"Baxter," George says, "likes you."
I crouch down and let the dog press his enormous, warm skull into both my hands, and for a moment I forget completely that I am kneeling on the floor of a house that probably costs more than I will earn in the next decade.
Baxter makes a sound of pure satisfaction and leans his full weight against my shins.
"He's usually suspicious of new people," George adds. His tone is dry, but when I glance up from the floor, his eyes are doing something else entirely.
"And not me?" I ask.
He considers this for a beat. "Maybe you don't scare him," he says.
Baxter flops sideways against my legs with the boneless confidence of someone who has decided we are old friends.
George disappears and returns with a glass of water, which is so unheroic and so exactly right that I almost say something.
I stand up and take in the room properly. There are high ceilings, dark wood, and a painting on the far wall that I'm almost certain is not a reproduction. The bookshelves run floor to ceiling and the spines are cracked, the shelves slightly uneven with actual use.
Through the rear window, the city glitters with headlights threading between towers, the distant geometry of lit windows stacked against the dark.
My brain is doing an inventory with focused, slightly panicked attention. My body has gone somewhere considerably softer, which I find deeply inconvenient.
George throws a rope toy down the hallway and Baxter runs after it, skidding on the hardwood with magnificent disregard for physics. George actually smiles, and I have to look away.
This,I think,is dangerously easy.
No performance. No managing the impression I'm making or reading the one he's making. Just the two of us and a ridiculous dog in a house that smells like old wood and something warm I don't have a name for.
George catches me looking at him and raises an eyebrow.
"Your dog has no concept of personal space," I tell him.
"He comes by it honestly," George says, and something in his expression suggests this is a confession he's not going to explain.
I don't push on it.
He drives me home twenty minutes later, and Baxter installs himself in the back seat with the solemn gravity of a chaperone who takes his responsibilities seriously, chin resting on my shoulder from behind. The streets are quiet.
I watch the city slide past and think that this, the not-talking, the easy dark, might be the most honest twenty minutes we've had in three weeks of strategic conversation.
He pulls up outside my building and I get out, and I know without looking that he's waiting. I hear the car idle as I push through the front door. By the time I reach the stairs, he's pulled away.
He waited.
I drop my bag inside my flat. Kick off my heels. Open my laptop before I've made any conscious decision to do so, driven by something between professional instinct and a feeling I refuse to name. My fingers find the search bar and type his name.
George Maddox.
The results load in a cascade — financial press, tech coverage, a photograph from some industry event where he's wearing the same careful, composed expression I've now watched him put on and take off like a coat. The headlines stack up, one after another, each one quietly enormous.
I lean back in my chair.
The thought arrives without drama, flat and certain as a closing door:I am so out of my league.
