Zoey had gone out for nothing more sinister than a bag of coffee beans, which made it feel, in retrospect, like a genuinely unfair ambush that she should stumble across Leo sitting at a cafe table with a woman she didn't recognize, laughing at something on a tablet propped between them.
She told herself, in the two seconds it took to fully register the scene, that this feeling rising in her chest was not jealousy. It was, she informed herself firmly, simple curiosity. Professional interest. The old, familiar itch of a mind that had spent six years cataloguing suspicious behavior and had apparently not fully retired the habit just because the primary suspect had, in the intervening weeks, become someone she'd started, however cautiously, to fall for.
This reasoning held up for approximately four seconds before she found herself diving behind the nearest available cover, which happened to be a newspaper rack outside the shop next door, from which she extracted a paper with the swift, unthinking urgency of a woman under duress.
She sat down at the small outdoor table closest to the rack, snapped the paper open in front of her face, and only realized, several seconds into her surveillance, that she was holding it upside down.
She did not fix this. Fixing it would have required lowering the paper, and lowering the paper felt, in the moment, considerably more dangerous than simply squinting at an inverted headline about municipal water rates.
She also put on her sunglasses, despite the fact that the cafe's awning currently blocked most of the direct sun, because some deep, animal instinct insisted that sunglasses made her less recognizable, an assumption that had never once, in the history of her life, actually proven true.
From this expertly concealed position, she watched Leo lean across the table, gesturing animatedly at whatever was on the tablet, laughing at something the woman said, the woman laughing back, easy and warm, the kind of laugh that suggested genuine rapport, genuine comfort, genuine —
Stop it, Zoey told herself, gripping the upside-down newspaper hard enough to crinkle the pages. You have no actual evidence of anything.
This had, historically, never stopped her before.
She sat there for nearly ten full minutes, newspaper trembling slightly with the force of her badly controlled emotions, watching the two of them lean closer together over the tablet, watching the woman touch Leo's arm briefly to point at something on the screen, watching Leo nod, entirely absorbed, entirely unaware that forty feet away, his neighbor was undergoing what could only be described as a full tactical surveillance operation over a bag of unpurchased coffee beans.
It was Leo who spotted her first.
She saw it happen in slow motion — his gaze drifting idly across the street, catching, snagging, then widening with unmistakable, delighted recognition on the woman hiding behind an upside-down newspaper and a pair of sunglasses at a cafe table she had no actual reason to be sitting at.
He said something to his companion, gestured toward Zoey's table, and both of them looked over, the woman's expression shifting into open, curious amusement.
Zoey considered, briefly, whether it was possible to simply become one with the newspaper, to fold herself into its pages and disappear entirely rather than face the consequences of what she'd just been caught doing.
This option was not available to her. Leo was already crossing the street, grinning in a way that suggested he found this development considerably more delightful than she currently had the emotional resources to process.
"Is that today's paper?" he asked, sliding into the chair across from her without waiting for an invitation. "Because it looks like you're reading about civic water infrastructure upside down, and I have to say, that's a pretty niche interest even for you."
"I was just—" Zoey lowered the paper an inch, felt the full weight of her own ridiculousness land on her all at once, and gave up on the pretense entirely, letting it drop to the table with a small, defeated rustle. "I don't actually have a good explanation for this."
"No?" Leo's grin widened, entirely unhelpfully. "Not even a fire safety angle? I feel like we could work with that."
"I saw you with someone," Zoey said, in a rush, because clearly the only way through this humiliation was straight through it. "At the cafe. Laughing. I didn't mean to hide, I just — reflexively hid. It's a whole thing, I have a whole history of this specific behavior, you're familiar with it."
"That's Priyanka," Leo said, gently, nodding back toward the table where the woman in question was watching them both with barely concealed delight. "From the studio. Colorist, remember? She was at the party. We're working through some palette notes for the wolf's redemption arc, it's genuinely the least romantic conversation happening within a five-mile radius."
"Right," Zoey said, feeling her face go thoroughly, comprehensively red. "Of course. I know that. I met her."
"You did," Leo agreed, clearly enjoying this considerably more than the situation warranted. "So what exactly was the plan here? Sunglasses, upside-down newspaper — were you going to follow us if the meeting ran long?"
"I hadn't gotten that far," Zoey admitted, mortified, "I was mostly just reacting."
"To what, exactly?"
Zoey opened her mouth. Closed it. There was no version of this confession that didn't sound, out loud, exactly as unreasonable as it had felt sitting behind her newspaper — a jealousy with no actual basis, a reflexive suspicion that had nothing to do with real evidence and everything to do with old habits that apparently hadn't fully retired just because her feelings for the man across the table had changed.
"I got jealous," she said finally, quietly, the words landing with more weight than she expected. "Which is stupid, because you were just talking about wolf redemption arcs, and I have literally no claim on you, and I still hid behind a newspaper like some kind of unhinged person."
