The grease was not his fault.

This was a fact. Documented, observable, reproducible under identical conditions. The hydraulic line on the third-year team's rig had been incorrectly routed and he'd said so, out loud, to their team lead, who'd nodded and done nothing about it because apparently that was how some people operated, and then Adrian had leaned across the bench for his caliper and the fitting had let go and now he had hydraulic fluid soaking through his favorite henley in a spreading dark stain that smelled like petroleum and bad decisions.

He looked at it.

He looked at the third-year team lead.

"Told you."

Then he grabbed a shop rag and, through a series of moves he'd later classify as deeply stupid, made it significantly worse.

Okay so the options were:

Go home, change, come back. Forty minutes minimum. Check-in with Santos at 5:15. Math didn't work, wasn't doing it.

Wear the ruined henley to the check-in and just own it. Viable. He'd done worse. Santos had once held a meeting while Adrian had a burn mark on his forearm from a soldering incident and neither of them had acknowledged it. But the hydraulic smell was genuinely bad, like, clear the room bad, and Santos had mentioned last week that the department chair was sitting in on check-ins this week which, fine, whatever, but also—

He pulled the henley off at his workbench.

Third option. Figure it out.

He balled up the henley and threw it toward his bag and turned back to his bench and picked up his caliper and that was that. Problem assessed, solution implemented, moving on.

"You cannot," said a voice behind him, "just take your shirt off in a shared academic space."

His brain did the thing it always did when she spoke unexpectedly, which was to briefly stop processing other inputs. Like everything else got rerouted. He hated that. He'd been noticing it for six weeks and hating it for six weeks and had made zero progress on fixing it.

He didn't turn around.

"Hydraulic fluid," he said. "Line blew."

"There are other people in here—"

"Martinez worked shirtless for a week in August. Nobody filed a complaint."

"Martinez wasn't—" a pause, "—you have a check-in with Santos in forty minutes."

He turned around then. She was two benches away, bag over one shoulder, arms crossed, doing that thing where her face was professionally disapproving but something else was happening underneath it that she was very deliberately managing. He knew that face. He'd made a study of that face without meaning to and that was not information he was going to examine right now.

"How do you know I know about the check-in," she said.

"Because you're also going." He turned back to his bench. "And you'll be there twelve minutes early. Like you always are. It makes the rest of us look bad."

Silence.

Then: "I have a shirt."

He stopped.

"In my bag," she said, already moving, because she did everything with that efficiency that drove him insane, no wasted motion, just decided and executing. "I keep a spare. For the lab."

"You keep a—"

"Yes. I work in a lab, Adrian, things happen." She said his actual name so rarely that it always landed weird, like a key in the wrong lock. "Don't make it weird."

He turned back around. She was holding out a folded shirt. Neatly folded. Color not yet visible because it was folded, but the fold was immaculate, which tracked.

He took it.

He shook it out.

It was yellow.

Not like—yellow-yellow. Pastel. Butter yellow. The color of something you'd see in a flower shop or a Pinterest board or literally anywhere except Adrian Leighton's wardrobe, which operated on a strict palette of grey, navy, olive, and occasionally a dark burgundy when he was feeling experimental.

He held it up and looked at it.

He looked at her.

She looked back at him with an expression of complete composure that was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

"It's Uniqlo," she said. "AIRism. It'll fit."

"It's yellow."

"It's butter yellow and it's that or you walk into Santos's check-in smelling like a hydraulics manual."