The lab was empty.

Not unusual for a Thursday at 7pm—most of the teams had cleared out after the 5 o'clock check-in, gone to dinner, gone to complain about each other at Coupa, gone anywhere that wasn't here. Adrian had stayed because he always stayed, because the prototype wasn't going to measure itself, and because Marcus had bailed with some excuse about a problem set that Adrian was eighty percent sure was actually a Hinge date.

Which left him alone with a half-built assistive arm, a measuring tape, and a problem.

The problem was geometric. Obvious. The kind of thing a first-year would've planned around.

You cannot get accurate dimensional readings on a curved load-bearing joint when you only have two hands and one of them is holding the component steady. He needed a second set of hands to run the tape while he kept the joint at the correct flexion angle. Simple. Except his second set of hands had just texted sorry man she's actually really cute and left him here.

Adrian sat back on the workbench, spinning the measuring tape around his finger, and stared at the ceiling.

He could wait until tomorrow. Come in before class, grab Marcus, get it done in ten minutes.

He glanced at the prototype. Looked at his notebook. Looked at the joint configuration he'd been trying to nail for three days.

Yeah, he wasn't waiting until tomorrow.

He pulled up his contacts, scrolled through the robotics club group chat—Brad was at a game, David was useless with anything that had a physical form, Emily was in Tucson for a family thing. He was genuinely considering texting the TA when the lab door opened.

He smelled her before he saw her. Which was a thing that happened now, apparently. Some floral thing, warm, not overwhelming—the kind of scent that stuck in a room after she left it. He'd started noticing it about six weeks ago and had been low-key furious about it ever since.

{{user}} walked in with her head down, bag over one shoulder, color-coded binder tucked under her arm, those pink Mary Janes clicking on the concrete floor like she was announcing herself. She clearly thought the lab was empty. She got three steps in before she looked up and saw him.

She stopped.

He stopped spinning the measuring tape.

For a moment they just looked at each other with the specific energy of two people who had, in the last month, argued about circuit ethics, conducted psychological warfare via passive-aggressive lab notes, and physically wrestled on the Main Quad in front of approximately forty witnesses.

"Leighton." Flat. Unimpressed.

"Mary Jane." He watched her jaw do the thing. "Didn't know you were coming in tonight."

"I didn't know I needed to file a schedule with you."

"You don't. Just making conversation." He held up the measuring tape. "Actually, weird timing. I need help with something."

The look she gave him could have etched glass.

"Not like that," he said, and then immediately wished he hadn't said not like that because now they were both thinking about like that, whatever that even meant. He pushed off the workbench. "The joint prototype. I need someone to hold the tape while I keep the flexion angle. Takes two minutes."

She looked at the prototype. Looked at him. Did some kind of rapid internal calculation he could actually see happening behind her eyes.

"Two minutes," she said.

"Two minutes."

She set her bag down and came over.

This was fine. Completely fine. They'd worked within proximity before—same lab, same tables, same equipment sometimes. This was just closer. Like, specifically, she was going to have to stand in the space between him and the workbench and hold one end of a tape measure while he held the component, which meant—

Yeah, okay. It was going to be close.

"Hold this end here," he said, pointing to the anchor point on the outer rail. "Keep it flush, don't let it angle up."

She took the end of the tape from him. Her fingers brushed his. He did not react. He was a composed and functional adult.

"I know how to hold a measuring tape," she said.

"I know you know."