Cora had not considered how difficult it would be to get ready for a date with a man who she had never even seen a picture of. A photo could tell you far more about a person than just appearances. It gave you a peek into how they presented themselves to the world, how they carried themself. And when it came to first dates, Cora liked to be a sort of chameleon, showing herself in whatever light that she thought would make the other person most comfortable. She never lied about who she was, but in a way, she supposed that this cherry-picking which side of herself she wanted to show off first was another form of acting.

Since she didn't have a picture of Lucas, she had to work off of Siena's description alone. She'd made him sound polite, perhaps a little shy, and maybe even a little bit old-fashioned. Cora didn't have the slightest clue about what plans he had for them this evening, but chances were that the nerdy boy wasn't intending on taking her to the club, so she decided that the safest route was to focus on making herself look pretty rather than hot. And that was perfectly fine by her—she didn't have the energy to feel very sexy after doing the matinee show this afternoon.

Her answer to her dilemma ended up being to wear her favorite jumpsuit. It sailed smoothly along that line between formal and casual and would be a lot more practical than most of her dresses in the off chance that they happened to do a lot of walking. She'd spent so much time deliberating, however, that he was already knocking at the front door by the time she was scrambling to put her earrings in.

Cora nearly tripped over her own feet in her haste to go answer the door—she didn't want to leave him waiting too long and immediately get off to a bad start—but took a deliberate breath to compose her demeanor before pulling the handle down.

The first thing she noticed about the boy at her threshold was that he was tall, much taller than herself, and thin as a stick. But he had sweet, pleasant features—big eyes and rosy cheeks patterned with freckles all framed by wavy brown hair. He wore khakis and a button-up, which was buttoned all the way up, and she held back an impulse to reach up and undo the top button or two. They definitely were not at that level yet.

"You must be Lucas."

"And you must be Cora," he smiled. "I, ah, got us dinner reservations at The Iris—is that okay?"

"That's great."

The Iris Bistro actually was an excellent restaurant, one that had a little bit of everything for reasonable prices, and was a good first date option for precisely that reason.

"Did you have any trouble getting here?" she asked politely while she locked up the door. Finding apartment units could sometimes be confusing as hell, but luckily her building was one of the easier ones to find your way around.

"Not at all."

She always found elevator rides with someone she didn't know very well to be awkward. Cora figured she ought to be quicker on her feet with conversation, but tonight she had butterflies swarming all about her stomach. It had been a while since she'd been on a first date and even longer since she went on one that she really cared about going well. A generic-sounding instrumental song was playing faintly as they stepped through the elevator doors and she stood a comfortable distance from him, not too close but not too far.

"So, Lucas," she began as they started slowly moving downwards. "What do you do-"

Cora didn't get to finish her question. The elevators opened with a loud ping and standing there was the absolute last person she wanted to see right now.

Shit.

Rasmus' eyes met hers for a second, but he was tight-lipped as he stepped onto the elevator and observed the scene in front of him—Cora with some random boy. A boy who definitely didn't know that the other two people in this elevator had been making out at work.

"What were you going to ask?" Lucas questioned, obviously thinking that the sound of the doors opening had been the only thing interrupting her and that the guy leaning against the opposite wall was a total stranger.

But Cora couldn't explain that he wasn't. If she wanted this date to go decently, she had to go along with Lucas like nothing was wrong.

"I, um, I was asking what you do," she said, a little quieter than she'd been speaking a moment before. "You know, for work."

"I'm a data engineer." Cora didn't know what on Earth a data engineer actually did, but she would have felt way too dumb asking even if Rasmus weren't standing right there. "Siena said you're an actress, right? What kind of stuff do you act in? Commercials?"

She told herself that the tiny noise she heard Rasmus make out of the back of his throat was just her imagination. After all, Lucas didn't seem to notice it.

"Theatre, actually," she explained as the elevator finally came to a halt and the doors slid open painfully slowly.

Rasmus was gone in the blink of an eye. Cora let out a silent sigh of relief, but nevertheless, the damage had already been done. She was going to be thinking about him all night now, and the whole point of this date had been to stop her from thinking about him.

"That guy must be in a hurry, huh?" Lucas laughed quietly.

She tried to smile. "Yeah, I imagine so."

Cora was miserably distracted and knew that it was making her a bad date, but the harder she tried to stop it, the worse it seemed to get.

She should have seen the possibility of running into Rasmus from a mile away, but it somehow hadn't crossed her mind. After all, they were usually very good at not running into each other considering that they lived in the same building, had the same place of work, and worked all the same hours.

