The Wrong Kind of Right

Chapter 6 – Working Late

By the second week of revised drawings, "working late" had become less of an occasional necessity and more of an unspoken arrangement.

It started with the seawall fix — genuinely urgent, genuinely requiring both of them hunched over structural drawings until the office emptied out around them. But even after Wale signed off on the new specs and the immediate crisis passed, the late nights kept happening anyway, quietly justified by budget spreadsheets that didn't actually need two people to read them, or renderings that could have waited until morning and somehow never did.

Mia told herself it was about the project. She was aware, in the part of her brain that still tried to be honest with her, that this was not entirely true.

"You're doing the thing again," Daniel said one Thursday, not looking up from his laptop.

"What thing?"

"Staring at the elevation instead of actually looking at it. You do it when you're thinking about something that isn't the elevation."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't." He finally glanced up, the corner of his mouth doing that thing that used to annoy her and now did something else entirely. "You've redrawn that railing detail four times. It was fine the first time."

"It wasn't fine. It was adequate."

"It was fine, Alvarez. You're stalling."

She was stalling. She wasn't about to admit it.

Around nine, hunger won the argument neither of them was having out loud, and they ended up splitting takeout at the conference table — pad thai for her, some elaborate curry for him that he insisted she try, holding a forkful across the table until she gave in and let him feed it to her, which was a wildly unnecessary amount of intimacy for a work dinner and which neither of them commented on.

"Okay," she admitted, chewing. "That's better than my order."

"Told you." He looked unreasonably pleased with himself. "I have good instincts."

"You have good instincts about curry. Your instincts about flood projections need work."

"They do not."

"They absolutely do. I was right about the pavilion, technically, before you made me redraw it into something better."

"We were both right. That's the whole terrifying premise of this project." He stole a piece of her pad thai without asking, which had become a habit over the past two weeks that she'd stopped pretending to mind. "Explains why we can't stop arguing. Neither of us is used to being matched."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's an observation. Possibly also a compliment. I haven't decided yet."

She threw a napkin at him, which he deflected without looking, laughing in a way that filled the empty conference room more than the overhead lights did. This was the part she hadn't expected, somewhere in the middle of the anger and the reluctant respect and the near-miss at the seawall — that Daniel Cole was, underneath the arrogance and the family baggage and the maddening confidence, genuinely funny. Easy to talk to, once you got past the parts of him built for boardrooms. She found herself staying later than the work required not because she was avoiding going home, but because she wasn't ready for the night to end.

They fell into a rhythm over the following nights that felt dangerously close to a routine — dinner around eight, work until ten or eleven, the office quiet enough that their voices carried, quiet enough that every small gesture felt larger than it should have. His hand brushing hers reaching for the same pen. Her shoulder against his, leaning in to see a detail on his screen, staying there a beat longer than the detail required. The two of them, more than once, catching themselves mid-laugh and going quiet at the same moment, aware of exactly how close they were sitting and exactly how little either of them wanted to move.

It was on one of those nights, close to eleven, the building nearly empty around them, that Daniel finally said something neither of them could pretend not to have heard.

"I keep finding reasons to stay," he said, not looking at her, sketching absently on a legal pad instead of anything useful. "In case that wasn't obvious."

Mia's pen stopped moving. "I noticed."

"Did you." He glanced up. "And?"

"And I've redrawn a railing detail four times for no reason, so." She shrugged, feeling more exposed than the admission probably warranted. "I think we're both stalling for the same reason."

Something shifted in his expression — the confidence dropping away, replaced by something quieter, more careful than she'd seen from him even at the seawall. "I told myself I wasn't going to do this. Co-leading a project with you is complicated enough without—" He gestured vaguely between them. "Without this."

"Without what?"

"You know what."

"Say it anyway."

He set the pen down slowly, like he was giving himself one last chance to talk himself out of it, and didn't take it.

"I like you, Mia. Not in the reluctant-professional-respect way I've been telling myself it was for the last two weeks. In the actual way." He exhaled, something almost like relief in it, like the sentence had been sitting in his chest for days and was finally allowed out. "I don't entirely know what to do with that, given everything, but I'm tired of pretending I don't."

The conference room was very quiet.

"Well," Mia said, her heart doing something complicated and entirely unprofessional, "cracks in the armor, Cole."

"Apparently." He almost smiled. "What are you going to do with that information?"

She thought about the careful walls she'd kept up for two years — around him, around this — and found, for the first time, that she didn't especially want to keep building them.

"I haven't decided yet," she said softly. "But I'm not redrawing that railing detail again tonight."

"No?"

"No." She closed her laptop, and didn't move away when he leaned closer instead of back. "I think we've both stalled long enough."