Then I catch myself, and my face does that thing where it tries to rearrange into professional neutrality but doesn’t quite commit. I settle for a scowl at my own reflection in the dark part of the screen.
Stop it. We’re not doing this.
We’re not sliding back into whatever we were before. I told him I’d think about being friends, not that I’d forgiven him. Not that I’d forgotten.
Even though I do miss him. With Logan, I never had to slow down or explain my leaps. He justfollowed. And when I couldn’t keep up with him, he didn’t make me feel stupid—he made me want to be smarter.
That’s a dangerous thing to miss.
Especially when you still don’t know why he threw it away.
I close the email without replying. Drag myself to the shower before I do something stupid like respond with a detailed critique of his methodology just to have an excuse to keep talking to him.
Actually, his Bayesian priors are slightly aggressive for this dataset?—
No. Shower. Now.
I don’t have time for the whole hair and makeup routine I did yesterday. So I settle for scrunching my curls and pulling my hair into a high ponytail. Foundation, blush, neutral lip, mascara—the bare minimum to look like a functional adult instead of someone who word-vomited her feelings at a dive bar and then rage-danced to Beyoncé.
As I slide my trusty glasses on, I catch my reflection. Without the war paint and the flat-ironed shield, I look distressingly like the old Audrey. The one who thought being smart was the whole package.
It’ll have to do.
The lab is still quiet when I arrive at 7:52, still slightly nauseous and definitely under-caffeinated.
I settle at my workstation and pull up his email again. The attachment is meticulous—of course it is, this is Logan—with detailed documentation for each model variation and a summary of his preliminary findings.
He’s right. The hybrid approach is promising. The latency reduction isn’t as aggressive as the optimized model, but the stability metrics are significantly better. It’s a smart compromise.
I hate that it’s a smart compromise.
If his work had been sloppy, I could have dismissed him. If it had been mediocre, I could have improved on it and felt smug about it. But this isgood. This is annoyingly, inconveniently good.
So much for intellectual superiority as a coping mechanism.
I’m so absorbed in the data that I don’t hear him come in.
“Morning.”
I jump, nearly knocking over my empty coffee cup. Logan is standing a few feet away, looking almost as rough as I feel. His hair is damp like he just stepped out of a shower, and there are shadows under his eyes that suggest he stayed up even later than 2 a.m.God I want to run my fingers through his hair and feel how cool the strands are—is that weird?
Wait. He’s holding two cups of coffee.
“Morning,” I manage, hoping my voice sounds more professional than my pulse feels.
He sets one of the cups on my desk and retreats a step. “Picked this up on my way in. Figured if you’re feeling anywhere near as trash as I am, you’d need it.”
I stare at the cup. Then at him. Then back at the cup.
“Thanks.” I take a sip—and have to clamp down on the noise that wants to escape my throat.
It’s exactly how I take it. From the coffee shop I prefer. Oat milk, no sugar, a sprinkle of cinnamon on top.
The cinnamon.
It’s not standard. It’s a quirk. Something I mentioned once, maybe twice.
He remembered.
