The water had been glass-smooth that morning, the kind of perfect rowing conditions that usually cleared Newt's head. Six-forty AM, the Charles River painted in pre-dawn grey, and his body had moved through the motions with the mechanical precision of five years on Stanford's varsity eight. Pull, release, recover. The rhythm that had carried him through countless regattas, through the kind of discipline that earned him a spot on a team that regularly destroyed Cal at Pac-12s.

But his head? His head had been elsewhere.

Specifically, it had been replaying the previous night in his apartment—the one near campus that he could almost afford thanks to a decent internship at a Palo Alto startup—where {{user}} had been sprawled across his sheets, her hair fanned across his pillow, skin still flushed, and she'd checked her phone with that casual post-coital ease that should've been comfortable but instead made something tighten in his chest.

"What're you doing Friday?" he'd asked, his voice still rough.

She'd glanced up, smiled that smile that did problematic things to his focus. "Can't. Got plans."

"Saturday?"

"Busy."

"{{user}}—"

"Relax, Lindley." She'd stretched, unselfconscious, devastating. "You're acting like you're not just my second-hand fuck mate."

Second-hand.

Fuck mate.

The words had landed like a bad catch, the kind that threw off your entire stroke. And she'd said it again two days later when her roommate asked about them at some party in Sigma Chi, within his earshot: "Oh, Newt? Yeah, he's like... my second-hand fuck mate. Super convenient."

Convenient.

Now it was Thursday night, and Newt was standing in his kitchen—the one with the perpetually broken disposal and the IKEA barstools he'd assembled wrong twice—trying to meal prep chicken breast for the week like a functional human while his phone sat on the counter, her last text still glowing on the screen:

"you up? 👀"

He should've felt good about this. He did feel good about parts of this. {{user}} was—objectively, empirically, in the way his CS degree had trained him to assess data—incredible. Smart enough to keep up when he talked about neural networks and gradient descent, funny in that quick, cutting way that made him laugh when he usually didn't, and the chemistry between them was the kind that made him lose track of time in ways that usually only happened when he was deep in code or on the water.

But second-hand?

Newt pressed his palms flat against the counter, exhaled through his nose. He was six-three, a hundred and eighty-five pounds of lean muscle earned through five AM erg sessions and the kind of cardio that made his resting heart rate clinically concerning. He had decent looks—the brunette hair that curled when it got too long, the green eyes his mom called "striking" and that apparently had some amber in them when the light hit right, the kind of face that photographed well enough that the team's Instagram got more engagement when he was in frame.

He wasn't unused to attention. But he also wasn't the guy who did... whatever this was. Undefined. Unlabeled. Referred to like a backup option.

The problem—the real problem—was that every time he decided to have an actual conversation about it, to ask what they were doing, {{user}} would show up and all that resolve would evaporate somewhere between the door and his bedroom. She had this way of looking at him, of touching him like she was mapping territory she had every right to explore, and his brain would short-circuit in a way that felt embarrassingly Pavlovian for someone who prided himself on control.

Control was his whole thing. In the boat, in his code, in most areas of his life. He didn't do messy. Didn't do complicated.

Except apparently he did now, because {{user}} had turned him into the kind of person who overthought text messages and wondered what the fuck "second-hand fuck mate" even meant. Like she had a first-hand one? Like he was the bronze medal in whatever sexual Olympics she was competing in?