Nine
Tilly blamed the lighting first.
The morning light in the newsroom was always too bright, too flat, bouncing off monitors and glass walls so everything looked a little washed out.
Today it made Savannah look sharper, like the edges of her were outlined.
She was at her desk near the middle row, coat still on the back of her chair, hair down, talking to Aimee about b-roll like she’d been here for years.
Tilly pretended not to see her.
They set their bag down in the gear alcove, checked batteries, checked again, because checking things was easier than thinking about the way Erin had said the word crush like it was a diagnosis.
They’d decided, firmly, sometime around midnight, that Erin was wrong.
It wasn’t a crush. It was proximity plus irritation plus the fact that Savannah talked like she ran the building.
That was all.
“Morning,” Jamie said, popping her head into the alcove. “You look… intense.”
“I look normal,” Tilly said.
“Uh-huh.” Jamie leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, amused. “Erin says hi.”
“Tell Erin I’m not talking to her.”
Jamie laughed. “You talked about Wells the whole night, Til.”
“I did not.”
“You did.” Her smile widened. “And I’m thrilled.”
Tilly rolled their eyes and shouldered the camera. “Don’t you have a show to proofread?”
“Don’t you have someone to stare at from a distance?”
“Goodbye, Jamie.”
They stepped out before she could say anything else, but the damage was done—their ears burned, and now they were hyper-aware of Savannah’s voice floating over from the assignment desk.
They didn’t even have to look to know it was her.
Smooth, measured, slightly lower than most reporters.
Everything enunciated. Everything controlled.
Henry’s voice cut through. “Franklin—you’re with Wells on the East Boston parking-ban follow-up. Streets and Sanitation’s doing a presser at four, then Aimee wants a couple of soundbites from residents.”
Savannah turned at the same time Tilly did. Their eyes met for the first time in two days.
“Got it,” Tilly said.
“Sounds good,” Savannah said, professional, neutral, like earlier in the week they hadn’t nearly snapped at each other over a frame.
It should’ve been fine. Parking-ban stories were low stakes—cold, quick, mildly annoying to drivers, six-soundbite packages where you could practically script the reactions ahead of time. It was the kind of assignment they could do in their sleep.
It didn’t feel like sleep.
By the time four o’clock rolled around, the temperature had dropped.
East Boston wind cut in off the harbor, biting through coats and scarves.
The small city podium was set up crooked near a row of parked cars dusted with salt.
A couple of local reporters were already there, shoulders hunched, cameras on tripods.
Somebody from the city was late. Of course.
Savannah stood beside the live truck, flipping through her notes with gloved fingers. She’d layered up—long wool coat, neat scarf—but she still looked like she’d walked out of a promo. No red nose, no wind-frizzed hair. Tilly hated how composed she looked out here.
“Levels good?” she asked without looking up.
“Yeah,” Tilly said, adjusting the viewfinder. “I’ll grab a cutaway of the tow-zone signs after the presser.”
“Perfect.”
The word landed weirdly. Polite. Too polite for the way they usually talked.
The city spokesperson finally arrived, breathless and apologetic, and started talking about snow emergencies and courtesy warnings.
Savannah slid into reporter mode immediately, eyes sharp, questions quick.
Tilly tracked her with the camera, steady as ever.
Muscle memory. They worked well. That was the problem—they worked too well for people who were supposedly nothing to each other.
When the presser broke up, Savannah walked over, cheeks pink from the cold. “Let’s grab a couple of man-on-the-street shots?”
“Yeah.” Tilly shifted the camera to their shoulder. “There’s a guy over there scraping his windshield.”
Savannah nodded. “You take the lead?”
“Sure.”
They approached the car owner together, and the interview went exactly like every winter-parking-ban interview ever: ‘I get it, but it’s annoying, where do you want us to put the cars?
’ and ‘This city doesn’t plow my street anyway.
