She laughs. “Oh wow. I thought you were underselling yourself.”
“I was,” I say. “I’m actually worse.”
She grins and nudges my arm. “Come on. Redemption throw.”
I throw again. It lands somewhere respectable enough to count.
“Yes,” I say quietly. “Athletic.”
She claps. “See. Growth.”
We fall into easy banter, playful insults, exaggerated concentration. For a few minutes, my head is blissfully empty. No spreadsheets. No mums. No internal timelines labelled when do I tell her about the baby without sounding like a bomb threat.
Sophia watches me line up another throw, head tilted. “You’re very serious about this.”
“I don’t likelosing,” I say.
“To me.”
“Especially to you.”
She laughs, warm and unguarded, and something in my chest loosens. This is nice. Genuinely.
Her dart wins the game by a mile. She bows dramatically. “Victory.”
I hold up my hands. “I concede. Gracefully.”
“Buy me a drink,” she says.
“Fair.”
We stand close at the bar, shoulder to shoulder, the easy proximity of people who have already decided they’re comfortable here. She tells me about a disastrous work call from earlier that day. I tell her about Thursday’s lesson and the little competition I had prepared for the kids.
“That sounds intense,” she says, laughing.
“It was character building,” I reply.
She looks at me for a moment, longer than before. Curious. Open. Not demanding.
And I think again about Christa. About Pea-Lime. About the fact that at some point, this stops being a detail I can keep in my back pocket.
Not tonight, I tell myself. Tonight is darts and laughter and a pub that doesn’t know my life.
We head back to the board for a rematch that I lose even more convincingly. Sophia is delighted. I am mocked gently and accept my fate.
When she steps closer to tease me about my terrible aim, the space between us shifts. Not dramatically. Just enough.
She looks up at me. I look down at her. There’s a pause where we both seem to decide the same thing at the same time.
We kiss.
It’s nice. Soft. Polite. No fireworks. No cinematic swoop. Just lips meeting and staying there for a moment, like we’re checking something together.
She smiles against my mouth. I smile back.
When we pull away, nothing feels wrong. Nothing feels overwhelming. It’s just… pleasant.
“Okay,” she says. “That was good.”
