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Cal could deceive himself that this was two friends who liked burgers checking out a new restaurant on a Wednesday night as much as he wanted to. It wouldn’t make what he was doing with Fin that.
What the fuck was he doing with her?
It was midweek, not a date night. It was burgers, and they’d eaten burgers together before. It was what friends did. They’d spent Friday night platonically in bed together. They’d spent Saturday at Beacon being friendly without it escalating into anything they couldn’t back away from. This didn’t need to mean anything. It was just a casual check in.
And it still wasn’t that.
It wasn’t keeping Fin too busy to find someone else, either, because she had ample time to do that when he wasn’t around.
It certainly wasn’t work.
Fin didn’t know what they were doing, either, because she was jumpy. He’d never seen her this nervous before. Not as Marilyn, not in front of Rory or at the Langleys’s or belting out Sia at the XRad party. She made fleeting eye contact and could barely say a word during the walk from her apartment in Carnegie Hill to the burger bar. Because it was rush hour they didn’t even try to hold hands.
If he called it a date, then he’d have to live with the consequences of having changed the game. He had no business doing that. Had made it deadly clear to her this kind of thing wouldn’t be happening, and now he was sitting opposite her, studying her, while she studied the menu.
And Christ, if this was a date, then he needed his head examined. This was a lousy first date. Wrong night, wrong transport, wrong clothes, he was still in his suit, wrong destination, wrong intention.
The tipping point had been the snuggling. She’d been in such obvious pain that he’d not been able to resist her request to spoon, and he’d liked it too much to stop. But he was a rat bastard for insisting she snuggle him when she was exhausted beyond arguing. And kissing her was taking it way too far, even though he’d passed it off as a joke and had kept his hands mostly to himself since then. Mostly, if you discounted fooling around by the Hudson, where he’d lifted her off her feet at one point.
Which is, of course, why this was a mistake, and why he was disgustingly happy to be sitting in a crowded, noisy, cheap, too brightly lit restaurant watching her internal debate about what kind of cheese to add to her burger.
“How’s your week going?” he asked after they’d ordered. His go-to safe question. Safe enough you could ask a stranger.
She told him about how she was setting up donor databases, how D4D had signed a deal with a new project partner in Namibia. He could barely hear her above the din in the place, but she was so expressive it didn’t matter. He drank her in, her excitement, her concern, her slightly manic bewilderment about what was going on between them. He didn’t know what to do with that because he felt it, too. A hot and cold flash of energy strung out between them, fizzing and sparking and throwing out high-voltage alert warnings.
They were off brief, and neither of them knew how to take it.
The arrival of the food saved them from more awkward, shouted conversation. Fin wasted no time tucking in. If he thought about the last burger he watched her eat, he was going to have an uncomfortable six-block walk ahead of him. He focused on his own meal, and since this wasn’t the kind of place you stuck around, they were back on the sidewalk with nothing to do before indigestion had a chance to take hold. The only plus was the burgers were sensational.
If he wanted this to appear as if it was friends sharing a meal, he needed to act that way. “I’ll walk you home.” As if he’d simply leave her here, anyway.
Five minutes later, he’d lost her in a crowd of people in fancy dress. He turned back to see her standing outside a hole in the wall theater next to a guy wearing a wig, red corset, frilly panties, suspenders, fishnets, and heels. The theater was showing the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
In case corset man got any ideas, Cal approached Fin from behind and put his hands on her shoulders. “How many times have you seen it?”
He felt her shrug. “I know every word.”
“And you want to see it again.”
She turned, her eyes sweeping over his face. “You hate it.”
She’d gotten good at reading him, not that he’d been trying to guard his feelings. It was a musical. He’d hate it. “It’s my favorite.”
She shoved him so hard he took a step back and had to apologize to the corseted Frank N. Furter. Then he queued with a mass of Brads and Janets, assorted cabaret characters, and at least one zombie nurse for tickets because it was Fin’s favorite, and this wasn’t a date, but it was an excuse to sit in the dark and hold her hand.
And he did hold her hand, and she sang every line, along with the rest of the packed theater, and he loved her for it. He never felt this out of place in the home of the rich and infamous he was ripping off. He hadn’t realized this movie was about deviancy and the sexual corruption of two innocents. There was a lot of innuendo and a young Susan Sarandon in her underwear.
When the house lights came up, Fin threw her arms around him. “You hated it and I loved it, and this was the best non-date ever.”
They both froze as she called it. “It wasn’t a date,” he said.
She unwrapped her arms from around his neck. “I know. I said non-date.”
“Which implies—”
She stood, tucking her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “Nothing. Because you don’t want it to be anything.”
He was tardy following her crabwalk to the aisle because nothing slowed you up more than an unnecessary lie.
