24. Lucy #3
Dottie, apparently bored by our failure to provide meaningful entertainment, returned to her bed and collapsed onto it with dramatic heaviness. Her tail thumped twice against the cushion before settling.
Ty watched her for a second, then looked back at me. “She goes everywhere with you now?”
“Mostly.”
“Good.”
I looked down at the folder and closed it. “She likes sleeping under my desk and judging meetings.”
“Same.”
“You have never slept under my desk.”
“Not yet.”
“Burns.”
His smile appeared then, small and lazy and unmistakably his.
The old rhythm breathed once between us, just enough to become dangerous.
I stacked the legal folder over the printed travel report, aligning the corners with more precision than necessary. “Why are you here?”
Ty’s smile faded by degrees. He looked toward the darkened corridor, then back at me. “I saw your office light.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s what made me stop walking.” He shifted his weight slightly. “You were still here.”
“So you came upstairs to confirm?”
“Maybe.”
“That is not believable.”
“I didn’t say it was my best answer.”
Despite myself, my mouth softened.
He took one step farther into the room, then stopped again, as if the distance between us had rules now and he was trying, carefully, to learn them. “I thought about going home,” he said.
“You should have. You have recovery in the morning. You should be sleeping.”
“I know.”
“And yet.”
“And yet,” he agreed. He glanced at the takeout container again. “Did you really only eat half?”
“It was a large portion.” I sighed. “How was Denver?” I asked, because small talk was safer than whatever this was becoming.
“Thin.”
I blinked. “The entire city?”
“The air. My lungs are still filing a complaint.” His smile warmed for one brief, lovely second. Then it softened into something that made my throat tighten.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“That is never true.”
“Just missed this.”
My lungs forgot their next instruction.
He looked around the office like he was giving me somewhere else to put my eyes if I needed it. “You correcting me. Pretending you’re not amused. Threatening me. Very on brand.”
I should have answered quickly. I should have rolled my eyes and told him his exhaustion was making him sentimental and sent him home before either of us forgot where we were.
Instead, I sat there with my hand on a legal folder and my heart behaving like it had not learned a single thing in eight years. “You can’t just say things like that,” I said quietly.
Ty’s gaze came back to mine. “I know,” he said.
He swallowed, and for a second, every trace of public Buzz fell away. No locker-room noise. No interviews. No bright, reckless confidence built to hold up under lights and attention and thirty reporters asking versions of the same question.
Just Ty. Looking at me like asking for anything mattered because my answer mattered more. “I’m not trying to mess up your night,” he said.
“It was already fairly mangled before you arrived.”
His hand came out of his coat pocket and rubbed once over the back of his neck, a familiar motion that pulled at something old in me.
Teenage Ty in my father’s kitchen, pretending not to be nervous before a math quiz.
Ty beside Betsy, snow in his hair, trying to ask a serious question and hating that seriousness made him visible. “I was going to go home,” he said.
“You mentioned that.”
“And then I saw your light.”
“I also believe we covered that.”
He huffed a quiet laugh. “You are really making me work for this.”
“You have not identified what this is.”
“Fair.” Ty took a breath. “Wanna call it and have a drink by a lake?”
For a second, I only stared at him.
The sentence was casual enough that it should not have landed with any weight at all.
A drink. A lake. A late night after a win.
It could have been nothing. It could have been the kind of invitation he gave everyone, easy and loose and backed by the assumption that the world usually bent toward him.
But his voice was not loose.
And I knew exactly which lake he meant.
The one outside Northbend. The house I had never seen. The private, quiet place people mentioned in passing when talking about summer barbecues or small team gatherings.
My chest tightened. “That sounds dangerously close to going home with you.”
His face changed. “It’s not the same ask.”
My throat worked. “Is that what we’re calling it?”
“A drink?” he asked.
I gave him a look.
He lowered his gaze for half a second, then lifted it back to mine. “I’m only asking a friend to have a drink for old times’ sake.”
The word friend did something strange in the room. Made it safer and more painful at once.
His smile faded again. “You can say no.”
I looked away from him and down at my desk. The access audit still waited. Charlotte’s email sat tucked into the folder where it belonged. The lo mein had gone cold. My father had gone home. Sarah had gone home. Naomi had locked up Paper Lantern and told me to stop using work as a bunker.
Dottie lifted her head from her bed, watching both of us with the solemn intensity of a dog who had chosen a side and was not above making it known.
“This is a terrible idea.”
“Maybe.”
I looked back at him. He simply stood there, tired and hopeful and trying not to make either thing my responsibility.
The old Ty would have charmed. The old Ty would have filled the silence until I laughed or snapped or both. The old Ty would have made saying yes feel inevitable and saying no feel like I had ruined the fun.
This Ty waited.
That was what undid me.
My hand moved before I had fully agreed with it, reaching for the lid of my laptop. I closed it slowly. The screen went dark, and my reflection vanished with it.
Ty’s eyes dropped to the motion. When they came back to mine, he looked almost afraid to breathe.
“Fine, Ty.” I could not believe what was coming out of my mouth. “I will have one drink with you.”