Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time Zoey Clarke ever used a computer was at the San Francisco Public Library. When the boxy Macintosh at the other end of the room caught her eye, she pointed at it and begged her dad to let her try it out. Her next hour was spent studying the pixels on the screen, poking at the keyboard, mousing around. She was five years old.

Thirteen years later, her Stanford acceptance letter arrived in the mail. Another five, and it was her first day at SPRQ Point.

Straightening her shirt collar in the mirror, Zoey took a deep, stabilizing breath. She adjusted her bright red blazer once, and then once more, shifting the stiff fabric over her body until it sat just right. It was the kind of shoulder-padded, color-coordinated, polyester dream of an outfit she had always imagined she would wear on this very day. She’d seen it in the window of a store her junior year of college and bought it on impulse—just a little extra motivation to keep her working toward her one major life goal.

In approximately one hour, Zoey would be pulling open the glass doors that divided her life before today and everything that came after. SPRQ Point was the wunderkind of the tech industry, and she was going to be working for Danny Michael freakin' Davis, who was one of her idols (only third to Ada Lovelace and Steve Jobs), a legend in tech, and a Stanford graduate five years before her. It was quite literally everything she had ever dreamed of.

With one final smooth of her shirt, Zoey let out an adrenaline-fueled breath. “Okay. I got this. I can do this.”

She descended the stairs with a spring in her step and made her way into the kitchen with a massive smile on her face. “Good morning, everyone.”

David twisted around in his seat, sizing Zoey up with a smirk. “Why are you dressed like a walking stop sign?”

Zoey looked down at her bright red pantsuit and shot her brother a reproachful look.

“David, come on, it’s her big day!” Maggie scolded, reprimanding her son with a smile before gesturing out at the steaming mug that sat in front of Zoey’s usual seat at the table. “How are you feeling, honey?”

The jitters continued to pulse through Zoey as she dropped into her seat and took the hot mug of coffee into her hands. “Excited. Nervous. Kinda feel like I’m going to explode.”

“So, business as usual?” David said.

“You’re gonna be great, Zo!” Mitch chimed in. Zoey looked up to see her father juggling three plates on his way to the table. He set a stack of three chocolate chip pancakes in front of her before handing off the other two to David and Maggie. “I made your favorite.”

Zoey smiled, leaning up to peck her dad on the cheek. “Thanks, Dad.”

Her dad affectionately mussed her hair and took his seat next to her mom, rubbing his hand over Maggie’s shoulder.

Zoey sliced off a piece of pancake with the side of her fork and exhaled, scanning her family’s faces. Chocolate chip pancakes always reminded her of her childhood, back when her dad would make a batch every Saturday morning and top it all off with sliced strawberries and whipped cream. He’d let Zoey stand on a stool once armed with a spatula to try flipping the pancakes, but after she had nearly started a fire, he decided he was better off doing the flipping. Zoey was happy to just watch.

After twenty minutes, Zoey was only able to finish about half of her pancakes, too excited to really eat anything. Her phone vibrated once on the table, and she picked it up and read the new notification.

“Okay, um…” Zoey huffed out a quick breath and shook her head, unable to keep from smiling as she stood up from her chair. “My Uber is here. I should get going.”

With her family’s words of encouragement calling after her, Zoey walked out of the house feeling ready, if not entirely sure what to expect. She had been building up this day in her mind for years, envisioning exactly how it would feel when she walked inside the SPRQ Point offices, scripting out the first conversations she would have with her new coworkers, thinking of all the projects she would work on. Her daydream film reel spun faster in her head as she watched the city blur by outside the car window. Soon, those picture-perfect visions of SPRQ Point would be real.

Before Zoey knew it, she was sliding out of the Uber, practically shaking in her steps as she walked inside SPRQ Point for the first time. Well, not the very first time—she had been inside once before during a later round of interviews—but the first time it actually meant anything. The high-ceilinged lobby was teeming with activity. People everywhere. Dozens of employees bustled around (some with a confidence only earned after years of experience, others huddled nervously in small groups), their chatter bouncing off the brightly-colored glass fixtures. The part of Zoey that was overwhelmed with excitement just wanted to stand still and take everything in all at once.

But her fangirling would have to wait. She was here to work.

Zoey lost herself in the crowd, hovering at the edge of conversations as her peers listed off the main bullet points of their résumés. Everyone sounded like they were in the same league of nerdy as she was, tossing around names like NASA, Google, and IBM like it was no big deal. Scanning the tall backs, rumpled hoodies, and laid-back postures of her fellow SPRQ Point employees, Zoey felt very small.

As much as she tried to deny it, there was also a part of her that wasn’t sure she could do this.

After an introductory speech by some SPRQ Point higher-ups, Zoey shuffled along with the crowd as they all were ushered onto the elevators in small groups. When the elevator doors opened on the fourth floor, she was the only one who got off. A swell of anticipation filled her chest as she surveyed the scene before her, all of it starting to feel more and more real: SPRQ Point. Her dream job. It was all happening.

“New blood!” A loud voice sidled up beside Zoey in the shape of an excited-looking man in an oversized green hoodie. “‘Sup. I’m Tobin. I’ve got the privilege of showing you newbies around.”

“Wait, Tobin as in Tobin Batra?” Zoey asked, her eyes going wide as saucers. “As in hacking legend Tobin Batra?”

Zoey also noticed that Tobin had said “newbies,” plural, despite the fact that she was the only one there, but that seemed far less important than Tobin freaking Batra standing in front of her.

“Dude! I like you already!” Tobin stuck his hand out, and Zoey shook it with enthusiasm.

She was working at SPRQ Point, and Tobin Batra was one of her coworkers? Absolutely nothing could ruin this day.

“Sorry I’m late!” A familiar voice called from somewhere behind Zoey and Tobin.

Zoey's spine tingled. That voice.

When she whipped her head around and saw who was running up to her and Tobin, half out of breath, her jaw fell open. Because it wasn’t just anybody rushing over to them.

It was Max Richman.

Zoey’s ex-boyfriend, Max Richman.

“Zoey,” Max said her name like he was surprised by it, his eyes widening as they passed over her face.

Zoey’s cheeks colored at the sound of Max’s voice, which, combined with his presence, was flooding her mind with days she had worked her hardest to forget. He looked a few years older and maybe a tiny bit more mature, but it was him all the same. Dark-haired, clean-shaven, nearly a head taller than her. Max.

“Max!” Zoey blurted out, taking a half-step back. After throwing an apology over her shoulder at Tobin, whom she had collided with, she wheeled back on Max, grasping for words like loose straws.

They stared at each other for a few seconds in complete shock. Zoey had no idea what to say.

“Do you two know each other or something?” Tobin asked, pointing a finger at both Zoey and Max. “‘Cause I’m kinda feeling some tension, if you know what I mean.”

Zoey and Max exchanged open-mouthed glances, something like an understanding zapping between them in that blink of a moment.

“No…” Max drew out the word slowly, while, simultaneously, Zoey chirped out “Nope!” and shook her head. “Not at all. Complete strangers. Just met this morning, in the lobby! Uh, hi again.” Zoey stuck her hand out to properly greet her brand-new coworker, forcing her lips into a smile. “I’m Zoey, which you already knew.”

Max took her hand and shook it. Zoey realized it might have been a mistake on her part when the brush of his fingertips against her palm sent an all-too-familiar shiver through her. “Max,” he recited, holding eye contact with her.

Their hands stayed clasped together for one very long moment.

“Do you guys need a sec?” Tobin grinned.

Zoey laughed nervously, pulling her hand out of Max’s grasp and rubbing her arm. “No, that’s—”

“We’re good,” Max said, nodding at Tobin.

Tobin looked between Zoey and Max, his grin nowhere near subsiding. “Dope. Okay, lemme show you two around.”

Zoey walked as far away from Max as she could while Tobin brought them around the fourth floor, ducking his head into offices to make rushed introductions—they got dagger eyes from Joan Bennett, the Executive Director of SPRQ Point’s fourth floor and their boss, who Zoey decided was a new addition to her list of tech idols—and showing them everything from a game area stocked with arcade machines to the sound-sealed, pitch-black isolation pods. Tobin pointed at coders as they wove through the mass of desks scattered across the open bullpen area.

“That’s Jarrett, and Billy, and—dude!” Tobin stopped in front of a tall man with a Gumby-esque physique and clapped him on the shoulder. The man startled at the contact, jumping a bit as he turned to face Tobin. “This is my boy Leif!”

The man introduced to them as Leif cleared his throat and stuck out his hand between Zoey and Max. “Leif Donnelly.” Zoey shook his hand immediately. It took Max a split second longer to react—from the looks of it, he was amusedly fixated on Leif’s hair, which was tied up in a tight bun at the back of his head.

“Leif’s my bro. We met when we both won the National Spelling Bee the same year. Fifth grade. Exhausted all the words on the list,” Tobin said proudly, nudging Leif with his elbow. “Tell them, Leif.”

“Oh, it was supereminent!” Leif replied enthusiastically.

Zoey wasn’t sure whether she wanted to hate him or be his friend.

“Anyway, that’s basically it,” Tobin said, leading Zoey and Max away from Leif to a pair of empty desks at the edge of the bullpen. He held his arms out wide, motioning grandly at the desks. “This is where you’ll work. Food bar’s over there. Rotates twice a week. Right now, it’s cereal. And then the meditation room and bathrooms are down that way. But you pretty much know the ropes now!” 

Zoey stepped up behind her desk and sat down in the green rolling chair. She gave it a spin—it was surprisingly comfortable, which was a good sign, considering she’d likely be sitting there for hours on end coding every day (not that she minded that in the least). When she spun the chair forward, her eyes landed on Max at his desk a mere ten feet away. He was basically in her direct line of sight, inspecting the computer at his desk with the exuberance of a kid in a candy store. Classic Max Richman.

Max Richman. Zoey was still stuck on his name, one which always sounded stubborn and convincing in her mind. Stuck on the idea of him. The idea of him here, at SPRQ Point. The bright shock in his eyes when he saw her, the shock that shot up her spine when she saw him.  

Of all the things she had been mentally jotting down as possibilities on her first day, not one could have prepared her for seeing him.

Eager to think about anything but Max, Zoey lugged herself out of her seat and walked briskly over to the food bar Tobin had pointed out earlier, which looked like it had cleaned out an entire grocery store cereal aisle. She lifted a carton of whole milk and poured it into a ceramic bowl.

Max was her coworker? Was this the universe’s idea of a sick joke?

Zoey picked up a large spoon and started piling cereal into her bowl, not paying much attention to which cereals she was adding.

There had to be some way for her to get out of this situation. Maybe she should take that offer from Google instead. Maybe she should ask to transfer floors. Maybe—

“Hey.”

Startled, Zoey dropped the spoon she had been using to shovel cereal into her mouth while her thoughts ran wild. It hit the side of the bowl with a clank and splashed some milk over the side.

Max was standing right in front of her, looking all dopey with his hands in his pockets and his mouth bent in a lopsided smile.

“Hi!” Zoey cleared her throat, her face burning. 

“I didn’t really say hi earlier.” Max chuckled weakly, casting his gaze at the ground. “So, uh… hi.”

“Hi to you, too.” Zoey smiled, looking down at her cereal and sucking in her lips to tamp down the embarrassment of having greeted Max twice in the span of ten seconds. “This is—I mean, wow, I haven’t seen you in—uh, how have you been?”

“I’ve been good!” Max nodded repeatedly. “Yeah, uh, after I graduated, I went back to New York for a little bit, but…” He tilted his head to the side and shrugged, the underlying meaning of which Zoey was all too familiar. “That didn’t last long. So, I’m back.”

For several seconds, Zoey just stared at Max, etching the lines of his face back into memory. It felt very much like she should say something beyond the obvious—at least ask him how he was, or, more importantly, what he was doing there—but her mouth could not manage to produce anything besides one jarring syllable.