Something in Leo's expression shifted, the teasing warmth softening into something more careful, more pleased in a quieter way. "You don't have a claim on me?" he repeated, gently.
"I mean—" Zoey faltered, caught off guard by the specific phrasing.
"Because I was under the impression," Leo said, leaning forward slightly, voice dropping just enough that it felt private, even in the open cafe seating, "that we'd made some progress on that front. Last week. In my workshop. With a hedgehog."
Zoey felt her whole chest go warm and unsteady, the mortification of the moment slowly transmuting into something else entirely. "That's—" she started, and found she didn't actually want to argue the point. "That's fair, actually."
"So," Leo said, the grin returning, softer now, "just to clarify the record: you don't need to hide behind newspapers. If you're curious who I'm having coffee with, you're always welcome to just ask. Or, honestly, just come sit at the actual table, which tends to work better for gathering information than upside-down municipal reporting."
"I'll keep that in mind," Zoey said, and found, despite the lingering heat in her face, that she was laughing now too, the absurdity of the whole situation finally breaking loose from its earlier tension.
Leo reached across the table, gently plucked the newspaper from where it lay, and turned it right-side up before setting it back down in front of her with exaggerated care. "There," he said. "Much better. Now you can actually read about water rates if that's genuinely your interest."
"It is not my interest."
"Sure looked like it for ten minutes."
"You're never going to let this go, are you."
"Never," Leo confirmed, standing, still grinning, glancing back toward Priyanka, who was watching the whole exchange with the particular delight of someone who fully intended to bring this story back to the studio in vivid detail. "I should get back. But—" He hesitated, something more sincere slipping through the teasing. "For what it's worth, the jealousy thing? Not stupid. Actually kind of nice to know it goes both ways."
He left before she could ask what he meant by both ways, crossing back to his table with an easy stride, and Zoey sat there for a long moment, upside-down newspaper now correctly oriented in front of her, sunglasses still perched uselessly on her nose, feeling the specific, giddy mortification of a woman who had just been caught red-handed doing something ridiculous and had somehow, impossibly, ended up more endeared to rather than less.
She watched him rejoin Priyanka's conversation, watched him gesture back toward her table once, watched Priyanka laugh, delighted, at whatever he'd said.
Zoey pulled off her sunglasses, folded the newspaper properly, and allowed herself, for the first time in this entire ridiculous saga, to simply laugh at herself without any accompanying spiral of shame.
It felt, unexpectedly, like progress.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Zoey had gone out for nothing more sinister than a bag of coffee beans, which made it feel, in retrospect, like a genuinely unfair ambush that she should stumble across Leo sitting at a cafe table with a woman she didn't recognize, laughing at something on a tablet propped between them.
She told herself, in the two seconds it took to fully register the scene, that this feeling rising in her chest was not jealousy. It was, she informed herself firmly, simple curiosity. Professional interest. The old, familiar itch of a mind that had spent six years cataloguing suspicious behavior and had apparently not fully retired the habit just because the primary suspect had, in the intervening weeks, become someone she'd started, however cautiously, to fall for.
This reasoning held up for approximately four seconds before she found herself diving behind the nearest available cover, which happened to be a newspaper rack outside the shop next door, from which she extracted a paper with the swift, unthinking urgency of a woman under duress.
She sat down at the small outdoor table closest to the rack, snapped the paper open in front of her face, and only realized, several seconds into her surveillance, that she was holding it upside down.
She did not fix this. Fixing it would have required lowering the paper, and lowering the paper felt, in the moment, considerably more dangerous than simply squinting at an inverted headline about municipal water rates.
She also put on her sunglasses, despite the fact that the cafe's awning currently blocked most of the direct sun, because some deep, animal instinct insisted that sunglasses made her less recognizable, an assumption that had never once, in the history of her life, actually proven true.
From this expertly concealed position, she watched Leo lean across the table, gesturing animatedly at whatever was on the tablet, laughing at something the woman said, the woman laughing back, easy and warm, the kind of laugh that suggested genuine rapport, genuine comfort, genuine —
Stop it, Zoey told herself, gripping the upside-down newspaper hard enough to crinkle the pages. You have no actual evidence of anything.
This had, historically, never stopped her before.
She sat there for nearly ten full minutes, newspaper trembling slightly with the force of her badly controlled emotions, watching the two of them lean closer together over the tablet, watching the woman touch Leo's arm briefly to point at something on the screen, watching Leo nod, entirely absorbed, entirely unaware that forty feet away, his neighbor was undergoing what could only be described as a full tactical surveillance operation over a bag of unpurchased coffee beans.
It was Leo who spotted her first.
She saw it happen in slow motion — his gaze drifting idly across the street, catching, snagging, then widening with unmistakable, delighted recognition on the woman hiding behind an upside-down newspaper and a pair of sunglasses at a cafe table she had no actual reason to be sitting at.
