Friends for the sake of the project.
I focus on the code. On the numbers. On things that make sense.
The simulation runs for forty-seven minutes without crashing.
“Holy shit,” Audrey breathes, watching the data scroll across her screen. “Logan, look at these stability metrics.”
I roll my chair over—maintaining distance this time—and look. She’s right. The numbers are better than anything we’ve achieved so far. Not perfect, but promising. Really promising.
“We need to run extended tests,” I say. “At least a few hours of continuous operation to make sure this holds up under sustained load.”
“Agreed.” She glances at the clock. “I can set it to run overnight and check the results in the morning.”
“Or we could stay. Monitor in real-time. Catch any issues as they develop.”
The words are out before I can stop them. What am I doing? Suggesting we spend more time alone together? After she touched my arm and I nearly had a cardiac event?
But she’s nodding. “That’s probably smarter. If something does go wrong, we’ll know exactly when and why.”
“I’ll order food,” I hear myself say. “There’s a Thai place that delivers until midnight. Pad see ew, extra vegetables, no bean sprouts, right?”
She looks at me. Blinks. “Yeah. And…ah…you want the spicy red curry with tofu instead of chicken.”
She remembers.
I fight the smile that threatens to crack my face open.
She holds my gaze for a split second too long before looking away. “I’ll grab some waters and energy drinks from the break room. Want anything else?”
“No, I’m good.”
She disappears and I order the food, then set up a multi-monitor display so we can watch the simulation metrics in real time. My hands are jittery. I flex them, try to will the adrenaline out of my system. I should be used to this by now—the chemical surge that comes with Audrey praise—but it’s worse now. Now that I know exactly how capable I am of ruining everything.
She comes back carrying a bottle of water in each hand, two cups of ice tucked under her arm. She sets them on the table between our workstations. “They’re out of La Croix and Red Bull,” she says, shuffling the waters so the labels face the same direction. “Is this OK?”
“It’s great.”
She sits, and for a while the only sound is the soft click of our keyboards. The simulation eats up memory and keeps time spinning out for both of us. I watch her more than the monitors.
Not obvious, at least I hope not. But enough that if she glanced up, she’d know.
The Thai food arrives. We eat at our desks, using chopsticks and spacing the cartons between our monitors so we can keep working while we refuel. She tucks her legs up on the chair in a way that makes me remember every all-nighter we ever shared in the old Carmichael basement lab. She even does the thing where she wipes the condensation ring off the desk with her palm. I catalog every tiny habit, like an archivist desperate to preserve a dying species.
“So.” She doesn’t look up from her monitor, but her voice slices cleanly through the silence. “Last night.”
I almost choke on a mouthful of curry.
“I did not expect to see you at O’Malley’s,” she says, finally facing me. “That was…odd, right?”
Her tone is almost playful, or maybe she’s just trying to make it not weird—like she wants to pretend it wasn’t as deeply unsettling for her as it was for me.
I nod, hoping the food gives me a plausible delay before answering. “It was unexpected. But not unwelcome.”
She laughs under her breath.
“I always got the sense you’d prefer your social collisions to be scheduled, color-coded, and confirmed by three calendar reminders.”
“Four,” I say before I can stop myself. “Fewer than four, and I start to panic.”