“Wow!” Zoey nodded several times, clearing her throat. “I mean, uh, what are the odds?”

“Well, honestly, you’re probably more surprised to see me here than I am to see you.” Max grinned, gesturing out at Zoey like she was some kind of a celebrity. “I mean, SPRQ Point? Makes perfect sense. If anyone was gonna make it here, it was gonna be you.”

Zoey flushed deeply in her cheeks, trying very hard to not remember the first time she had ever told Max her dreams of working at SPRQ Point one day. “You remembered?”

Max smiled. “How could I forget?”

She wished she didn't want to smile back. She shouldn’t smile just because seeing Max made her want to smile. Or because the fact that he remembered her dream after all those years made her want to smile. Those were the absolute worst reasons for her to smile, even though she could feel her stupid lips curving up as if they had a mind of their own. It took more than a modicum of her strength to keep herself rooted in reality, one which was so extremely incompatible with all of this.

She snuck a look back at the bullpen and then returned her attention to Max. “Listen, Max, they all can’t know we know each other.”

Max furrowed his eyebrows. “How come?”

“Did you hear Tobin earlier? Imagine how he'd act if he knew we dated!” Zoey blew out a breath. “Look, I don’t know about you, but this job is really important to me.”

“It’s important to me, too,” Max said.

“Okay, so, we’re in agreement.” Zoey crossed her arms, tucking her chin to her chest. “I think it’s best if we just stay away from each other.”

Max pressed his lips together—halfway to a frown, but looking like he was trying to hide it. “Okay. Fine.”

“Great.” Zoey nodded. They stared at each other silently until they both broke away from the Cereal Bar, weaving through the bullpen in diverging paths until they reached their desks.

Avoiding Max was what made the most sense. And, anyway, it wasn’t like it would be that hard. They hadn’t seen each other in three years. Whatever had once existed between them was nothing but a distant memory.

For the second time that morning, Zoey settled into her new desk, drumming her fingertips on its surface. Just ten feet away, facing her, was Max at his desk. Too close for comfort. She wasn’t sure how she could possibly make it through the day without thinking about him.

And so, she put her head down and got to work.

Chapter Text

As her foot restlessly tapped the floor, Zoey flicked her phone screen to life to check the time yet again. There were four people in front of her in line, all equally impatient as the woman at the front continued rattling off a laundry list of coffee drinks. Was she trying to caffeinate an entire army?

Zoey felt a tap on her shoulder. She slowly turned her head, only to be faced with the sight of Max Richman.

“Ah!” Zoey yelped, jumping a little when she saw the goofy grin on Max’s face. “What are you doing here?”

“Getting coffee?” Max said, giving Zoey a funny look. “What are you doing, trying to apply for a loan?”

Zoey rolled her eyes, half-suppressing a chuckle. Damn it. He was still funny. She cleared her throat, straightening her shoulders.

“No, I meant that as, like, a rhetorical question. I thought we were going to, you know…" Zoey pushed the air in front of her. "Keep our distance.”

“Yeah, and I’m fine with that. Totally.” Max nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. He gestured in the direction of the counter, where the woman in front had finally gotten her order, balancing a full cardboard cup holder in each hand on her way to the door. “But I also need my morning coffee, and this is the closest place to work.”

Zoey opened her mouth to kindly ask Max to just walk half a mile to the next-nearest coffee shop, but she decided that might be unreasonable. She huffed out a sigh.

“Okay. Fine. But just because we happen to get coffee at the same place doesn't mean we're going to walk to work together or anything. Actually, maybe we should stagger our arrivals. You know, so people don’t get the wrong idea.”

“What, like that we might be friends?” Max furrowed his eyebrows. “Honestly, Zo, I don’t see the big deal.”

Zoey flinched at how easily the nickname had fallen from his lips. Just like that, it was three years ago, and they were huddled in a corner of the library, talking low so nobody else would hear. The memory burned inside her chest.

“We’re not friends. Not really,” Zoey muttered.

Max’s mouth twitched at the comment, bringing Zoey an immediate stab of guilt.

“Okay, yeah, but we also haven’t seen each other in like three years. You don’t think we could be friends again?”

Could they? Zoey wasn’t sure she and Max had ever really been friends in the first place. At least, just friends and nothing more. With them, there had always been more. ‘Friends’ could never begin to cover it.

“That’s besides the point! I just…”

Zoey blew out a frustrated stream of air. Max just didn't get it. If he thought they could be friends, maybe he had never really known her at all.

"Next."

Zoey whirled around, concluding from the mildly annoyed look on the barista's face that she'd been at the front of the line for a while. Offering the barista a strained smile, she stepped up to the counter and ordered her usual nonfat latte. After paying, she stepped off to the side with her arms pulled tightly to her chest, waiting for her drink to be called.

Max ordered after her. Zoey eyed him from her spot, darting her eyes to the ground when he stepped away from the counter. Her ears burned as she heard him walk in her direction.

"Nonfat latte?"

Zoey bolted to the counter and grabbed her coffee. She flattened her lips and looked at Max, giving him a stiff nod. 

“I gotta get to work. See you there, coworker.”

And before Max could say anything else, Zoey booked it out of the Golden Gate Grind, her feet pounding the pavement.

The rest of Zoey's first day at SPRQ Point had been fairly uneventful. After speeding through her assigned code in just a couple of hours the day before, she'd had the rest of the day to observe her new coworkers. Tobin seemed like he was practically bouncing off the walls all day, alternating long periods of hyperfocus on his work with even longer stretches of goofing off with the other coders. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Leif seemed like he knew exactly what he was doing with every keystroke and click of his mouse. A few times, Zoey saw other coders walk up to him and ask questions like he was their go-to authority on programming. He was going to be someone to watch out for, no question.

And then there was Max. As much as she tried not to, Zoey couldn’t help but watch him, too. He had this look about him when he was concentrating (a look that hadn’t changed since college, apparently)—his mouth gaping slightly, eyebrows furrowed in concentration, all laser-focused on his screen without a single blink. It made Zoey crack a smile.

Okay, so, maybe she had gotten caught up in a memory for a second, and maybe her heart still remembered why Max used to make it race. But that was just a momentary lapse, only what could be expected of a surprise reunion with an ex. Today was a new day with new work, and she was not going to get distracted.

The walk to SPRQ Point from the coffee shop was quick, maybe five minutes at most. Zoey stepped onto the elevator and pressed her back to the wall, collapsing her shoulders with a heavy exhale. She had to focus. No distractions.

Just before the elevator doors closed, a hand shot between them.

Zoey's boss, Joan, stepped onto the elevator, dressed in a stern-looking black pantsuit that probably cost five thousand dollars. Her eyes were pointed down at her phone as she furiously typed away, muttering something under her breath. When she glanced up, her face took on an expression like she was trying to remember who Zoey was.

Zoey gulped. “Oh, uh, hi, Joan.”

“Hi.”

Joan gave her a curt nod and stepped to the back of the elevator. It occurred to Zoey then that there was a very good chance Joan had no idea who she was or that she even she worked on the fourth floor because she was Joan freaking Bennett, for crying out loud, and she probably didn’t need to know the name of every single person that worked with her.

Joan tucked her phone away and pointed at Zoey. “You just joined the fourth-floor team, didn’t you?”

Surprised, Zoey nodded vigorously. “Yep. Sure did. Uh, I’m Zoey, by the way. Zoey Clarke. If you didn’t know that.”

“I didn’t,” Joan said.

Ouch.

“But I do now.”

Joan stepped off the elevator, turning back to Zoey just as the embarrassment started to seep into her cheeks. “Hey, a certain number of years back, I was in your shoes, working with a bunch of knuckleheads at Google. Don’t let them get to you, okay?”

Zoey beamed and gave Joan a thumbs-up. “Okay. Gotcha.”

Giving Zoey something that almost approached a smile, Joan turned and headed toward her office.

Zoey was so starstruck, she almost forgot to get off the elevator. Joan Bennett. After that interaction, she could forget about coffee. The pure thrill of getting advice from her boss was going to single-handedly propel Zoey through the day.

She stepped off the elevator in a daze, running the twenty words she had exchanged with Joan Bennett over in her mind. Her morning was starting off on a high note.

Well, except for seeing Max at the coffee shop. That was less than ideal.

Zoey scoffed to herself, rolling her eyes at Max’s still-empty desk as she sat in front of her own. It was just her luck that of the probably tens of thousands of tech nerds in the Bay Area, she and Max were the only two new coders on SPRQ Point's fourth floor. He'd never mentioned wanting to work at SPRQ Point back when they were in college. How had he ended up here?

Somewhere in the distance, the faint ding of the elevator sounded. There was Max, walking off the elevator with a Golden Gate Grind coffee cup, just a few minutes after Zoey had walked in. He'd staggered his arrival.

At least he knew how to follow directions.

Max walked straight to his desk, not sparing half a glance in Zoey’s direction. He sat down with his coffee and took a long sip. Zoey wondered if he still took it black. He used to say it allowed for 'a fuller appreciation of the coffee flavor,'  but really, Zoey knew it was because milk made his stomach hurt.

No. She was not going to think about how Max took his coffee or about Max, period. She was here for one thing and one thing only: to work.

And so, she worked.

Eight hours later, Zoey's hands had cramped up from all the typing, and her eyes were bloodshot, but she'd blown through her work. For the second day in a row, she'd finished early and gotten a head start on future assignments. Joan had even given her a vague hum of approval as she passed by Zoey's desk. Zoey was still flushed with pride.

“Hey, Max. We were gonna head over to Temescal to grab a beer. You in?” Tobin rolled his seat over to Max, who was shutting down his computer.

Zoey watched them over the top of her screen, narrowing her eyes in concentration at the back of Max’s head.

“Uh, yeah. Sure,” Max said, giving Tobin a nod.

“Sweet.”

Tobin scooted his chair over to Zoey’s desk next, his sure grin a bit less enthusiastic. “Zoey? Brewery? You coming?”

Pointedly, Zoey glanced back at Max. He had finished shutting down his computer and was currently packing his backpack, his chin pointed downward. Zoey had seen how close all the Brogrammers were, and she ached for that camaraderie. But at the end of the day, she was a woman. If her coworkers found out about her and Max, however much in the past they were, they were never going to take her seriously. To get respect at work, she had to keep her head down and earn it.

Zoey shook her head, but her heart plummeted. “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

As Tobin wheeled back to his desk, Zoey piled her belongings into her purse. She snuck a look back over her shoulder at Max, sliding his jacket on. He locked eyes with her, and for a brief moment, it was like he could sense that she was upset. His eyebrows drew together slightly, but he turned away and slung his backpack over his shoulder.

Zoey watched as Max and the rest of their coworkers piled into the elevator, laughing and talking amongst themselves. It was okay. She didn't even really like beer.

The elevator doors closed. Left in the empty bullpen by herself, all her hard-earned pride having worn off, Zoey shut her eyes and sighed.

Chapter Text

Weeks started to pass like minutes. Zoey walked onto the fourth floor every day with her latte and sat at her desk, and before long, Max would follow. They didn’t talk at the Golden Gate Grind, and they didn't talk at work. In fact, Zoey noticed that Max had started spending all his time talking with Tobin and Gabe and Kevin. She would return from the bathroom and see them all crowded around Tobin's desk, watching something on his screen, laughing and giving each other high-fives. Meanwhile, she ate lunch alone.

Zoey unwrapped the peanut butter and jelly sandwich her dad had packed for her and leaned back, resting her head on the step behind her. The lobby bleachers were her go-to lunch spot, the perfect place for her to avoid Max and all of his new best friends.

“Room for one more?”

Still chewing a bite of sandwich, Zoey looked up. Leif was standing an awkward distance away holding an unopened bag of kale chips. He didn’t really seem like he was up to anything, but Zoey knew better.

She swallowed her bite and scowled. “What do you want, Leif?”

