This time, neither of us pretends otherwise.
“You still holding back?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “You?”
“Yeah.”
That almost makes me laugh.
“Good,” I say. “Wouldn’t trust you if you weren’t.”
Her lips press together, but there’s something else there now, something that wasn’t there before.
Not trust.
But not rejection either.
“We need to move past surface-level,” I say. “This isn’t going to break open from the fence.”
Her eyes narrow slightly.
“You’re suggesting what?” she asks.
“I’m suggesting we stop pretending this is just observation,” I reply. “We dig.”
“That’s crossing a line,” she says.
“You crossed it already.”
“So did you.”
“Exactly.”
She exhales slowly, eyes hard as steel.
“You’re asking me to work with you,” she says.
“I’m telling you we already are,” I reply.
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” I admit. “It’s not.”
She studies me for a long moment, weighing it.
“This goes bad, it doesn’t just come back on us,” she says. “It escalates.”
“I know.”
“And you’re still pushing it.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I tilt my head slightly.
“Because something’s wrong,” I say. “And I don’t like being lied to.”
