"Yes."
"You noticed my tea order. From the cups I leave around the arena."
"You leave them everywhere. It wasn't difficult."
The box cracked a little more.
She took a sip of the chai. It was exactly right. The proper ratio of spice to sweetness, the oat milk frothed just enough, and the honey subtle but present.
"Thank you," she said softly.
He finally turned around, spatula in hand, his expression carefully neutral. "You're welcome."
They stood there for a moment, the kitchen island between them, steam rising from her cup, something unspoken thickening the air. Then she deliberately set the cup down on the counter without using a coaster, and watched his eye twitch.
"Where are the plates?" she asked innocently.
The mural sketches were, admittedly, a war crime.
She hadn't planned to work on them. She'd planned to stay in the guest room, read one of his color-coordinated books, and wait out the storm like a reasonable houseguest who respected boundaries.
But the light in the dining room was incredible. The floor-to-ceiling windows faced east, and even with the storm still swirling outside, the overcast sky created a soft, diffused illumination that was perfect for detailed work. Her fingers had been itching since she woke up. She'd been working out the central composition, the piece that would tie everything together, and inspiration didn't wait for convenient timing.
So she retrieved her art supplies from the bags he had carried in and spread her sketches across his dining table. She gradually added her pencils, her erasers, her reference photos, her charcoal sticks, her loose sheets of tracing paper, and her crumpled notes about team history. Within an hour, his immaculate twelve-seat dining table looked like a tornado had swept through an art supply store.
He walked in around noon and stopped so abruptly she heard his shoes squeak on the hardwood.
She looked up from the sketch she was working on—a detailed study of crossed hockey sticks framing the Emerald Enforcers boar logo—and smiled brightly.
"Good light in here," she said cheerfully.
His eyes traveled across the table at the scattered papers and the charcoal smudges on the wood surface. He silently studied the pencils rolling precariously close to the edge and the reference photo that was definitely going to leave a mark because she'd pinned it in place with a piece of tape.
Tape on his table. The irony was not lost on her.
"This is..." He didn't finish the sentence. His face had taken on that fixed quality again, the one that meant his brain was trying to process chaos and failing.
"It's organized," she said cheerfully. "I know where everything is."
"How?"
"It's a system."
"It's—" He gestured helplessly at the explosion of creativity. "There's charcoal on my table."
"I'll clean it."
"There's tape on my table."
"I needed to hold down the reference. Would you prefer I drilled holes and installed a corkboard?"
His jaw worked. No sound came out.
She felt a flicker of something that might have been guilt. She was pushing him, she knew. Testing the limits of his tolerance, and poking at his need for control like a kid poking a bee's nest. It was petty. It was also deeply, profoundly satisfying in ways she probably needed to unpack with a therapist.
"I'll be done in a few hours," she said, more gently. "And I'll put everything back. Promise."
He nodded stiffly, turned on his heel, and walked away without another word.