Leif's mouth gaped open. “You’re eating lunch right now, so I thought—I mean, I also was going to eat my lunch right now, so—”

“Oh.” Zoey perked up, surprised. One of her coworkers (excluding Max, obviously) was not only acknowledging her, but apparently being nice to her. She wasn’t exactly sure how to act. She gestured at the spot next to her on the steps, and Leif sat down.

He opened his bag of kale chips and started munching on them in silence, staring off into the distance. Zoey narrowed her eyes at the side of his face.

“What’s up, Leif?”

Leif set down his chips with a sigh and turned to her. “Tobin skipped TV night last night.”

Zoey furrowed her eyebrows, unsure whether that was supposed to mean something to her. “Okay?”

“He hasn’t missed one of our TV nights in over two years, Zoey. This is a big deal!”

Leif was more vulnerable at the moment than Zoey had ever seen him. This TV night thing was a big deal to him, obviously. She just had zero idea why he was talking to her about it.

Zoey tentatively reached her hand out and patted Leif on the shoulder, screwing her face into an expression of sympathy. “Uh, that must be… tough.”

“It’s because he was hanging out with Max.” Leif tilted his chin down, his face hardened. “Ever since we all went out for beers that one time, they’ve been bros. I think they were watching sports last night.”

It was all Zoey could do not to roll her eyes. Max was making friends. That was great. There was nothing wrong with that.

She settled for a small huff. “Leif, I don’t know why you think I care what Max is doing with Tobin, but—”

Leif frowned darkly. “Tobin’s my best friend, Zoey! I just want things to go back to the way they were.”

Underneath her steady composure, Zoey was gritting her teeth. Whatever Leif’s problem with Tobin was, it had nothing to do with her. He should stop digging himself into the past and accept that once things changed, they could never go back to the way they were. It was stupid of him to try.

But Leif’s eyes were wide and pleading. “Look, can you please just distract Max for a week or so? There’s a National Geographic Birds of Paradise special next Monday that Tobin said he’d watch with me, and I can’t deal with him canceling again.”

Zoey’s pulse started racing. “Me? Why does it have to be me?”

Leif chuckled weakly. “Believe me, I tried asking other people. You were actually my fifth choice. But everyone’s super behind on their work, or they have to go to their cousin’s wedding in Florida or whatever. And, anyway, you and Max are still technically the newbies. That’s one thing you have in common, right?”

In truth, Zoey and Max had many more things in common, something she knew all too well. But after spending two weeks hell-bent on avoiding him, she wasn’t about to give in.

“Um, I don’t know, Leif. I don’t really like to mix my work life and personal life.”

“Okay.” Leif’s face turned sullen, his shoulders drooping forward. Zoey almost couldn’t believe how easily he had given up. “It’s fine, I’ll just ask Glenn or something.”

Leif stood up, practically on the edge of tears. It was truly pathetic, but the guy really seemed to love his best friend. And he was trying.

“Wait, Leif—” Zoey sighed. Leif turned around, looking so hopeful she had to forcibly swat away the last-second doubt that had entered her mind. “I’ll do it.”

Leif smiled and pumped his fist. It was unquestionably the happiest Zoey had ever seen him. “Great. Thank you.”

He took a step away, but turned around and offered out his bag of chips. “Oh, uh, want one?”

Zoey pressed her lips together. “I’m good.”

With one final nod, Leif strode off, and Zoey collapsed back in her seat.

Well, that was a mess.

Somehow, Leif had convinced her to “distract” Max for an entire week all so he could fix a minor problem in his friendship, and like the genius she was, Zoey had agreed. She wasn’t entirely sure what “distracting” involved, but it probably meant actually speaking to and spending time with Max, both of which she hadn’t really done since they had both started at SPRQ Point. At this point, would Max even want to hang out with her?

She was about to find out.

For the rest of the day, Zoey spent a good chunk of time staring at Max. She bored her eyes into his focus-wrinkled forehead as he worked, trying to see through to his brain. What was going on in there?

When they were in college and Zoey had wanted to distract Max, she’d had a few strategies. Most of them involved Max on his back and Zoey straddling his lap, but that was decidedly not an option now. And neither was kissing. That had also been a good way to distract him.

Zoey sharply turned her head away from Max and blinked several times. Now she was getting distracted. Her mind needed a Max detox before it started finding other things to remember.

Figuring out how to distract him would have to be tomorrow’s problem.

Tomorrow’s problem turned out to be something else entirely.

On her way to the Golden Gate Grind, Zoey’s Mini Cooper—a used blue model she’d found on Craigslist and purchased at a very modest discount—started to sound funny. The car sputtered as she pulled to a stop at a red light, then again when she pressed her foot to the acceleration. As the scary sounds persisted, Zoey started to panic and, not knowing what else to do, did what her dad taught her.

She pulled over just as her car came to a shaky, creaking stop.

Zoey groaned, slamming her forehead against the steering wheel. “Great.”

After calling the towing company, who charged her $100 to tow her car and told her she’d have to pick it up tomorrow, Zoey walked the remaining five blocks to the Golden Gate Grind. By the time she got there, it was so late that Max was nowhere to be found—the one silver lining in her situation, if there had to be one. She bought her coffee and trudged over to work.

On top of Leif’s stupid assignment to keep Max busy, Zoey was moving through her morning thoroughly annoyed. She even snapped at Tobin when he asked to borrow a pen. Max looked up from his desk for half a second when it happened, so she was obviously doing a fantastic job at being a distraction, just keeping him occupied all day.

At five, Zoey was more than ready to go home and take out all the ice cream in the freezer. As her coworkers gathered their things and pushed in their chairs, she reached for the spot on her desk where she usually kept her car keys, and—

“Shit!” Zoey yelled, slamming her palm against her desk.

“You good, dude?” Tobin asked, leaning away from Zoey like he was afraid she might swing.

“Ugh!” Zoey let out an exasperated huff, digging the heel of her palm into her forehead. “No, it’s just… my car broke down on the way to work, and now I have to figure out a way to get home.”

Zoey’s coworkers exchanged awkward glances and went back to what they were doing before, putting on coats and packing up backpacks. As Zoey could have predicted, none of them cared that she was basically stranded. Except for Max. After a brief hesitation, Max walked over to her desk.

“I can give you a ride.” He dropped his voice so only the two of them could hear, raising an eyebrow. “Unless… that doesn’t fit into your definition of ‘staying away from each other.’”

Across the room, Zoey saw Leif wink and give her a thumbs-up. Zoey subtly shook her head at him and tried to communicate that this was not part of her nonexistent plan, but Leif seemed satisfied, already walking over to Tobin with a huge smile on his face.

Zoey cleared her throat, returning her attention to Max. “No, I would appreciate that. Thank you.”

Max nodded. “Sure.”

He returned to his desk to grab his jacket, gesturing with his head toward the elevator. Zoey felt a massive gulp roll its way down her throat as she white-knuckled her purse, taking slow, stalling steps Max’s way.

It was the first time they had spent alone in weeks, discounting their brief morning coffee shop overlaps. Zoey noticed how Max shortened his strides so she could keep up, something that he’d always used to do. She guessed old habits died hard.

"What's the address?" Max asked as they walked into the company parking garage.

Zoey twisted her bottom lip between her teeth. "Oh, uh, I actually still live with my parents. I don't know if you remember where they live…"

"No, I remember," Max said quietly.

Zoey saw the remembering in his eyes. She looked away from him before she could see too much of it.

Max’s car was well-kept, the same tidy old Audi he’d been driving since college. Zoey had always liked the car, which still smelled of leather and Max’s cologne. They’d gone to the drive-in together in that car, with the windows rolled down to let in the fall breeze, Zoey’s head on Max’s shoulder. They’d made out in the backseat more than a few times, all cramped into each other and trading quiet laughs. Zoey inhaled a sharp breath as she sat in the passenger seat, the same seat where she had once leaned over, undid Max's belt buckle, and—

“I was wondering why you weren’t at the Golden Gate Grind this morning,” Max said as he backed out of his parking spot, almost absentmindedly.

It brought Zoey back to the present, her heart squeezing into itself. “You were?”

Max glanced a grin her way. “I mean, you’re always there, and today, you weren’t. You kind of have a routine, Zoey.”

Zoey laughed nervously. “Yeah, well, my car decided to give up on life before I could get there this morning, so I showed up super late.”

Max let out a soft chuckle. But that was all. Zoey felt herself waiting for more.

The silence hung like a ball waiting to drop.

Max darted his eyes sideways at her. “So, this must be a big deal for you, huh? Getting a ride from me? You know, considering we’re not friends or anything.”

There was some extra meaning in what he was saying, but Zoey couldn’t quite decipher it. She let out a sigh, fingering the cuff of her blouse. “I’m sorry. I didn't want—I don’t want us to be strangers.”

“Really? ‘Cause it kinda seems like that’s exactly what you want.”

Max said it with his eyes on the road, as if he’d barely had to think about it. Zoey felt the words ice through her chest. So he was mad at her. All that buddy-buddy with the other coders, the radio silence—he was mad that she’d pushed him away. And he still didn’t understand why.

Zoey was exasperated. “You don’t get it. This job is really important to me, Max!”

“I know that.” Max drew his eyebrows together, turning to look at Zoey fully as he stopped at a red light. “You know that I know that.”

Zoey stared out her window, defiantly steering her chin away from Max. Why was he so determined to be her friend again after everything that had happened between them?

“It’s this next left,” Zoey muttered, staring at her hands. Max had already flipped down his turn signal.

Like he had many times before, Max pulled up to her parents’ house, the car slowing to a stop right next to the curb. Zoey flung her door open and got out of the car, wrenching herself free of her seatbelt.

She turned around and looked at Max. He wouldn't look at her.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah. Of course,” Max said, nodding like he was speaking more to himself.

Zoey stood where she was for another few seconds, swallowing down the hot tears she felt pushing at her eyes. "Um… okay. Bye."

She closed the passenger-side door and watched as Max pulled away from the curb, driving down the street and disappearing around the corner.

There one minute, gone the next. Just like back then.

Like she'd wanted to for two weeks, Zoey sat on the front step, held her head in her hands, and cried.

Chapter Text

Four Years Ago

Clutching tightly to her backpack straps, Zoey followed the teeming tide of students inside Gates, the building where she’d spent the majority of her freshman and sophomore years at Stanford. Early morning classes had just let out, and it was time for Zoey’s first lecture of the day: Machine Learning.

According to the very reputable RateMyProfessors.com, Dr. Nelson was tough. Anecdotes posted on the website recounted students breaking down in tears during exams, mountains of homework, someone new dropping the class every other session. It was a graduation requirement, the hardest computer science course Stanford had to offer, and Zoey could hardly wait.

Zoey walked into the lecture hall, a rotunda with rows of blue seats, and started heading for her favorite spot. She’d had a few other classes in that same room and had discovered exactly where she liked to sit: the middle row, in the middle seat, in the very middle of the classroom. It was also where she preferred to sit in a movie theater—right at the heart of the action.

When Zoey started walking down the center row, she saw someone else sitting there. Messy, overgrown brown curls topped his head, and he wore a Stanford T-shirt under a dark grey zip-up hoodie. She recognized him vaguely as another computer science student, someone she’d definitely had classes with before, but couldn't remember his name. Matt Richardson?  It was something like that.

“Hi,” Zoey said as she took the seat two away from his, leaving an empty space between them.

He looked up from his lap, where his hands had been shifting around a Rubik's Cube in small, quick motions. A glimmer of recognition passed over his face. “Hey. Did you take Advanced Data Structures last fall?”

“Yup, sure did.” Zoey nodded, sliding her backpack off, the heavy weight of it dropping hard to the floor. He eyed the bulging bag briefly, like he was wondering what someone as short as Zoey was doing carrying that much around.

