She said five minutes.
She came back in thirty.
By the time she reappeared, the parking lot had thinned out considerably; most of the cars gone, the last stragglers trickling toward the exit, the whole place quiet enough that her heels were audible from halfway across the lot.
"I am so sorry." She said it fast, already closing the distance, genuinely contrite in a way that almost caught me off guard. "I grabbed my things, and then the head of the department cornered me in the hallway wanting a full debrief on how the event went, and it felt rude to just cut him off mid-sentence, so I—"
"It’s fine."
She stopped in front of me, tilting her head slightly, studying my face like she was checking the math on something. "So... you’re not upset?"
The smile that followed was doing a lot of work; the specific kind of smile a kid gives right before or right after getting caught doing something they knew better than to do, banking entirely on charm to close the gap.
"Stop that. It’s very effective and I hate it."
She giggled — the sound landing somewhere in my chest before I could stop it — and immediately added, "All’s fair in love and war."
I raised an eyebrow. "Love?"
"Friends. Friends and war," she corrected, a little too quickly, and didn’t quite meet my eyes while she said it.
I stared at her for a moment, then shook my head, already unlocking the car.
"Just get in."
She got in without further comment, quieter than usual, and I pulled out of the lot before either of us said anything else.
The silence stretched a while. Not uncomfortable exactly, but noticeably different from her usual restlessness, like the slip from earlier was still sitting somewhere she hadn’t fully shaken off yet.
"So," I said eventually, mostly to fill the space. "How was the event?"
She turned to face me properly, something searching in the look.
"Do you really want to know?"
"...Yeah. Sure."
She studied me for a second, like she was checking whether that ’sure’ had any actual weight behind it.
"I ask because I don’t look like it, but I talk. A lot. Especially when I’m comfortable. And I’m super comfortable around you. So if you’re just being polite, now’s the time to back out."
I glanced at her for a moment, then laughed. "Go ahead. I’m listening."
She beamed, visibly, and settled back into her seat before launching in.
Turns out the ’boring department thing’ was a faculty showcase — every professor in the engineering school presenting some sliver of their current research to the rest of the department, ostensibly to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration, mostly, according to her, to give everyone a reason to wear their nicest blazer and silently judge each other’s PowerPoint transitions.
She launched into it with more energy than the words ’faculty showcase’ had any right to produce; the guy from Materials Science who’d tried to explain graphene applications using a slide with seventeen different fonts, the visiting lecturer who’d gone twenty minutes over his allotted time and gotten cut off mid-sentence by the department head’s increasingly aggressive throat-clearing, the free coffee that had run out before her own presentation slot, which she brought up twice, with real, lingering offense.
"They ran out. Before mine. I had slides prepared and everything, and I had to present sleep-deprived and caffeine-free, like some kind of savage."
"Tragic."
"It was. Nobody understands the severity."
She talked with her hands more than I’d noticed before, animated in a way that had nothing to do with performance. She was just genuinely, visibly happy to be telling someone about her day, the same way anyone would be if the someone actually seemed to want to hear it. I caught myself smiling more than once without meaning to, mostly at how thoroughly unbothered she was about admitting a room full of PhDs had spent an hour talking about torque converters and thermal efficiency like it was the social event of the season.
By the time she wrapped up — something about her own presentation going well, despite the coffee tragedy, and a colleague asking her to co-author a paper she was ’cautiously excited’ about — I realized we’d already made it most of the way across town without either of us really noticing.
I pulled up outside her place and killed the engine.
She turned to face me, still riding the tail end of whatever good mood the story had put her in, until the smile faded, replaced by something that looked a lot like her actually thinking too hard about the next thing she wanted to say.
"What’s wrong?"
"Do you—" She stopped. Started again. "Do you want to come in?" A pause. "To see the kitchen."
"The kitchen."
"It’s a very nice kitchen."
I raised an eyebrow.
"I promise not to do anything to you," she added quickly.
"Sounds pretty reassuring."
Something in her deflated a little at that. The specific kind of energy loss that happens right after you realize a joke landed sideways.
"You’re right," she said after a moment. "I’m being silly."
I watched her for a moment, then exhaled.
"How about lunch," I said. "This weekend. Something friends would actually do—"
"Yes." She looked up so fast I almost laughed.
"You didn’t even let me finish."
"Yes. Yes. Yes."
I stared at her for a second, then laughed. She laughed right along with it, a little breathless, like she’d surprised even herself with how fast those ’yes’s’ had come out.
"Thank you," she said, still smiling, already reaching for the door handle. "For today. All of it. Even the parking lot."
"Even the parking lot."
"Especially the parking lot."
She got out, and I watched her walk up to the house — no bolting this time, just an easy, unhurried kind of happy — and sat there for a second after the door closed behind her.
Then I drove off, already looking forward to lunch. Which was, in itself, a mildly concerning development.