I find keeping to a word limit very difficult indeed. In school, when we were told to write three pages, I was the student who typed single space, elite (no computers in those days when dinosaurs roamed the earth), with 1/2 inch margins and three pages of footnotes in addition to my three page paper! I made the suggestion because sometimes once the question occurs to the reader, it distracts from the story...and that would be a shame. If the two people are friends, there's nothing wrong (I don't think) with indicating that without damaging the growing sense of something happening in the scene beyond simply two people meeting over drinks.