“Yeah, I think we were in the same class." His lips tugged into a smile. “I’m Max, by the way.”

Zoey lifted her hand in a small wave. “Zoey.”

Max pointed at her with a growing grin. “I remember you. You were the one who always answered Blumenthal’s questions every single class.”

Zoey shrugged, her cheeks blooming with heat. She unpacked her backpack and started arranging her desk just the way she liked it. “That’s me. I’m kind of—actually, 'kind of' might be an understatement—an overachiever.”

Max eyed the complex setup of notebooks, pencils, and pens spread in front of Zoey's SPRQ Screen New Age laptop, her prized possession. All he had on his desk was a laptop opened to Visual Studio Code. His eyebrows rose on his forehead. “I can see that.”

The lecture hall buzz started to intensify, the last of the stragglers and out-of-breath students who'd run across campus to make it to Gates taking their seats. The noise pulled Zoey's attention around the room, her eyes jumping from person to person and to the front, where the professor still hadn't shown up. She looked back at Max.

"Uh, are you… a comp sci major?" Zoey asked awkwardly. 

Max nodded. “Comp sci major and physics minor, which I kind of just picked up after all the pre-health classes I had to take.”

Zoey’s eyes widened. “You’re pre-med?”

“Pre-dental, and not by choice.” Max flattened his mouth as if to say don’t ask. Zoey didn’t. “What’s yours? Your major, I mean.”

“Also comp sci. No minors or anything. It’s… all I really want to do,” Zoey admitted, feeling very red. When talking to her peers, it always seemed more relatable to say you had no idea what you wanted to do—she'd never really been good at fitting in.

Max gave a pensive hum and a slow nod. "So, you're gonna be the next Ada Lovelace, huh?"

He pointed at her shirt, printed with a painting of the 19th-century mathematician's face and the word LOVELACE in a fancy font.

Zoey blushed. "That's the plan."

It was hard to ignore the way her heart was beating differently than normal. It was quick with excitement, and maybe it was just because she was successfully holding a conversation for more than two minutes, but Zoey had a feeling it was something else, too.

“Uh, so, what year are you?” Zoey asked, rolling one of her pens back and forth on her desk.

“I’m a senior,” Max said. “Kinda hard to believe.”

“Wow.” Zoey blinked out of surprise. “So you’re almost outta here, then. That’s… crazy.”

The stress of it all was painted plainly across Max's face. He blew out a heavy breath. “Yep. You?”

“Me? Oh, I’m a junior.” Zoey nodded, suddenly feeling a bit more insignificant. A senior was talking to her? Other people her age barely ever acknowledged her existence, so someone a year older not only acknowledging her but being nice to her was pretty earth-shattering.

Max cracked a grin. “Wow. You know, usually, only seniors take this class.”

Zoey flushed at how impressed he looked. “Uh, yeah… my advisor told me that, too, but I told her I could handle it. I can handle it.”

“I don’t doubt that at all."

Something about that sentence made Zoey want to cover her face and hide. He was seeing her without even trying. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear with a nervous laugh, straightening her papers on her desk.

Just as she was about to ask Max where on campus he lived—the next of her usual itemized list of small-talk questions—Dr. Nelson stepped up to the chalkboard and cleared his throat.

With one last flit of his eyes to Zoey, Max straightened in his seat and steered his shoulders forward. Zoey let herself look at him a bit longer.

Next class, there was no empty seat between them.

Chapter Text

Present

Zoey swung by the auto body shop in an Uber before work, and after being charged an exorbitant amount to replace her dead car battery, finally got back behind the wheel of her Mini Cooper and drove to SPRQ Point.

The night after Max dropped her off at her parents’ house, she’d gotten about half an hour of sleep.

She still remembered everything about him. It was impossible to forget. Unlike what so many of their peers had opted for back in college, they were never just a hookup. It was the ease of understanding, the comfort, the familiarity that made her want to do everything with him, over and over again. It was the same feeling that made her end it.

But this? This silence, impossibly cold and harsh, was so much worse. It was why Zoey had been up all night, cross-legged on her bed with her old journal in her lap, flipping through the pages. She pored over her loopy writing from junior year, the meek observations she’d written about Max early on, the long stories of the time they’d spent together that unfolded across multiple pages later on. Her first love: lived and lost, just like that.

The journal she’d bought fresh just before she started at SPRQ Point was already beginning to fill up. First impressions of the other coders: Leif, way too tall; Tobin, way too loud; and the others, way too much of way too many other things. A second impression of Max. He was still everything she remembered.

Zoey propped her favorite pen under her chin—a Pilot G-2 0.5 with blue ink—and stared at a blank page. She couldn’t stand the silence with Max any longer. It hurt too much. She had to make a plan.

With a click of her pen, Zoey scribbled down the first step, which was also the most obvious one.

Talk to Max.

They had to start somewhere.

That was where her mind had been all night, and it was also where her mind was that morning as she walked into the Golden Gate Grind to pick up her latte. The auto body shop had already delayed her fifteen minutes, so she was unsurprised to see that Max was not inside the café. That was fine; she'd accounted for the possibility in her plan.

Max was already at his desk when she entered the bullpen, his head hunched close to his computer screen. He was typing faster than Zoey had ever seen him type before, his forehead piled with wrinkles of heavy concentration. His intensity reminded Zoey of how he used to look while doing his homework, all squinty-eyed at his laptop like he could barely make out what was on the screen.

Zoey dropped her coffee off at her desk and approached Max, stopping behind his computer. She laced her hands together behind her back and bounced on the balls of her feet, looking for a moment to cut in.

“Hey, Max. Can we talk?” Zoey asked.

Max’s eyes jumped up from his screen, followed by the curious curve of his eyebrows. He crossed his arms and swiveled his chair slowly from side to side, studying Zoey with narrowed eyes.

“Why?”

Zoey huffed out a breath, shaking her head. “Because I’m tired of avoiding you, okay? And I’m sorry.”

The lines on Max's face softened. Zoey stared at him staring at her, hoping she still knew him well enough. She figured the odds that he would agree to talk to her hovered right around eighty-three percent.

“Okay.” Max nodded, flattening his palms on the surface of his desk and pushing out of his seat. “Let’s talk.”

Maybe the odds were in her favor after all.

Just as she had been banking on, nobody was at the Bread Bar yet, which made it the perfect location for their conversation. Zoey knew very well that Tobin went to retrieve his morning muffin just after nine-thirty, and nobody else bothered with the Bread Bar until lunchtime. She strode over and climbed the steps, grabbing a plate for the croissant she knew she wanted. Max followed behind her with slow steps, his face blank. He stepped up next to her with crossed arms, raising an eyebrow.

“Um, so…” Zoey took a big bite of croissant. She hummed with pleasure at the buttery goodness. “Mm! Wow, this is good.”

Max wrinkled his eyebrows, not-so-subtly telling her to get on with it.

“Right.” Zoey swallowed, dropping the croissant back onto her plate. Now it was time for the hard part. “So, the reason why I didn’t want us to really be seen together or talk at work is because… because I’m a woman.”

Max nodded slowly, silently, his expression melting into one of sympathy.

Zoey felt a swell of confidence. This was the truth—her truth. She could tell him what she was feeling because she knew what she was feeling.

“Look, Max… being a woman in this office, in the tech world, I don’t always feel like I belong. It was the same in our computer science classes in college. I don’t feel like everyone always respects me the same that they respect all the guys. And I guess I was afraid if we got close again, if people knew we were close… they would start saying things.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that?” Max said, his forehead creased with sympathy.

Zoey sighed, pressing her fingers to her forehead. “I probably should have, but I didn’t think you’d get it.”

“Zoey,” Max exhaled, shaking his head at the ground. “I probably can’t ever get it, not the way you do by, you know, living through it. But, I mean, I care about you. You should never have to feel uncomfortable at work. And I’m sorry you have to deal with all of this.”

Zoey managed a small smile. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“Sure,” Max said softly.

It was funny how easy things could be sometimes. Zoey saw in that moment that Max really did care about her. She needed someone like that in her life. She needed him.

“Can we please just be friends again?” Zoey asked, holding Max’s gaze. “I miss you.”

Max looked at her, his mouth slowly shifting into a smile. “Yeah, we can be friends. I’ve missed you, too.”

Zoey smiled wide and walked forward with her arms outstretched. Before she was even there, Max pulled her into a tight hug, his arms wrapping her with a gloriously familiar warmth. And Zoey didn't care who saw.

“Zo,” Max said with his mouth close to her ear, quiet enough that only she could hear.

“Yeah?”

“If any of those guys say anything to you, I’ll fight them.”

Zoey laughed, pulling back from the hug to see a totally unwarranted, serious look of confidence on Max's face. “No, you won’t.”

“I could,” Max insisted, crossing his arms, all smug smile and bravado.

“Suuuuure,” Zoey laughed, catching the hint of a knowing smirk on Max's lips. She stuck her hand out. “Glad to have you back, Max.”

Max gave her a firm handshake. Zoey rested with the feeling of his palm in hers, appreciating the calluses of his hand that she knew like the back of her own. “You too, Zo.”

Tobin stared at Zoey and Max for a considerable amount of time when they returned to their desks, the ramifications of which Zoey simply chose to ignore. Five minutes later, Max was sending her Slack messages, and throughout the day, their eyes sought each other over the tops of their computers, and they muffled their laughs together.

It was nice to have a friend.

Chapter Text

“And so I tell him—here, you go.” Max paused his story to push the door open, gesturing for Zoey to walk inside the coffee shop ahead of him.

“Thank you.”

Max followed Zoey to the end of the line—three people, short compared to the usual early morning rush. “I tell him there’s no way I’m ordering shots that have little flecks of gold in them. Like, it just screams douchebag, you know?”

Zoey shook her head, a short laugh bursting between her lips. Though she'd never tried Goldschlager, she found it hard to disagree with Max. The one job alcohol had was to get her blasted—why waste all that gold? “What’s Tobin like several drinks deep?”

A look of horror crossed Max’s face. “You don’t wanna know.”

“Fair point.” Zoey sighed, cracking a smile at the images supplied by her imagination. “I have to admit, I was a little surprised when you two started becoming besties. You used to hate guys like Tobin back in college.”

“And I still do,” Max said, adamant. “I was honestly just trying to push myself out of my comfort zone a little, Zo. And, hey, at least he was talking to me.”

Zoey cringed, giving Max’s shoulder a light push. “Ouch. I deserve that.”

“Not really.” Max grinned. It was a promising sign of forgiveness.

Since deciding they could be friends, the old Max had become easier for Zoey to find. Before, she'd had to look for him across rooms all while pretending not to look, but now, she could see that easygoing demeanor of his, always lingering a joke away.

Max ordered his coffee and glanced down at her, and Zoey followed with her usual. He did still order black coffee, she'd discovered, just another thing about him that was still the same. They stepped back from the counter, huddling against one of the only free walls in the shop. Max pushed his sleeves up his forearms.

“So, is Leif still on you about hanging out to ‘distract’ me?” Max held up air quotes, patently amused by the way Zoey had laid out the specifics of Leif’s plan. It was only Wednesday, but she had already started to forget that Leif had even asked.

Zoey darted looks left and right, guarding her mouth with her hand. “Yesterday, he sent me a Slack message commending me on all my ‘hard work.’”

Max furrowed his eyebrows. “Okay, I get it. The guy with the man bun hates me. I’m really offended.”

“He doesn’t hate you…” Zoey trailed off, thinking it over. “Okay, so, maybe he hates you. So what?”

Max chuckled, more an exhale than a laugh. His lips stretched high and wide, and his eyes crinkled at the corners. Zoey opened her mouth to poke fun at it like she used to, but changed her mind.

Zoey shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t mind hanging out with you. You know, for Leif’s sake.”

Max nodded, all business again. “Right. Yeah.”

A coffee shop employee called out their black coffee and nonfat latte, and Max moved to grab the cups from the counter. He handed Zoey her latte and raised his own cup.