On the bright side, their table at The Iris was ready for her and Lucas when they got there, so there was no awkward waiting around to be done. As they were seated, she told herself that she was going to turn this night around and have fun.

The most important thing was that Lucas was nice. She could get him up to speed on the theatre world, help him with his sense of style. Those were all surface-level issues that could be fixed. If there was anything she had learned from spending so much time around Rasmus, it was that someone's looks and charisma didn't matter if they had a rotten personality.

Or maybe they did, since she'd kissed him anyway.

Cora bit down on her tongue a little bit, invisibly chiding herself. She needed to stop beating herself up so much about kissing another boy recently—it wasn't like she and Lucas were even an item yet, much less exclusive. And even if they were, it wouldn't have mattered because she wasn't going to kiss Rasmus North again without the stipulation that she was literally getting paid to do so.

"Are you alright?" Lucas asked from across the table, folding his hands. "I hope this isn't horrendously rude of me, but you look a little stressed."

She forced herself to relax her shoulders and let a half-truth easily slip off her tongue. "Just a little stiff from work. I probably should have mentioned that I work Sundays."

"Ah, my bad. Was tonight a bad time?"

"No, no," she corrected herself. "This is great—Mondays are my day off, so I can be out as late as I want tonight."

His eyebrows lifted in curiosity. "That's an unconventional schedule."

"I work an unconventional job."

And there Rasmus was again, smirking at the forefront of her mind. Pucker up, Coraline.

She'd barely even noticed a waiter approach with a notebook in his hand. "Can I start you two off with drinks?" he offered. "A glass of wine, perhaps?"

Cora glanced back down at the alcohol menu. She was probably going to need more than one glass.

Fortunately for Cora, things moved in the right direction once she got some booze in her. She had a rule of not drinking too much when she was around strangers, but she allowed herself the grace of going a little further than she normally would since she'd been so on edge to begin with. The conversation flowed much more easily over dinner, her frustrated thoughts dissolving away into iridescent dust as she focused on Lucas, who was charming in his own right. That smile of his was enough to make a girl melt and though he seemed to have a little bit of difficulty being casual, there was something novel about his formality. It wouldn't have been endearing if it were an obvious result of him being uncomfortable around her, but he seemed entirely naive of the fact that he was being unnecessarily proper and didn't seem to take any issue with her own manners.

Maybe this is just how normal adults behave, she thought to herself as he untucked his napkin from his shirt. It was the sort of behavior that her uppity parents surely would have fawned over.

The evening was much milder by the time he had paid for their dinner and they were leaving the restaurant. The sun was low behind the horizon of skyscrapers, a light breeze dancing against her skin. Her whole body felt warm from the wine she'd drank, but her mind was pleasantly fuzzy and no more.

"Would you care to walk back?" he asked. "Or is that not really your thing?"

"It's my thing when the occasion is right," she assured him. "And luckily for you, I wore walking shoes."

They weren't all that far from her apartment. It would take them twenty or twenty-five minutes, but she smiled a little bit at the confirmation that Lucas wasn't in a rush to end their date. And she was having a good time, too, right?

They were holding hands now, their arms dangling clumsily between their bodies. His palms were significantly larger than hers and the silver watch that glistened on his wrist made his hand feel heavier than it was. The sensation of the metal rubbing against her own arm was slightly unpleasant, but surely that was just because of the unfamiliarity. Plenty of men wore watches.

She wasn't paying much mind to their surroundings as they strolled along, but not even ten minutes into their walk, Lucas came to a halt. It was only once he did that Cora realized they were passing a wall of posters for Broadway shows, one of which was Illicit Affairs.

All of their ads had been updated to include the phrase Tony Award-winning Best Play somewhere on them, so this particular poster was a new one she hadn't seen yet. The image that had been chosen was one of the shots from their photo call—of her and Rasmus leaning in towards each other, a hair's breadth away from kissing.

"...Isn't that the guy who was in the elevator with us earlier?" Lucas asked.

Her decision not to explain that had already come back to bite her. She'd described a small amount about their show over dinner had quite conveniently omitted virtually everything about Rasmus.

"...Um, yeah," she grimaced, pulling her eyes off of the poster. "He's my coworker."

"Why didn't you introduce me?"

"We're not exactly friends," she said, which wasn't a lie.

"Oh. I'm sorry."

She felt guilty for how easily he was convinced. "Don't be sorry—it's not like you have to be best friends with everyone you work with. In my field of work, it's actually easier most of the time if you don't get too attached."

