Chapter 12
Logan
She kissed me.
Not on the mouth.
So I guess that doesn’t really count as a first kiss.
But still.
I can’t stop thinking about her lips on my cheek.
For three days.
Three whole fucking days.
I’ve been dreaming about it. Distracted by the memory of it. And now that the simulation has given us over a hundred hours of steady data, we’re back to working side by side. All. Day. Long.
And every time I look at her, my brain runs an endless loop of she kissed me she kissed me she kissed me.
It was just a cheek kiss. A thank you. A gesture of... what? Forgiveness? Acceptance? The beginning of something more?
I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.
She hasn’t kissed me again. I haven’t kissed her at all.
I’ve thought about it approximately nine hundred and ninety-nine times. I’ve drafted and deleted different conversation openers. I’ve Googled ‘how to know if someone wants you to kiss them’ and immediately closed the browser in shame.
We’ve fallen back into our old rhythm—her at her workstation, me at mine, ideas bouncing between us like we never stopped. Except now there’s something else underneath. A current I don’t know how to name.
“You OK over there?” Audrey asks, glancing up from her screen.
“What? Yeah. Fine. Why?”
She’s watching me with the hint of a smile, as if she knows exactly what my circuits are doing and finds it extremely entertaining. “Because you’ve been staring at the same line of code for ten minutes without blinking.”
“That’s not true.” I blink three times in rapid succession as proof.
She laughs. “You’re allowed to talk to me about non-work related things, Logan. I told you three days ago you’re not a malfunctioning robot. Don’t prove me wrong now.”
Questions that have nothing to do with work immediately pop into my head. Like, what does it mean, that you kissed me? What are we now? Are we friends who sometimes kiss each other on the face? Are we still ‘not complicated,’ or does that mean something different after the kiss?
But none of that makes it out of my mouth. All I come out with is, “The simulation’s holding at a hundred percent for the last cycle. Not a single error.” I drag myself back to the present. “The stress test is almost boring at this point.”
She comes over, crowding into my personal space, which is now—apparently—her space too. She clicks around the data, eyebrow arched. “Boring is what we want. If a system isn’t boring under stress, that’s how you end up on a conference call with the FDA.”
“Yeah, good point.” I try to focus on the screen. I really do. But then I catch her scent—vanilla and coffee—and my brain short-circuits.
It’s her old scent. Not the unfamiliar floral thing she came back from Sweden wearing.
She’s back. The real her.
I’m lightheaded. Dizzy. Is this what people mean by being drunk on someone? Is that a real thing, or did pop songs trick me into believing it?
She leans in, practically shoulder to shoulder with me. “You were right, by the way.”
I swallow. “About what?”
“My projection. Your hybrid algorithm is more stable than mine,” she says. Her arm is right up against mine. If I moved even slightly, we’d be touching. “I ran a few iterations with your threshold logic last night. I didn’t want to admit it, but you basically wrecked my math curve.”
It’s supposed to be a little jab. I think she even means it as a compliment disguised as a challenge. But the way she says it, with her lips curving on just the right side of smug, makes my whole brain start blinking warning lights.
“Your math curve was never in danger,” I say, and it’s almost true. She’s smarter than me. Just in a different direction. Her mind is all elegance and clarity, patterns that feel like music even when they’re just lines of code. I could watch her work forever. And have, basically.
She bumps my arm. “Don’t get modest on me. If you want, we can take a break for a bit. It’s getting close to dinnertime, and we both skipped lunch.”
I’m about to say yes—like, emphatically yes, let us take a break so you can maybe kiss me again, possibly even somewhere that isn’t my cheek and I won’t even try to block it—when my phone buzzes in the weird insistent way reserved for the work group chat.
I try to ignore it, but Audrey glances at the phone, then at me.
“You should check that. Landon’s been wound pretty tight today.”
She’s right. I tap on the screen and instantly regret it.
Landon:
heads up, everyone—first clinical sim results are officially blowing up. want full team in conf room A for rapid fire review @ 5:30
Bennett:
Dinner included. Serena’s bringing food from that Italian place everyone liked last time.
Layla:
The one with the good breadsticks?
Caleb:
Obviously. Who do you think she is?
Bennett:
Did you ask her to get extra? Logan eats like a teenager going through a growth spurt.
Caleb:
He’s a grown man. He can order his own extra breadsticks.
Bennett:
And yet he never does. I’m being proactive.
Jenna:
I’ve already liaised with Serena and added extra breadsticks to the order. Also extra tiramisu. You’re all welcome.
Layla:
Jenna, you’re a goddess.
Jenna:
I’m aware.
I check the time. 5:27. “Shit. We need to go,” I say, still looking at my phone as I turn—and nearly run her over.
She’s right there. By the time I realize, we’re already colliding.