’ Tilly kept the frame tight, catching the puff of his breath in the air.
Savannah thanked him, charmingly, and moved on to the next.
Efficient, professional, nothing wasted.
And somehow that irritated Tilly more than if she’d messed up.
Because earlier in the week she’d been pushing, leaning in, asking for tighter shots, fighting for control—and now she was just… good. Polite. Distant.
They finished the last interview as the light started to fade, a dull blue settling over the street. Savannah glanced at her notes, lips moving silently as she ran through her tag.
“I can record the standup now if you’re good,” she said.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
She stepped into frame, breath fogging. “Rolling in three, two—”
The first take was fine. The second was almost perfect. On the third, Savannah paused mid-sentence, lowering her hand.
“Wait,” she said. “Can you check the frame?”
Tilly glanced down at the monitor. The shot was clean — technically. But a street sign cut awkwardly behind her shoulder, bright and distracting.
“Yeah. It’s… busy,” they said. “Hang on.”
Savannah stayed where she was as Tilly stepped forward, boots crunching lightly over salt. They adjusted the tripod first, lowering it half an inch. Still wrong. The angle needed more than that.
“Don’t move,” Tilly said quietly.
They reached past her, one hand steadying the camera, the other shifting her a fraction to the left by the sleeve of her coat. Not rough. Not gentle either. Just precise.
She didn’t step back.
Up close, the cold had finally caught her. A faint flush along her cheekbones. A loose strand of hair lifted in the harbor wind. Tilly could smell something clean and expensive under the bite of winter — soap or perfume or both. It didn’t belong out here.
“Okay,” Tilly murmured. “Try now.”
Savannah looked up at them first instead of the lens. Just for a second.
Then she reset.
“Rolling in three, two.”
This time it was perfect.
They packed up in silence. Not tense, exactly. Just full. The kind of silence where every sound—coil of cable, slam of van door, click of lens cap—felt too loud.
Back at the station, the newsroom had thinned out. The five o’clock rush was over. The ten-o’clock rundown glowed on the assignment board. Savannah peeled off toward her desk to log the interview names. Tilly headed straight for the edit bay, card in hand, grateful for the dark.
They loaded the footage, scrubbed through the presser, and dropped in her standup. It was all clean. It always was. They should’ve felt satisfied. Instead, they felt… off. Like they were watching someone else’s day.
The door opened without a knock. Savannah leaned in, arms folded. “How bad was the static?”
“Barely there,” Tilly said, not looking away from the screen. “I can filter it.”
“Okay.” She hesitated. “Thanks. For fixing it.”
“Part of the job.”
“Still. Thank you.”
There was that politeness again. Careful edges. No sparring. No, ‘you’re reckless’, or ‘you’re cautious.’ Just distance.
Tilly spun the chair around. “Did I do something?”
Savannah blinked. “What?”
“You’ve been…” They searched for a word that wasn’t pulling away or ignoring me because both of those sounded ridiculous even in their head. “You’ve been… very professional.”
Savannah’s mouth twitched like she wanted to smile but wasn’t sure if she was allowed to. “Is that a complaint?”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“You said it like it was.”
Tilly exhaled, leaning back in the chair. “It’s just weird when people change their whole style in the middle of the week.”
Savannah stepped fully into the room now, letting the door swing shut behind her. “I didn’t change my style.”
“You stopped arguing.”
“I can argue if you want,” she said, dry. “I was trying not to be a pain.”
“You’re always a pain.”
That got the smile out of her, small but real. “Well. At least that’s consistent.”
The tension eased a fraction. Not gone, but softened enough that Tilly’s chest didn’t feel as tight.
“I wasn’t mad,” Savannah said after a moment, quieter now. “In the edit bay. The other day. I mean—I was, but not… at you. I just care how it looks.”
“I know,” Tilly said. “I care how it looks, too.”
“Yeah,” she said, watching them. “I know.”
They let that sit between them, warm in the humming blue of the monitors.