He said something to his companion, gestured toward Zoey's table, and both of them looked over, the woman's expression shifting into open, curious amusement.
Zoey considered, briefly, whether it was possible to simply become one with the newspaper, to fold herself into its pages and disappear entirely rather than face the consequences of what she'd just been caught doing.
This option was not available to her. Leo was already crossing the street, grinning in a way that suggested he found this development considerably more delightful than she currently had the emotional resources to process.
"Is that today's paper?" he asked, sliding into the chair across from her without waiting for an invitation. "Because it looks like you're reading about civic water infrastructure upside down, and I have to say, that's a pretty niche interest even for you."
"I was just—" Zoey lowered the paper an inch, felt the full weight of her own ridiculousness land on her all at once, and gave up on the pretense entirely, letting it drop to the table with a small, defeated rustle. "I don't actually have a good explanation for this."
"No?" Leo's grin widened, entirely unhelpfully. "Not even a fire safety angle? I feel like we could work with that."
"I saw you with someone," Zoey said, in a rush, because clearly the only way through this humiliation was straight through it. "At the cafe. Laughing. I didn't mean to hide, I just — reflexively hid. It's a whole thing, I have a whole history of this specific behavior, you're familiar with it."
"That's Priyanka," Leo said, gently, nodding back toward the table where the woman in question was watching them both with barely concealed delight. "From the studio. Colorist, remember? She was at the party. We're working through some palette notes for the wolf's redemption arc, it's genuinely the least romantic conversation happening within a five-mile radius."
"Right," Zoey said, feeling her face go thoroughly, comprehensively red. "Of course. I know that. I met her."
"You did," Leo agreed, clearly enjoying this considerably more than the situation warranted. "So what exactly was the plan here? Sunglasses, upside-down newspaper — were you going to follow us if the meeting ran long?"
"I hadn't gotten that far," Zoey admitted, mortified, "I was mostly just reacting."
"To what, exactly?"
Zoey opened her mouth. Closed it. There was no version of this confession that didn't sound, out loud, exactly as unreasonable as it had felt sitting behind her newspaper — a jealousy with no actual basis, a reflexive suspicion that had nothing to do with real evidence and everything to do with old habits that apparently hadn't fully retired just because her feelings for the man across the table had changed.
"I got jealous," she said finally, quietly, the words landing with more weight than she expected. "Which is stupid, because you were just talking about wolf redemption arcs, and I have literally no claim on you, and I still hid behind a newspaper like some kind of unhinged person."
Something in Leo's expression shifted, the teasing warmth softening into something more careful, more pleased in a quieter way. "You don't have a claim on me?" he repeated, gently.
"I mean—" Zoey faltered, caught off guard by the specific phrasing.
"Because I was under the impression," Leo said, leaning forward slightly, voice dropping just enough that it felt private, even in the open cafe seating, "that we'd made some progress on that front. Last week. In my workshop. With a hedgehog."
Zoey felt her whole chest go warm and unsteady, the mortification of the moment slowly transmuting into something else entirely. "That's—" she started, and found she didn't actually want to argue the point. "That's fair, actually."
"So," Leo said, the grin returning, softer now, "just to clarify the record: you don't need to hide behind newspapers. If you're curious who I'm having coffee with, you're always welcome to just ask. Or, honestly, just come sit at the actual table, which tends to work better for gathering information than upside-down municipal reporting."
"I'll keep that in mind," Zoey said, and found, despite the lingering heat in her face, that she was laughing now too, the absurdity of the whole situation finally breaking loose from its earlier tension.
Leo reached across the table, gently plucked the newspaper from where it lay, and turned it right-side up before setting it back down in front of her with exaggerated care. "There," he said. "Much better. Now you can actually read about water rates if that's genuinely your interest."
"It is not my interest."
"Sure looked like it for ten minutes."
"You're never going to let this go, are you."
"Never," Leo confirmed, standing, still grinning, glancing back toward Priyanka, who was watching the whole exchange with the particular delight of someone who fully intended to bring this story back to the studio in vivid detail. "I should get back. But—" He hesitated, something more sincere slipping through the teasing. "For what it's worth, the jealousy thing? Not stupid. Actually kind of nice to know it goes both ways."
He left before she could ask what he meant by both ways, crossing back to his table with an easy stride, and Zoey sat there for a long moment, upside-down newspaper now correctly oriented in front of her, sunglasses still perched uselessly on her nose, feeling the specific, giddy mortification of a woman who had just been caught red-handed doing something ridiculous and had somehow, impossibly, ended up more endeared to rather than less.
She watched him rejoin Priyanka's conversation, watched him gesture back toward her table once, watched Priyanka laugh, delighted, at whatever he'd said.
Zoey pulled off her sunglasses, folded the newspaper properly, and allowed herself, for the first time in this entire ridiculous saga, to simply laugh at herself without any accompanying spiral of shame.
It felt, unexpectedly, like progress.
You've reached the end of this chapter