Her hand shoots out to steady herself and lands on my chest, open-palmed and flat. Heat blazes through my shirt, straight to my spine. My own hand goes for the edge of the table—reflex, trying not to land face-first—but I catch her elbow instead.
For three seconds we’re fused together in a tangle of limbs and awkwardness. Her heart beats through her palm. Or maybe that’s mine. I can’t tell anymore.
Her eyes are wide. Startled but bright. She’s half-laughing, half-dismayed.
“Sorry,” she blurts, hand still pressed to my sternum. “I wasn’t—”
“It’s fine.”
But it’s not fine. My heart is hammering so hard she has to feel it. Her hand is steady and warm, and the only thing I want in the entire world is for her to leave it there.
Forever, if possible.
I look at her, and she looks back at me, and for one dizzying second all the ambient noise of the lab drops out and there’s only her eyes, and her mouth, and the spot on my cheek that hasn’t stopped tingling since Monday and the almost-smile breaking on her lips now.
Her face is so close that I could count her eyelashes if I had the presence of mind to count anything.
She doesn’t move her hand. I don’t move mine.
“We should get to that meeting,” she says, but her voice is soft and distracted, like she’s forgotten what the words are supposed to mean.
Still, neither of us moves.
“Italian,” I say stupidly. “Serena’s bringing Italian. Breadsticks.”
“Right.” Audrey’s voice comes out strange. Breathy. “That’s... good.”
I should step back and give her space. I should say something normal and diffuse whatever this is.
But I can’t stop looking at her. And she’s looking back at me with those brown eyes, wide and uncertain, and then—
Her gaze drops to my mouth.
Just for a second. Just a flicker. But I catch it.
Thirty-four years of not doing this. Thirty-four years of being too scared, too awkward, too convinced I’d get it wrong. Thirty-four years of watching from the outside while everyone else figured out what I couldn’t.
Fuck it.
I kiss her.
It’s not smooth. It’s not romantic. I just lean forward and press my lips to hers, quick and clumsy, more collision than kiss. My glasses bump against her cheekbone. Her surprised exhale puffs against my skin.
I pull back immediately, heart hammering.
“Sorry,” I blurt. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—that was—I didn’t mean to just—”
“Logan.”
“I should have asked first. I know I should have asked. I don’t know what I was thinking.
” And there it is. Proof that I’m exactly as broken as I always suspected.
Can’t even kiss someone without turning it into a disaster.
“I wasn’t thinking. That’s the problem. I never think when it comes to you and I just—”
“Logan.”
“—keep making everything worse and now I’ve probably ruined the sliver of closeness we had and—”
“Logan.”
I stop talking. She’s smiling. Why is she smiling?
“I wanted you to,” she says.
“You did?”
I run the words through my brain twice, looking for the catch. The qualifier. The but that has to be coming.
It doesn’t come.
“Yeah.” Her shoulders drop, tension releasing. “Would you like to do it again? Maybe with less panic this time?”
I stare at her. “We have a meeting.”
She laughs. “I don’t mind being a few minutes late if you don’t.”
A swarm of what-ifs crowds my brain, but all I say is, “I would really like that.” My voice comes out calm, which is a lie—my hands are shaking and my brain is pure blue-screen.
Taking my glasses off carefully, she sets them on the table and then closes the rest of the gap, one hand still flat on my chest, the other coming up to cup my jaw. Her thumb grazes the edge of my chin, slow and careful, and then her lips are on mine.
This kiss is nothing like the first.
No panic. No accidental collision of facial features. She’s patient with me, calibrating pressure and angle, as though she’s tuning a system for maximum stability. Guiding me. Showing me exactly what to do, how to lean, how to breathe into it.
I should be embarrassed. I’m a thirty-four-year-old man being taught how to kiss like a teenager at prom.
But I’m not. Because she’s not making me feel like a student or a project or a problem to be solved. She’s just showing me. Trusting me to follow.
It’s not scary at all. It’s easy.
I have a vivid memory of installing a processor in grad school. If you rush it, you’ll bend the pins and the whole motherboard is screwed. But if you line it up and let the weight do the work, everything clicks into place.
That’s what this is. Her lips soft, the rhythm cautious but electric, and the sudden, precise sense that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
It makes me think that I was never broken. I was just installed incorrectly.
When she finally pulls back, I’m dizzy but not out of breath. I want to ask her if it was good, if I did it right, if this means anything. But all I can see is her smile, wide and bright, and the soft flush that creeps across her cheeks.
“Well, then,” she says, voice a little rough. “Look who’s not a malfunctioning robot.”
I can’t help smiling. “I think you might have rewired my brain.”
“Good. Yours could use an update.”
We’re both still holding on, neither of us moving away. Then our phones buzz simultaneously.
“That’s probably the group chat wondering where we are,” she murmurs, not moving.
“Probably.”
“We should go.”
“Probably.”
Neither of us moves.
“Five more minutes?” I ask.
She answers by kissing me again.