"Cheers."

"Maxwell."

Zoey tapped her cup to the side of Max's, hot liquid sloshing through the tops of both cups.

"Ow," Zoey winced, blowing the droplets of coffee off of her hand. "Why do we keep doing that?"

"Hey, it's tradition," Max said. Lips wide, eyes crinkled.

"You still smile so funny," Zoey remarked before she could stop herself.

Max held the door open again on their way out, his goofy grin getting progressively goofier. "And you still won't leave me alone about that."

"Pssh." Zoey waved off the comment and took a small sip of latte. "Never."

The walk upstairs was significantly less stress-inducing now that Zoey had Max with her. Any surprise run-ins with Joan or Tobin, and Zoey would have backup. That, and having an actual friend at work made her feel so much less alone. All that anxiety about being a woman in a man's tech world hadn't gone away, but it was nice to have someone on her side.

Tobin bounded up to Max the second they hit the bullpen. His hoodie was bright pink and embroidered with a massive yellow smiley face, a near-perfect reflection of Tobin's expression.

"Dude!" Tobin clapped Max on the back. Max shot Zoey a pained look, and she smothered a laugh in the sleeve of her sweater. “Steelers and Giants. Tonight. My place. You in?”

Despite being wrapped in Tobin's hands, Max had managed to make it to his desk, and he set his coffee down. He hissed out a puff of air between his teeth and shook his head. “Uh, I’m actually busy, Tobes.”

Max shot a look at Zoey across the bullpen, raising his eyebrows. Zoey nodded and gave him a thumbs-up.

Turning back to Tobin, Max crossed his arms. “Yep. I have plans.”

“Ahhhh, I get it.” Tobin bobbed his head up and down, his pointer finger shooting in Zoey’s direction. Zoey flinched at the abruptness of the motion. “You’re hanging out with Zoey again.”

Zoey rolled her eyes and sat at her desk. Tobin was kind of clingy. He and Leif were perfect for each other.

Max exhaled like he'd had to explain himself one too many times already. "Yeah. Sorry. Hey, but, why don't you ask Leif to watch the game with you?"

Looking mildly satisfied, Max glanced over at Zoey as if his comment had been the peak of subtlety. Zoey gave him an exaggerated smile of approval.

“Bros before girls! I don’t say hoes ‘cause that’s offensive." Tobin protested. Suddenly, the smiley face on his hoodie looked like an overcompensation. "Also, Leif doesn't like sports."

Max patted Tobin on the back. "Sorry."

Tobin watched with drooping eyes as Max sat at his desk and booted up his computer. In that instant, Zoey felt kind of bad for the guy.

But then, without missing a beat, Tobin bounded over to Leif and started battering him with his usual enthusiasm. Leif looked thrilled.

A Slack notification popped up in the corner of Zoey's screen.

Max Richman (8:33 AM)
We did it.

Zoey grinned, her fingers quickly tapping out a response.

Zoey Clarke (8:33 AM)
Nice job, partner.

With Tobin and Leif seemingly reconciled, Zoey was able to work the rest of the day without distraction. Well, with the exception of a few funny Slack messages from Max, which made her snort with laughter. He'd made a custom emoji of Danny Michael Davis pointing up with both hands and the caption "YES!" in all caps, and Zoey couldn't resist reacting with it to every one of his messages.

Five o’clock arrived. Zoey picked up her purse and stepped up to Max's desk, bouncing back on her heels. "Ready?"

Max slung his backpack on and gestured ahead. "Lead the way."

The two of them had gotten lunch every day since slapping on the friendship label, but this was the first time they would be hanging out one-on-one outside of work. The thought inexplicably made Zoey a bit nervous, exactly how she used to get before their first few dates. Her cheeks felt hot, and she was suddenly acutely aware of the meaning of her words.

"I'm glad we're spending time together again," she said in a flurry as they stepped onto the elevator, scrunching her eyes shut in embarrassment. "Uh, I mean… hanging out. You know what I mean."

Max looked unfazed. "Yeah, me too."

Zoey silently ordered herself to act normal all the way to the Thai place.

Agreeing on Thai takeout for dinner had been easy. The only problem was that the Thai place had no seating, which meant they'd have to take their food elsewhere. Her parents’ house didn’t seem like the best idea—they had met Max a few times back when he was still her boyfriend, and Zoey didn’t want to introduce that awkwardness into the night. Unfortunately, Zoey was also still newly full-time employed and didn’t have the funds to rent her own place. Max had been pretty quiet about his own living arrangements, and, in the end, they just decided to go eat by the bay.

“How about here?” Zoey pointed to a bench positioned in the waning shadows of two willow trees, the path in front of it worn down with dusty footprints.

"Sure."

Max sat on the left side of the bench, setting the bag of takeout on his lap as he began unpacking the containers. He handed Zoey her pad see ew and passed her a set of plastic utensils.

“So, how are you liking SPRQ Point so far? Is it everything you ever dreamed of?” he asked, a teasing lilt to his voice.

Zoey couldn't help but beam. "I love it. And, honestly… it is kind of everything I dreamed of."

Max's lips tugged into a smile. He looked down at his takeout container and speared a piece of chicken with his fork, lifting it to his mouth. Zoey watched as he chewed distractedly, his gaze drifting off to the sunset at the edge of the water.

There was something about that setting sun that always made Zoey feel like time was running out. Her thoughts unwound in quick flashes, old conversations looping around her mind like broken records. It was all coming back again.

“You know, I never really asked how you ended up here. I mean, I thought…” Zoey’s voice suddenly felt thicker, her words clogging up at the back of her throat. That last conversation, still a fresh wound years later. “I thought you were heading back to New York.”

Max looked back at her in surprise and then stared at his hands, lowering his chin to his chest. “I was supposed to. My dad sent me the plane ticket and everything. But the night before, I was packing my suitcase, and I just…" He shrugged. "Gave up.”

It came as a surprise to Zoey. Max hadn't gone back to New York after all? She tilted her head, waiting for more of an explanation.

Max nodded. “I called my dad in the morning, and I told him I wasn’t going home. He was understandably pretty upset. But my heart just… wasn’t in it, I guess.”

Zoey nodded, releasing her shoulders with a lengthy exhale. “And SPRQ Point?”

Max glanced over at Zoey briefly, his eyes darting to the ground as soon as hers met them. He chuckled softly. “Uh… that took a while. I had basically zero job experience, so I did some coding for a video game startup, and I found an entry-level data processing job that paid okay. Basically all my salary went to rent and groceries the whole first year. And then a few months ago, I applied to work at SPRQ Point, and a few weeks ago, I got the call, and now I’m here.”

Another nod. It was all Zoey could think to do as the information settled in, her confusion still weighing. Max had been in San Francisco for two whole years, and he hadn't told her?

Zoey let out a nervous laugh, smacking her palm to her head. "Wow. This is weird."

"Is it?" Max asked, his forehead creased in doubt.

"Kind of. Not bad weird, just… different weird. If that makes sense."

Lips stretched, eyes wrinkled. "Yeah. It does."

Zoey just laughed, sticking her fork into Max's container to steal a piece of chicken. He made a small sound of protest, but then shifted his container closer to her.

The sun set the rest of the way while they finished their food. So much was different, but everything that mattered was still very much the same.

Chapter Text

Cars honked their way through the congestion on the Embarcadero, a chorus of busy people all in a hurry to get somewhere different. But if anyone was in a hurry, it was Zoey, who had been anticipating this very day for several years. She drummed her fingers on her jeans and resisted the urge to ask Max whether they were there yet like an impatient five-year-old. After all, he had been nice enough to drive.

It was the first free weekend either one of them had had in a month, not because they had particularly prolific social lives, but because Joan had made all the coders come in every Saturday and Sunday for the past three weeks to work on a massive SPRQ Phone security update. As much as she loved her job, Zoey was relieved to finally have a break.

Finally, Max broke free of the traffic. Zoey squealed in delight when the car pulled into the parking lot outside their destination. It had been one of her favorite places as a kid, the best interactive science museum San Francisco had to offer: the Exploratorium.

The building was a cubic hunk of metal, industrial-looking and slate gray on the outside. Rectangular sheets of chrome tiled the front, and apart from a scattering of glass doors and windows, the rest was all stone. It was composed entirely of straight lines and edges, as if an architect had slapped a door on a gigantic hard drive and called it a building. Zoey couldn’t wait to go inside.

“Don’t people usually come here with kids?” Max asked, one eyebrow arched in doubt as he unbuckled his seat belt.

Zoey was already out of the car, slamming the passenger-side door shut behind her. “Yep.”

Max’s face still held a fair amount of skepticism, but his mouth ticked up at the corners. “Okay. You do realize people are probably gonna judge us, right?”

“I don’t care!" Zoey laughed, almost manically. "The Exploratorium is cool, and you promised you’d take me here one day."

She only realized her mistake after the words had left her mouth. Max stuttered to form a response, clearing his throat at the ground instead. He had promised to bring her to the Exploratorium one day, but it was a promise he had made when they were in college. While Zoey's chin was on his bare chest, if she recalled correctly.

Of course, before they'd even stepped through the museum doors, Zoey had made things awkward. Like she always did.

“Right. Yeah. Cool.” Max closed his door and pointed his key at it. It took at least five presses of the button before the two beeps sounded, signaling that the door had locked. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and flattened his mouth, falling into step beside Zoey as they made their way toward the entrance.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up. I didn’t mean to be weird,” Zoey mumbled, casting her eyes downward.

“Well, you’ve always been a little weird,” Max said, his mouth going lopsided. “But I still like you.”

His shoulder brushed hers when he said it, the tiniest nudge of sleeve to sleeve. Zoey didn't mean to read into it, but when Max was looking away from her, his lips still holding their smile, it was hard for her not to.

Little kids ran around the high-ceilinged first floor like it was a playground, exhausted-looking parents scrambling after them to keep up. Zoey almost felt like running, too, her attention pulled ten ways at once by the rainbow lights and the giant floating moon and the brilliant blue walls of the museum. This was her heaven.

“Max, Max, Max!”

Zoey dashed over to one of her favorite areas, the optical illusion exhibits, and stepped in front of the mind-bending Café Wall. The wall was tiled with rows of black and white squares that looked crooked, though a placard beside it explained that the lines were actually parallel. Zoey cast a wide grin over her shoulder and saw Max following behind slowly, his eyes alight with amusement. “This is so cool!”

Max studied the wall, his eyebrows scrunching further together the longer he looked. Zoey looked the illusion up on her phone, curious to find out exactly how it worked.

“Oh, so, apparently, if you look at the gray lines, you can tell the rows really are straight, but if you look at the tiles, your visual cortex neurons get overwhelmed, and it looks all crooked, but there also seems to be something called 'modularity' involved?" She scoffed out a laugh. "Wow. I took one cognitive psychology class freshman year, and I don't understand any of this."

Blinking up from her phone screen, Zoey caught Max watching her like he wasn't aware of his own smile. Her cheeks bloomed with heat. “Uh, did I… was that too much?”

“No,” Max said, inclining his head toward Zoey. "It's just… cool how excited you are."

Zoey beamed, lifting her shoulders in a small shrug. "Yeah, I am. Thanks for agreeing to come with me."

Max's mouth twitched up at the corner. "Of course."

He walked over to a wall-mounted plexiglass container and pulled out a glossy trifold. He unfolded the paper and held it out in front of Zoey. It was a bird's-eye view map of the Exploratorium, exhibits labeled in tiny letters.

"Where to next?"

There were too many exhibits to count. Zoey led Max from place to place, her brain buzzing with excitement. A white wall where their bodies cast colorful shadows in bright blues and pinks and greens. Two dish-like chairs on opposite sides of the plaza where they could whisper and still hear each other. A gigantic metal harp that made a shrill ringing noise with the wind. Fun had never felt so real.

