if it had been through an autoclave. With every pass, my ballistic meter rose a few notches. We were now at level ''irritable'' and heading into ''dangerous.''