“Okay,” Savannah said finally, pushing off the door. “I’m gonna go write the tag. Text me if you need me to re-voice.”
Tilly snorted. “We don’t text. We work.”
Her eyes flashed—surprised, then amused. “You talk to Harper too much.”
“She talks too much.”
Savannah shook her head, still smiling as she left.
When the door closed behind her, Tilly stared at the blank space she’d left, then at the footage on the screen. It was just a parking ban story. Just another winter night, but their hands still remembered the weight of her sleeve, the quiet way she’d trusted them to fix the frame.
They turned back to the monitor, scrubbing through the footage again, even though there was nothing wrong with it.
She was good. Too good. Clean delivery, sharp pacing, instinctive awareness of the lens.
Earlier in the week, she would have been leaning over their shoulder by now, arguing about timing, pushing for a tighter crop, asking if the background looked too staged.
She would have made the edit louder. Harder.
Now she was careful.
Professional.
Like she’d decided distance was the smarter move.
Tilly hated how much that bothered them.
It should have been a relief. No friction. No hovering presence just outside their peripheral vision. No need to constantly adjust to someone who moved through the newsroom like she already owned it.
Instead, the quiet felt wrong.
They froze the frame on her standup — mid-sentence, eyes just off the lens, that small controlled confidence she wore like armor. People saw that version of her and assumed she was untouchable.
Tilly knew better.
They’d seen the flicker of uncertainty when the wind caught her hair. Felt the moment she waited for direction instead of giving it. Not weak. Not fragile. Just… human in a way she clearly didn’t like being.
Something was shifting between them. Not dramatic. Not even visible from the outside.
But real.
And Tilly didn’t know whether they wanted to shut it down or push it further just to see what would happen.
That uncertainty sat heavier than any crush joke Erin had thrown at them the night before.
They finished the edit, sent it to the server, and logged their notes. The newsroom was nearly dark when they finally packed up.
They finished almost at the same time.
Savannah capped her laptop and glanced toward the edit bay just as Tilly stepped out, camera bag already slung over their shoulder. For a second, they both hovered — waiting for the other to move first.
Neither did.
“You heading out?” Savannah asked.
“Yeah.”
“Same.”
They fell into step without discussing it, the quiet between them companionable in a way that felt new. The newsroom lights were dimming for the night, monitors going dark one by one as they crossed the floor and pushed through the back door into the cold.
The parking lot was mostly empty, overhead lights buzzing softly, everything washed in yellow and shadow. Their breath puffed white as they walked side by side across the damp pavement.
Savannah stopped at her car and set her bag on the hood, digging for her keys. Tilly took two more steps before stopping near their own door, turning back.
“Hey,” Savannah said. “Good work today.”
“Yeah,” Tilly said. “You too.”
She found her keys but didn’t unlock the door. Instead, she stayed where she was, one hand curled around the metal.
“You always make it better,” she said.
Tilly huffed out a breath. “That’s not hard with a parking-ban story.”
“Thank you.” Savannah smiled, quick and real. “But still.”
And before Tilly even knew what was happening, she stepped forward and kissed their cheek.
Warm. Brief. Certain.
Tilly froze.
Savannah pulled back just as fast, eyes wide as she’d surprised herself. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Tilly opened their mouth. Nothing came out.
She shook her head once, retreat already setting in. She unlocked her car, slid inside, and shut the door. The engine turned over. Headlights flared. A moment later, she was gone, tires whispering over wet asphalt.
Tilly stood there for a second longer than necessary, breath fogging, fingers numb around the strap of the camera bag, trying to get their heartbeat under control.
This wasn’t supposed to happen again — this slipping, this noticing.
Tilly sat in the driver’s seat of their car for a long moment before turning the key.
They weren’t proud of it, but part of them kept replaying the way she’d said ‘thank you’ — soft, like it meant something.
And Tilly hated that it did.