After a couple of hours roaming around the museum (and witnessing a red-faced toddler give a screaming tantrum five feet away from them), Zoey and Max exchanged a look that said they'd both had their Exploratorium fill for the day. They walked over to the Seismic Joint, a café located just a block away, and ordered the sugariest-looking thing in the display case.

Zoey cut the s'mores brownie down the middle with a plastic knife and picked up her half. Her teeth sliced through oozing marshmallow, fudgy brownie, and graham cracker—the perfect bite. Gooey S'mores Brownie, indeed.

“This is amazing,” Max marveled through a bite of brownie.

A streak of chocolate had ended up smeared across Max's upper lip. Zoey noticed it immediately and traced the path of it with her eyes, swooping down from his Cupid’s bow across a patch of stubble above his mouth.

Max blinked at her, eyes narrowing. “What? What is it?”

“You have a little—” Zoey pointed to her own lips and watched as Max’s eyebrows shot up. He grabbed a napkin from the dispenser on the table and wiped his face, cleaning away the patch of chocolate.

“Thanks.”

Zoey nodded, swallowing down her fluster. Maybe if they were still in college, still together, she would’ve reached out and gotten rid of the chocolate herself. But they weren’t in college. They were three years older and three years different. Distantly different.

“I need more coffee," Zoey announced, springing up from her seat. Caffeine was always a dependable escape route.

“Me too,” Max agreed, gathering up their trash from the table. He pushed his chair back and stood up, jerking his head toward the register. “Wanna get some on our way out?”

Max didn't have to ask twice. Zoey followed him back to the counter where they’d ordered the brownie earlier, still actively shoving away thoughts of that chocolate smear. The same barista was still behind the register, a girl with long, shiny black hair tied up in a sleek ponytail.

Zoey ordered her usual latte and took a step back from the counter.

“And I’ll have a black coffee, please,” Max recited as if from a script. Ever-predictable, the two of them.

“Coming right up!” the barista said, calling their orders out over her shoulder. She turned back to Max and studied his face. Zoey shot a look at him to see if he'd somehow gotten more chocolate on him, but his face was clear.

“Have we met before? You look super familiar for some reason,” the barista asked Max. She'd propped her hands against the edge of the counter, leaning her body over ever so slightly. Zoey wrinkled her brows. Either Max and this girl had some history, or she was witnessing the world’s most cliche pickup line.

“Uh…” Max glanced down at Zoey, very obviously having no idea why the barista was asking him such a thing. It brought Zoey some relief. He shrugged. “Maybe? Did you go to Stanford, too?”

The barista’s eyes lit up, and, inexplicably, Zoey’s heart started to pound. “Oh my God, wait! You did that one-act play, right? About your dad?”

Zoey pursed her lips, feeling as if she was being pushed into the background with every additional word Max and the girl exchanged. She had no idea what play the barista was talking about, but from his slow nod, Max definitely did.

“I did, yeah. You saw that?”

The barista nodded enthusiastically, her lips stretching wide to reveal a set of annoyingly perfect teeth. They were freakishly pearly for someone who worked with coffee every day. “It was amazing! So well-done. Wow.” The girl stuck her hand across the counter. “I’m Phoebe.”

Max shook her hand. "Max."

“I’m Zoey,” Zoey blurted out, plastering on a smile.

Both Max and Phoebe turned to look at her with mouths mid-sentence, as if they had forgotten she was there.

“Hi,” Phoebe said flatly.

The cold of her voice hit Zoey square in the forehead, and the feeling traveled down her spine in a rhythm eerily similar to that of jealousy.

Another Seismic Joint employee set a pair of coffees on the counter, calling out Zoey's and Max's drinks. Phoebe finally returned her attention to the register and rang up the order.

“Your total is $10.36," she said to Max only.

Max handed her his card. Phoebe swiped it in the reader and gave it back, holding eye contact with him while she did.

“See you around," she murmured, somehow managing to make it sound both shy and sultry.

“Yeah,” Max replied.

Zoey grabbed both of their coffees off the counter and strode toward the door with quick steps. She was beginning to feel sick.

Once the café door had closed behind Max, Zoey spun around and handed him his coffee. It couldn't be jealousy. It was just revulsion at watching people flirt, something that was totally normal and expected. They started walking back toward the parking lot, and Max took a sip of his drink.

“Seemed like someone was into you,” Zoey said pointedly, darting her eyes back to the Seismic Joint.

Max looked back at the café, his eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Really? You think so?”

The vague curiosity in his voice sparked something uncomfortable in Zoey’s stomach. She felt her cheeks grow hot with embarrassment at the thought of Max finding the barista attractive. But they were friends, and even if she was jealous, she had no right to be.

Zoey gave a noncommittal shrug. “Maybe. I dunno.” She shook her head, eager to change the subject. “Anyway, uh, thanks. For bringing me to the Exploratorium. I had a really good time.”

Max’s lips bent upward. “Me too. Honestly, I get why you like this place now. We should come back."

Excitement zipped through Zoey. "Really?"

"Yeah." Max unlocked the car, and they both got inside. "Whenever you want."

And it hit Zoey then: if she were anyone else, she would be jealous of this.

Eighties music hummed out from the old car radio as they inched forward on the highway. The song was “Dancing In the Dark,” an old Bruce Springsteen that Zoey only knew because Max used to share his earbuds with her. Warm October air breezed by outside the window. Zoey tucked a flyaway strand behind her ear and glanced back at Max in the driver’s seat. His fingers tapped the steering wheel to the beat of the song, and she could see him mouthing along to the lyrics. She wanted to say something, she but wasn't sure how.

“Max."

Max’s fingers stopped tapping. He turned to look at Zoey. “Hm?”

Zoey thought about their takeout dinners by the bay. The Slacked jokes they traded every five minutes at work. The way that when she’d brought up the Exploratorium, Max had immediately started making plans.

“You're my best friend," she said, feeling her cheeks flush. "Maybe ever."

Max grinned and landed a light punch on Zoey's shoulder. "You're mine, too."

A rumbling sports car swerved in front of them, and Max rushed to replace both hands on the wheel. Zoey snorted out a laugh and shook her head. After silently cursing the other car under his breath, Max turned back to her.

"Definitely ever."

Chapter Text

Zoey sprinted down the stairs, shoving her bag over her shoulder in haste. She entered the kitchen with quick strides, grabbed a blueberry muffin from the platter on the counter, and hurried toward the front door.

“Honey, why are you in such a rush?” Maggie called from the kitchen table.

“No time to talk! Gotta go! My Uber’s here!” Zoey yelled over her shoulder, and she flung the door open.

The Audi was parked across the street from her parents’ house, the engine running on a low rumble. Max was in the driver’s seat looking down at something, probably his phone. As she neared the car, Zoey felt the buzz of her own phone in her jeans pocket.

She hadn’t mentioned to her family that the well-timed Uber that had been picking her up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the past month was actually Max. Her brother would never let her hear the end of it. David had only met Max a handful of times years back, but David had also taken full advantage of those times to mess with Max. Then there was the problem of her parents. Zoey could practically hear her mother asking if she and Max were back together. She wasn’t sure she could handle it.

Zoey flung open the car door and slid into the passenger seat.

“Sorry I’m late!”

Max clicked his phone off, dropped it into the cup holder, and grinned over at her. “I hate to break it to you, Zo, but you’re late every time I pick you up.”

Zoey snapped her seat belt into place with a huff. “I am not.”

Max tapped the time on the dash: 8:12 AM.

“Are so.”

Annoyingly, he was right. Zoey collapsed back into her seat and pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Ugh, sorry, I just slept super weird last night.”

“Weird how?” Max asked.

Zoey bit down on the tip of her tongue so hard it went numb. Her first mistake was mentioning the dream at all.

It was still fresh in her memory. She’d been on the fourth floor of SPRQ Point late at night, with her desk lamp casting the only light. She was sitting on her desk with her legs spread, and Max had his head buried between her thighs. Her hands fisted in his hair, and her head tipped back in ecstasy as she sang his praises over and over again. It was so vivid, so real. She’d woken up in a cold sweat when it was still dark, and couldn't force the dream away enough to go back to sleep.

A sex dream. Of Max. Of her and Max together.

She wanted to laugh it off. They were friends now. A sex dream about a friend, though uncomfortable, was something to laugh about, like “Ha ha, brain, why would you come up with such a silly thing?” But Max wasn’t just a friend, or, at least, he hadn’t only ever been just a friend. Her subconscious was digging up the past, and it was doing far too good a job.

Zoey decided to change the subject. “Uh… did you get Joan’s email? We’re getting a Candy Bar this week.”

Max hummed thoughtfully. “Now, do you think that means a food bar full of candy, or are we all gonna get one candy bar to split?”

Zoey laughed and shoved Max’s shoulder. She squinted her eyes at his shirt, a plain blue long-sleeve.

“Why aren’t you wearing a costume?”

Max pointed to the back seat, where a wrinkled Knicks jersey sat crumpled in a pile. “I will be wearing one. I’m a Knick.”

Zoey scoffed. “That’s not a costume, Max. It wasn’t a costume back in college, and it definitely isn’t one now.”

He shook his head, letting out a soft laugh. “Well, what are you supposed to be?”

“I’m a constellation.” Zoey pointed out the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d glued to her shirt and leggings. Her getup was black from head to toe. She’d stayed up all night making sure each star was positioned accurately.

Max’s eyes flicked across her costume. “Ursa Major?”

“Yes,” Zoey replied, surprised. “It’s my favorite.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Max said. He’d turned his head upon pulling up to the red light. His throat bobbed, a noticeable swallow.

Zoey stared at Max. He stared back.

Max cleared his throat. “Uh, anyway…” He shook his head. “You excited for the party tonight? According to Tobin, it’s supposed to be kind of a rager.”

“I’m almost scared to ask what that means.” Zoey laughed.

“Yeah, you don’t wanna know.”

Any tension Zoey might have imagined dissipated for the rest of the car ride. By the time she and Max were getting off the elevator, walking onto the fourth floor, she’d decided there had barely been any tension at all. It was just her dream, hell-bent on haunting her waking hours, too.

The other programmers were dressed in the geekiest array of costumes she had ever seen. Tobin and Leif were decked out in elaborate Batman and Robin costumes, respectively. As she passed his desk later, Zoey could hear the effort Tobin was putting into deepening his voice so he could sound intimidating. It was not working. There were also not one, but two Spocks, pointy ears and all, and a turtlenecked Steve Jobs lookalike. Joan was wearing a witch hat.

Around 4:55, the bullpen lights dimmed. Either Joan was secretly a huge fan of Halloween, or, more likely, Danny Michael Davis had made sure the whole building was decked out for the holiday. The nest in the conference room was covered in those synthetic spider webs, and tiny plastic spiders dangled over the table. Orange string lights curled around every metal structure on the floor, casting a faint glow. “Monster Mash” played over the loudspeaker.

Zoey ladled neon-colored punch into Max’s SPRQ Point mug and also some into her own, laughing. “You can’t be serious!”

Max’s grin stretched wider. “Dead serious. I wasn’t even allowed to go trick-or-treating with the other kids from my school.”

“Okay, but you never tried a piece of candy until you were in high school? Never ever?”

“After my dad struck the fear of cavities and gingivitis into me? No way.” Max tipped back his mug and took a long pull of punch. Between the two of them, they’d already taken out a good fourth of the punch bowl. Maybe they should have been more cautious considering Tobin had been the one who’d made it, but whatever he’d put in it was working.

Zoey glanced over at the Candy Bar, her eyes widening. “I have an idea.”

Soon their legs were dangling off the mezzanine, a pile of candy bars heaped between them. Zoey held up the Milky Way she’d picked up and tapped it to Max’s with a giggle. “Cheers.”

They tore the wrappers open and bit into the chewy candy, mouths stuck with caramel and nougat.