Lucas' eyebrows furrowed. It wasn't a negative reaction, per se, but more so like he was still trying to wrap his head around what she did for a living. After a thoughtful "hmm," they finally continued down the sidewalk.

But Cora was back to her original state of being pissed off at Rasmus for somehow messing with everything good in her life. She thought about all those little moments onstage when they were close like that, the heaviness that lingered in the air when their lips were mere moments away from meeting and everyone in the room knew it. It was electrifying.

Could she ever feel that way about Lucas?

"Has that ever happened to you before?" he asked after a long minute of silence.

"Huh?" Her mind had ventured much too far.

"Have you ever gotten too attached to someone?" he questioned curiously.

Cora's heart lunged forward in her chest.

"Nope," she lied. "Not at all."

"I had a good time tonight," she told Lucas once they were nearly back to her apartment.

She didn't know what portion of that was truth and what was lie. She thought she was enjoying herself, so why didn't she feel more...happy? There was no magical spark, no giddiness that rose up in her throat when she looked at him. But maybe that just wasn't real life; maybe it was absurd to assume that their chemistry would be instantaneous. She just needed to be patient and give it time.

"I did, too." He looked over at her hopefully. "Can I see you again?"

A confused, panicky feeling shot through her chest out of nowhere, but Cora quickly nodded. "Yeah, I'd like that."

She wasn't going to give up before she'd really even tried. No matter how tempting it was sometimes, Cora Kline was not a quitter.

But right after she had the thought, one of the most uncomfortable things that could happen in that moment actually happened. It wasn't Rasmus again, thank God. But Lucas clumsily leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. It was gawky and the sensation was way too yucky to be enjoyable, but Cora smiled like she thought it was sweet.

"I'll text you soon?" she suggested, partially to give herself control of the situation and partially just so that she could hurry up and get out of there.

It wasn't that Lucas was terrible, but her thoughts and feelings felt like a giant, mushy mess right now and she needed to go sort them out.

If he doubted her motives, he didn't question them aloud. Once they walked into the lobby, he turned to her and said, "I guess this is goodnight, Cora."

"Goodnight, Lucas. Thanks again for everything."

But as soon as she was in the elevator and the doors had closed, she let out a long sigh. What a mess. That hadn't helped nearly as much as it was supposed to. In fact, she was possibly even more nervous about trying to meet new guys now than she'd been ever before.

She was starting to think that something was seriously wrong with her. Her standard for men should not have been an arrogant jackass who drove her insane. But she was in too deep and there were too many things she liked about him in spite of everything else.

He was stupidly, infuriatingly handsome. When he actually allowed himself to smile for you, it was the loveliest of smiles. The same could be said for his laugh—it was full, bright, and rare as a shooting star. Though their whole job was to play pretend, she didn't have to pretend around him. They couldn't really hide their true colors from each other no matter how hard they endlessly tried.

And he'd kissed her like he meant it, like he needed her. Regardless of his actual emotions towards her, it was a far cry from what she'd just received downstairs.

Oh, great, she thought wryly as she stepped out of the elevator and into the dim hallway, squinting. Now I'm imagining that he's waiting for me outside my door.

Wait–

Cora stilled. And blinked. She wasn't seeing things—he was actually outside her door. Her throat suddenly felt much too tight, her mouth dry. Slowly, she approached where he was leaning against the wall, but she didn't dare get too close.

"...Can I help you?" she asked.

He startled just a little bit when she walked up, even though she was the one who should have been scared out of her mind.

"Were you just on a date with that guy?" he asked carefully.

She didn't owe him an explanation—she didn't owe him anything. And yet, her lips still admitted, "Yeah, I was."

All was silent for what felt like a very long time. She could hear the faint hum of a fluorescent light down the hall, but here in the darkness, in the stillness, he looked like something out of a Caravaggio painting, a harsh angel. As if against her own will, her feet carried her a couple of tentative steps closer to him.

He closed his eyes for a prolonged moment, almost as if he were in pain. "I've been thinking about you too much, Cora," he said in a voice that wasn't entirely steady. "And trying not to is making it worse."

All of the air in her lungs trapped itself in her throat, unable to release from her lips or return from whence it came. His eyes were dark as they opened, looking only at her.

"Tell me you don't want me here," he murmured in a tone that sent a chill of pinpricks down the line of her spine. He wasn't begging—God, no. Rasmus would never beg. The way the words fell off his lips struck her as reverent, like the way she'd mumbled prayers as a child. "Tell me to leave."

But her veins were thrumming with an exhilaration she'd never felt in her life, so Cora could only softly shake her head and say,

"Stay."