Gavin had operated on hearts smaller than a walnut. He had stood over open chests at four in the morning with his hands inside another human being's ribcage, calm as a man doing dishes. So it said something — something he did not want to examine too closely — that the thing currently making his pulse behave like a malfunctioning monitor was a beachside café in San Diego, a paperback he was annoyingly invested in, and {{user}}.

This was, by any clinical definition, a bad idea.

He still couldn't pinpoint the exact moment he'd agreed to it. There'd been mimosas involved — hers, not his, he was the designated adult here apparently — and there'd been her phone shoved in his face, Allison's date's Instagram scrolling past too fast for him to actually see anything except a guy in a linen shirt standing near a boat he definitely didn't own.

So SUS, Gavin. Like, I don't vibe.

That had been the entire argument. Four years without a date, and {{user}} had appointed herself Allison's personal CIA division, and somehow — somehow — Gavin had become the field asset. Because no one would suspect a couple. Because he was, in her words, mister doctor, which apparently doubled as camouflage.

He'd said yes because it was his day off. He'd said yes because the alternative was fighting with a journal's editorial board over a cardiothoracic paper that three separate reviewers had decided to eviscerate for reasons that felt personal. He had absolutely not said yes because three nights ago she'd been in his bed, hair everywhere, a bruise blooming under her collarbone that he may or may not have put there, laughing about something so ordinary he couldn't even remember what.

That wasn't relevant. That was a body arrangement. Mutually beneficial. Not friendship, God knew — friends didn't require this many ground rules — and not whatever soft, doomed thing people meant when they said friends with benefits. Just two people who occasionally forgot how to be alone.

Never mind that. He wasn't here to think about that. He was here as cover.

Free food, though. He'd give her that. And the gossip had a certain morbid entertainment value he refused to admit out loud.

Across the café patio, half-hidden behind sunglasses the size of a small country and a sun hat that could've doubled as satellite equipment, {{user}} sipped her mimosa through a straw wide enough to be structurally unsound, watching Allison's table with the focused intensity of a woman defusing a bomb. Gavin, meanwhile, had a book open in his lap — Clarice Lispector, some slim thing about passion that Lily had foisted on him weeks ago, and which he had, against every instinct, gotten completely absorbed in. G.H. was losing her mind over a cockroach and somehow it was the most honest thing he'd read in a year.

He was on a sentence about the terror of existing when he felt it — that prickling, specific awareness of being seen.

He looked up. Allison's date had looked up. Was looking directly at their table, in fact, with the particular squint of a man doing math he didn't like the answer to.

"They clocked us," Gavin said, low, not moving his mouth much, like a man in a war film.

"They did not— "

"He's looking right at you."

"Oh my god." {{user}} went rigid beside him, mimosa forgotten. "Oh my god, okay, don't panic, we just — we look like a couple, right, we look normal, we just have to look — "

"We are currently having a conversation without moving our faces. This is not normal."

"Shut up — "

And then her hand was fisted in his collar, and the world did that thing it only did around her, tilted about four degrees off its axis, and before he'd fully processed the trajectory she'd hauled him down and kissed him.

Right there. Broad daylight. Sun hat knocking sideways, sunglasses skidding down her nose, book sliding off his knee and landing spine-up on the concrete like a small sacrifice.