“This is so good,” Max marveled, savoring the candy with his eyes shut.

“Mm-hmm.” Zoey nodded.

He made a sound that was borderline obscene, taking another bite. “I can’t believe my dad was depriving me of Milky Ways my whole childhood.”

“Me neither.” Zoey washed down the candy with a strong swallow of mystery punch, which had started making her head feel warm and fuzzy half an hour ago. She was only barely conscious of how her eyes had magnetized to Max since.

Max leaned back on his hands and looked out over the bullpen. “This party’s actually pretty great.”

Zoey followed Max’s gaze to Tobin, who was at least seven drinks deep, loudly declaring that Batman was going to rid SPRQ Point of hoodlums and skeevy douchebags. She looked back at Max, wrinkling her nose. “Really?”

Max nudged her shoulder. “No, I mean, hanging out with you.”

“Oh.” Zoey’s red spread all over. “Me too. I mean, hanging out with you is fun, too.”

They had already eaten a pair of Milky Ways, two Twix bars, and some Snickers. Zoey reached for two Reese’s peanut butter cups, handing one to Max.

“Can I ask you something?” Max looked at Zoey.

Intrigued zipped through Zoey’s chest. “What?”

His eyes didn’t falter from hers for a second. “Why did you break up with me? Back then?”

A sputtered series of non-words escaped the back of Zoey’s throat. “Uh…”

Max raised his eyebrows, a clear sign he was expecting an actual answer. 

“Why do you want to know?” Zoey asked nervously.

“Honestly? ‘Cause I’m tipsy.” Max’s mouth tugged up at the corner, and he shrugged a boozy smile her way. The smile dipped. “‘Cause I always sort of wondered.”

The question was like a shot of cold water to her face. Even so, it was still not enough to pull Zoey out of her stupor. She leaned her head on Max’s shoulder and stared straight ahead, feeling his arm settle around her shoulder. Tobin was leading a conga line around the bullpen. The scene blurred at the edges.

“Well…” Zoey sighed, taking herself back to that day. “I mean, you were graduating. I was still going to be here, at Stanford, and you… I thought you were going back to New York.”

Max’s hand warmed her arm. “Right, but… I guess, I sort of didn’t think that meant it would be the end for us. I never imagined being apart from you.”

Zoey tilted her head back. Max’s eyes were clouded with something—the alcohol or the memory, she wasn’t sure. “Me neither, Max, but it happened. We broke up.”

He lowered his head, a slow nod, then looked back at the party. Zoey wished she could say more.

It was the timing. It was that year between them. It was New York, and then it wasn’t. But really, it wasn’t any of those things. She had just gotten scared.

Zoey swallowed back the emotion that rose up her throat. “Anyway, that’s all in the past, right?”

“Yeah,” Max murmured. “Of course.”

The last few notes of the Ghostbusters theme song petered out. “Monster Mash” began to play for the fourth time.

Max groaned. “Not again.”

“Seriously, who made this playlist?” Zoey nestled closer to Max, letting out a yawn.

On the dance floor, Tobin whooped and started singing along at the top of his lungs.

“Yeah, that tracks,” Max muttered.

The two of them sat on the mezzanine, slowly made their way through the candy pile, and listened to “Monster Mash” play for a fourth time. And then a fifth. It was only when Max tapped her arm some hours later that Zoey realized she had fallen asleep on his shoulder.

Chapter Text

Five Years Ago

“I have to tell you something."

Zoey’s head rested on Max's chest, her hands clasped loosely over her stomach. They had been laying on his bed for a good hour, trading easy conversation about classes, their few shared friends, their dreams. Apart from their voices, the apartment was quiet; Max's roommate was out of town for the weekend.

She tilted her head back, looking at him upside down. “What is it?”

Max slid his hand into her hair with a sigh, his fingers twisting through her curls. “My dad called me last night.”

This brought Zoey out of her comfortable sprawl and upright. One of the only things she knew about Max’s dad was that Max did not like to talk about him. Max barely mentioned him in the first place, and the one time he had, it was accompanied by a frown. Based on that fact alone, Zoey didn’t really like Alan Richman.

“What did he say?” Zoey asked. Alertness clutched her. She wished her heart would stop knocking against her ribcage like something was very wrong.

Max fell silent, focusing his eyes on his bedspread. Zoey brought her hand up to his cheek, trying to bring him back to her. “Max.”

“He wants me to go to dental school,” Max said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear it.

“What?” Zoey's throat tightened.

She dropped her hand to her lap. The room felt like it was contracting, squeezing out all the air inside.

He swallowed heavily and shook his head. “He basically told me it’s great I got to 'fool around and waste time in California for four years,' but it’s time for me to come back to New York.”

“But… you’re not going, are you?” Panic rose up Zoey's spine with an icy chill. Max looked away.

“I might have to.”

The words were a swift slap to the face. “What does that mean?”

“Zo… it’s complicated with my dad. I mean, my brother’s already working for the family practice, and my sister’s on her way to doing the same, and there’s just a part of me that really wants his approval, you know?”

As horrible as she felt thinking it, Zoey didn't know. She had never once had to earn her father's approval. It was a given, a steadfast guarantee that came freely with his love. 

“But I thought you wanted to stay here, and… and try to find something in Silicon Valley?”

“I did. I do. I…” Max sucked in a heavy breath. The pause in that breath was stifling.

Suddenly, Zoey could see it all: Max graduating at the end of the year and moving back to New York. Going to the same dental school where his dad had met his mom, meeting someone there, calling Zoey up in the middle of the night to tell her he’d moved on. It was as vivid as if it had already happened.

Max rubbed at his eyes. “Listen, could we just forget about this for now? Please?”

Zoey shut her eyes tightly, feeling the burn of tears threatening her eyelids. She forced an exhale. “Okay.”

She lay back down, tucked her cheek to Max’s chest, and drew a shaky breath. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, fingertips dragging a gentle path up and down her arm. It was the same warmth that had always brought her comfort. All she could think of was it being taken away.

The Treehouse was emptiest around three, when most people were either in class or too tired from class to drag themselves over to the only taco place on campus. It was three-thirty, and only a few tables were occupied, students either chatting quietly or knee-deep in their computer screens, typing like there was no tomorrow. This was around when Zoey and Max would usually meet up after their early afternoon classes. They both preferred the quiet.

Zoey drummed her fingertips along her jeans, her body abuzz with nerves. He was already late. She remembered him mentioning a midterm yesterday, sometime before he'd dropped the bomb about New York. That was probably the holdup. He wasn't standing her up.

Sure enough, no sooner than the thought had crossed her mind, Zoey looked up and saw Max walking inside. His backpack was haphazardly slung over one shoulder as he pushed the door open with the other. He looked around and found her, and his lips eased up. It was automatic how he navigated the maze of tables to the corner table where she was sitting. Their table.

"Hey." Only he could make that syllable sound so full of awe and affection.

"Hey. How was your day?” Zoey asked, nervously fingering the edge of a napkin on the table.

Max shrugged, sporting a crooked grin as he slid into the seat opposite her. “Fine. I had that midterm just now, but I think it went pretty well. Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to make it, but—“

“We have to break up,” Zoey blurted out.

Max’s smile collapsed. He blinked once. “What?”

Zoey dropped her elbows to the table's edge and lowered her head into her hands. It had just exploded out of her. A nuclear disaster.

"I can’t…" She peeked at Max’s face through her fingers. Confusion. "I don’t think I can do this anymore. You’re graduating soon, and then… and then, who knows?”

“Yeah, I’m graduating, but that doesn’t mean we have to break up—”

“But it does, Max!” Zoey strained to keep her voice from going shrill. She failed. “You’re going to New York, and I know long-distance is really just a way to put off a breakup for a couple months. It'll only hurt more that way.”

"I'm probably not even going to New York!"

"Really?" Zoey pressed her palms to the table. "Then why did you tell me about it?"

Max fell silent. That silence told Zoey everything she needed to know.

"I'm still figuring things out."

All of the awful feelings Zoey had ever felt were rearing their ugly heads at once. The uncertainty wrapped around her diaphragm like ivy, digging in and choking her. The only way she knew how to get rid of it was to say goodbye.

"Then I think you need to figure them out without me."

Max's jaw stiffened. So rarely had she seen him anything less than his usual easygoing self—this was like feeling an entirely new kind of pain. “You’re serious?”

Zoey chewed her lip. She nodded. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Max said, his voice hoarse. “Okay, um… I gotta go.”

He stood up, grabbed his backpack, and walked straight for the exit. Zoey buried her head in her hands, unable to bring herself to check if he looked back. She could never look back from this. The only choice was to move forward.

She sat at their usual table for another hour and zoned out. There was a good chance she'd just made the worst mistake of her life.

Chapter Text

Present

Zoey grated out a groan. She dug her fingers into her eyes, wishing she had called in fake sick to work. It was only one o’clock.

Joan had been in meetings with company higher-ups all day, which meant that, terrifyingly, the Brogrammers had been left to their own devices. They had been locked in a heated office chair race for the past hour, which meant squeaky chair wheels and lots and lots of raucous cheers. Zoey wasn’t entirely confident she could last another four hours without dying.

She looked away from her work (needless to say, she hadn’t been making much progress), her eyes snagging onto Max. He was muttering something to himself as he watched Leif time the latest chair racing heat with a stopwatch. Max looked just as miserable as she felt.

Zoey sprang out of her seat, sidestepped Gabe as he came flying by in his chair, and strode over to Max’s desk, propping her hands on the edge.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Max said, mouthing oh my God as his eyes shifted sideways. Tobin got a running start and jumped onto his chair. A second later, he was writhing in pain on the floor.

Sometimes it was hard for Zoey to believe that her coworkers were supposed to be some of the most brilliant minds in tech. She let out an exasperated sigh and redirected her attention to Max. “Do you wanna watch a movie tonight?”

Max nodded. “Yeah, sure. Sounds fun.”

Zoey tapped her fingertips on Max’s desk and looked around absentmindedly, combing her eyes across the tabletop. The contents included Play-Doh in three different colors, a stress ball, and a stack of cookbooks.

“Since when do you cook?” Zoey asked, surprised.

Max shrugged. “Eh, I dabble. Not having dining hall food on hand and living on my own meant I had to learn a thing or two. Also, my…” He sighed and shook his head. “My dad and I used to cook together back when I was a kid.”

“You never cooked for me,” Zoey remarked.

Max cracked a smile. "Well, that's only 'cause you never asked."

Zoey rolled her eyes, a laugh compromising her cross expression. It was true that Max had done pretty much whatever she asked him back when they were together, even when she only meant it as a joke. What if we tried every Ben & Jerry's flavor in the store? The next day, Max had shown up at her dorm with fifteen pints of ice cream. That had been one of her favorite nights with him.

"Is after work good?"

Max's eyebrows were raised with the question. Zoey blinked away the memory and cleared her throat.

"Yep. Sounds good."

It was much easier to focus on work with the promise of a movie night as motivation. Zoned out of the bullpen chaos with her headphones and a podcast, Zoey tapped out a few hundred lines of code, debugged, and dropped the finished product into Joan's inbox. 

She put on her jacket and stepped back in front of Max’s desk. His computer screen was already black. “Ready?”

Max slung his backpack over one shoulder. “Yeah. So, uh, where do you wanna go? Your parents’ place?”

In that instant, Zoey realized that the question of where was one that had completely slipped her mind. She and Max had been friends for a couple of months, but they'd only ever hung out at SPRQ Point and around the city. Other than to pick her up for work, he hadn't been back to her parents' place. She hadn't been to his place, either, for that matter.

"Uh…" Suddenly, Zoey felt flustered. "I don’t know if that’s a good idea, you know, since they know you and everything. And they’d probably ask questions…”

They started walking toward the elevator. Max adjusted his backpack strap. “Yeah. Right. Uh, then you can come to my place if you want?”

