“I really did.” He handed her a coconut-shell drink with an umbrella he’d 3-D printed that afternoon. Just because. The umbrella was structurally unnecessary and aerodynamically questionable, but it made him smile when the print job finished, and he hoped it would make her smile too.
She took the drink and sniffed it, turquoise eyes glinting with mischief. “Did you run a tox screen on this fruit?”
“Perhaps, yes.” He nudged his glasses up, a nervous habit he couldn’t seem to break. “The coconut tested clean across the board. No bacteria, no pesticides. Although the umbrella might be a tripping hazard if misused.”
“How does one misuse a cocktail umbrella?”
“I’m sure you’d find a way.”
“Rude.” She sipped, her lips curving around the rim of the shell in a way that made his pulse spike. “Hey, this is delicious. What’s in it?”
“Rum, coconut water, lime, a splash of passion fruit juice, and a carefully calculated amount of simple syrup to offset the acidity without overpowering the?—”
“David.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re doing the thing where you over-explain because you’re nervous.”
He blinked. “I’m not nervous.”
“Your leg is bouncing.”
He looked down. His leg was, in fact, bouncing. He stilled it immediately. “Residual energy from walking over here.”
“Uh-huh.” Lena popped a piece of mango into her mouth, chewing slowly, watching him with an expression that was half-amused, half-something else he couldn’t quite decode. “What’s the occasion, Jones? You don’t strike me as the spontaneous midnight picnic type.”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“Maybe.” She tilted her head, hair spilling over one shoulder. “Or maybe you’ve been stress-coding for seventy-two hours straight and hit some kind of exhaustion-induced romantic breakthrough.”
“Can it be both?”
“I suppose it could.” She reached for a cracker, layered it with cheese, and took a deliberate bite. “Though I have to say, if this is what sleep deprivation does to you, I’m not sure I want you getting a full eight hours.”
Heat crept up the back of David’s neck. “Is that your way of saying you approve?”
“I’m saying,” She gestured at the spread with the remains of her cracker, “that for a guy who spends most of his time talking to machines, you’re surprisingly good at this whole human interaction thing when you try.”
“High praise.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.” But she was smiling, and the smile reached her eyes this time, crinkling the corners in a way that made David’s rib cage too small for his lungs.
He sat beside her, close enough now that their elbows brushed. The contact sent a shockwave up his arm. Ridiculous. He dealt with electrical currents daily. This was simple skin-on-skin, neurons firing, basic biology.
Except it wasn’t.
Lena reached for another piece of fruit but paused when her gaze landed on her Tupperware container. “Oh. Right. Almost forgot.” She pulled the lid off, releasing the aroma of dark chocolate and mint into the humid night air. “My contribution to this well-planned spontaneous event.”
“Why the truffles?” he asked because he needed to say something before his brain short-circuited.
She gave a little shrug, studying the waves intently now. The shift in her energy was subtle but unmistakable: a screen dimming from full brightness to standby mode. “Walter said we all deal with stress differently. He drinks Irish whiskey. I microwave chocolate.”
David smiled. “Microwave?”
“Don’t judge. I have a system. Thirty seconds, stir, thirty more. Anything longer and it seizes.” She picked up a truffle and turned it between her fingers. “Kind of like people.”
“People seize up when overheated?”