The ever-elusive place where Max resided. There had been a good chunk of time when Zoey wasn't even sure it was real. "Sure."

Max's lips ticked up. Maybe he lived in a commune, or an RV, or a bunker. The possibilities were limitless. Although, probably he just lived in an apartment like half the people in San Francisco did.

They'd taken the Audi to work that morning. David was starting to get suspicious of Zoey's daily "Ubers" and loudly remarked on her way out the door that she must be racking up quite the commuting tab. Zoey watched Max buckle his seatbelt and after, start the car. Movements that were force of habit looked strangely robotic.

“You know, you never mentioned where you were living," Zoey said what she'd been thinking. “We usually just hang out outside of work.”

Max's eyes skipped over to her as he backed out of the parking spot. “Yeah… I guess I just didn’t want to get into any of that stuff at first. It's sorta… complicated.”

Nothing made more sense to Zoey than 'complicated,' but she had thought they were past 'at first.'

The sky was turning orange and pink. Max drove through the city, past the Financial District, Downtown, and Yerba Buena until they were further: wide streets, construction sites, condos. South of Market. He pulled up to a nondescript orange building and parked on the street.

Blowing out a breath, Max glanced over at her. "This is it."

Not a bunker. It was just a regular old apartment building—at least, from the outside. Based on Max's rigid demeanor, though, Zoey had a feeling that there was more to it.

They walked up a set of stairs that creaked under their feet, and they stopped on the third floor. Max stepped up to a dark green door with a tarnished brass lock. The paint was peeling. He pulled keys from his back pocket, fitted one into the lock, and opened the door.

Inside, the space was a squeeze. It was even smaller than Zoey's dorm room at Stanford had been. There was a bed pushed against one wall. A small kitchen crammed at the entryway. One medium-sized window on the far wall let in a moderate amount of light onto weathered wooden floors. Max's apartment when they'd been back in college had been at least four times the size of this one.

It was as if he could sense all her questions. He folded his arms and shrugged. “It’s… my dad cut me off when I decided to stay in San Francisco, and the startup I was working at couldn’t afford to pay me much. This was the cheapest place I could find."

Zoey looked around the apartment, nodding distractedly.

“I’m hoping to move out soon, now that I’m on my feet with SPRQ Point.” Max scratched the back of his neck. “Listen, I didn’t mean to hide where I was living from you. I just didn’t really know how to explain all the other stuff.”

“Max… I had no idea,” Zoey said, swallowing heavily.

“Well, how could you?” Max gave her a weary smile. “It’s fine. My dad and I haven’t spoken since then, but I’m doing fine.”

Zoey turned in place in slow circles, taking it all in. Max walked ten feet and was suddenly at the very edge of the apartment.

“I crowdsourced the furniture, mostly. Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace. I actually found these chairs on the side of the road.”

She followed his outstretched arm to a pair of rattan chairs pushed under a small round table. “Cool."

Sympathy bubbled up inside Zoey's chest. Max had to make it on his own after graduation with nobody supporting him—not even her. She'd run away from him, and he'd been here the entire time.

"Uh, let's…" Zoey shook her head to keep the tears at bay. "What do you want to watch?"

Soon they were seated beside each other on Max's loveseat, which he proudly told her was from a flea market in Alameda. Zoey could feel her entire leg pressed up against Max's, their elbows touching, their bodies crammed on the small seat. It was a tight fit.

Max let her pick the movie. The Goonies was playing on his laptop on the ottoman he used as a coffee table, and the lights were off. Trying to find a comfortable position on the couch, Zoey leaned her head on his shoulder.

Last time, they were drunk. She remembered it only vaguely, but he had welcomed her touch then.

Max wrapped his arm around Zoey's shoulder, stone-cold sober. Maybe it was just because they had to be, but they were so close together.

All of a sudden, Zoey felt it all again.

The warmth of Max's body heat. The gentle swipe of his fingers on her arm. The way it was automatic, the way it was easy. What had been dormant inside her heart was as alive as ever. This. Him.

Zoey tilted her head up to look at Max, who was deeply enthralled in the movie. He always used to get that way. She missed this closeness. She missed him more than anything, even now that he was here.

The movie was playing, but all Zoey could think was that she had to get him back.

Chapter Text

The first time she kissed Max, Zoey’s shirt was soaked through with coffee.

With midterms looming on the horizon, the two of them had holed up in a fluorescent-lit library study room for hours on end, laboring over their Machine Learning projects. They had graduated from occasional texts about homework to coffee once a week and were definitely friends, but Zoey was almost a little certain they could be more. Max had a habit of mirroring her body language during coffee; she would cross her arms, he would cross his. Basic psychology said that meant something (also, she had a little crush on him).

During hour five, Zoey almost fell asleep on her laptop. Max offered her his coffee. Clumsy, she spilled it all over herself in the handoff. He spouted off apologies. She laughed. He laughed. And then she just leaned in and kissed him.

That was how it happened the first time. It was simple. Natural. Almost—dare she say—easy.

Now, at twenty-four years old, with not one, but two relationships under her belt (the second being a three-week slog last summer with a girl she'd known from high school), Zoey was back to being clueless.

Since their movie night at his apartment, she had no idea how to act around Max. What to say, whether she should say anything, whether she was ever saying too much. He was so impossible. And so, she did the only thing that made sense: absolutely nothing.

It was just too easy to stay quiet—their friendship demanded no more from her. And their friendship was such a good thing. Max messaged her Spotify links over Slack, and Zoey started setting aside her podcasts in favor of his music. There was a lot of Billy Joel, Max’s favorite singer in college and apparently also Max’s favorite singer in the present. Yesterday, he sent her “Movin’ Out” after finally signing the lease for his new apartment.

She could smile just thinking about that.

Max took another bite of his burrito, eyes wandering with the lull in their conversation. They had gotten lunch from the new Mexican place down the street. Zoey had already finished her tamales. Now she was just looking at him.

He looked more different than she had realized. Even beyond the obvious—the visible stubble on his cheeks, the tightening of his jaw—he looked like he’d been through something. Zoey wondered if it was his dad or SPRQ Point or the crushing weight of millennial ennui, or maybe something else. She was still trying to figure it out.

Their lunch break was technically over five minutes before, but Max hadn’t made a move back toward his desk, so neither had Zoey. They sat on their hanging chairs, rocking back and forth. Zoey kicked herself forward until her knees grazed Max’s. His lips curved in amusement.

“Do you wanna try somewhere new for lunch tomorrow?” he asked. “I heard about this place that’s a café where you could also do your laundry. Sounds cool, right?”

Zoey was fixated on the corners of his eyes. The crinkles he had there—they had gotten more defined since college. “Yeah, cool. Super cool.”

Max leaned forward in his chair, head tilted to the side. “Hey, you good? You seem kinda… out of it.”

Clearing her throat, Zoey nodded vigorously. “Mm-hmm. Yep. I’m good.”

“You sure? ‘Cause you’re sorta looking at me funny.”

Zoey wrinkled her nose, blinked. “What? No, I’m not.”

“Uh, yeah. You kinda were.” Max grinned, widening his eyes. “Like this.”

Being noticed like that had her stomach all twisted up. Chin tucked to her chest, staring at her lap, Zoey forced away eye contact. “I wasn’t trying to look at you funny on purpose.”

“I know that. I was just teasing. Hey.”

Max scooted his chair up to Zoey’s and nudged her knee with his knuckles. She looked back up at him and at those lips of his, lips currently appearing to force back a smile.

“You know I love to keep you on your toes.”

Max winked. That plus the word love was enough to make Zoey sigh. She disguised it with a cough.

“David says I have eyes like an animated deer,” Zoey mumbled into the sleeve of her sweater.

He chuckled. “You do kind of have a doe-eyed thing going on, but it’s cute.”

Cute. Again her stomach was in knots. Again and again and again.

Tobin walked by the hanging chairs on his way to the Pizza Bar, casting them a suspicious glance.

Zoey looked away from Max again. “Um, I heard Andy’s looking for a team leader for the SPRQ Point Global project. I kind of feel like I want to do it.”

Max smiled. “You should. Nobody on the team deserves it more than you.”

Another swell. It was all too much. Her lips fidgeted with a smile, and she sprang out of her seat.

She was feeling it all and more, and the words exploded out of Zoey before she could stop herself:

“I have to go. Lots of work to get done. Catch up with you later, ‘kay?”

And she raced back to her desk.

Should she say something? Should she tell Max she was still in love with him? In love was kind of a big statement—maybe just that she liked him? No, they were in their mid-twenties, for God’s sake.

She dropped into her seat and blew out a heavy breath, winded from Max or rushing away from Max (either way, it was his fault). He was walking back to his desk at a normal pace, shooting her a look that asked what was that?

Zoey shrugged and steered her head toward her computer screen, pretending to work. In reality, she was thinking, and not about work.

Zoey checked her computer and saw that another twenty minutes had passed. Great. Twenty minutes gone, and all she’d done was freak out about Max. The epitome of productivity.

Before she knew it, she was opening Slack, typing him a message.

Zoey Clarke (1:35 PM)
Can I talk to you about something?

She stared at the message until it burned holes into her eyes, and punched the backspace key.

Hey, so, you definitely don’t have to say anything and I get if this feels like it’s coming out of nowhere but I still—

Delete delete.

I wanted to tell you—

Delete delete delete delete.

Zoey groaned, pushing down on the key until the whole message was erased. She closed out of Slack and clicked back over to GitHub, where the work she was paid to do was sitting, waiting for her.

Max's new place was a moderately priced one-bedroom in the Mission that they'd found after scouring Zillow for hours. The bedroom actually had a door, and the kitchen was actually wide enough for two people to stand in it without being on top of each other, but Zoey's favorite part was that it was ten minutes closer. Max told her that was his, too.

Moving was a daylong task. It was almost five by the time they were done and sitting on their bench by the bay with takeout. The sun set so much earlier in late November. Zoey had always hated that, losing hours of sunshine as the days got colder, until her dad showed her how to find the stars. Then she didn’t mind as much.

Max handed her a set of wooden chopsticks and a napkin. “Thank you for helping me find a new place, Zo. I really appreciate it.”

"Of course. Anytime.”

”Well, hopefully not anytime. I hope this place lasts me a while.”

Zoey shrugged. ”Eh, a few years, give or take.”

First, Max cracked a smile, then they both eased into laughter. Their shoulders brushed, and Zoey felt electricity sizzle down her spine. She pointed a chopstick at Max's chow mein, and he tilted the container toward her.

"You know, I honestly thought I'd be stuck back at my old place a lot longer," Max mused as Zoey twirled the noodles around her chopsticks and lifted them to her mouth. "I'm glad I was finally able to tell you about the stuff with my dad, though. It's been kind of lonely these past two years, you know? I missed you."

The words warmed their way through Zoey's chest. She nudged at Max's arm with her elbow. "I missed you, too."

Max was quiet. Zoey stared at him, pondering the meaning of them missing each other. The words sank in heavy, his slight smile, his eyes flickering down her face. She felt so coffee-stained again.

Slowly, both of them leaned across their takeout containers, and then they were kissing. It was only a few seconds, closed lips on closed lips, and suddenly, Zoey was back in college again. She lifted a hand to his face and leaned in closer, but Max broke away.

“Uh…” A nervous-sounding laugh rocketed out of him. “Wow. Old habits, huh?”

“Uh-huh,” Zoey said. They kissed. She kissed Max. Max kissed her. It was all coming back, it was there already. She knew and she didn't know and it was weird and wonderful and happening.

Max coughed. Cleared his throat. “Got caught up in the moment, I guess.”

Zoey raised an eyebrow. “Is that all?”

“Yeah.” Max blinked, drawing his eyebrows together. “Yeah, I mean, I didn’t—I didn’t mean to kiss you. We just, you know, we kissed.”

The moment slammed to a stop. Zoey dropped her hand from Max's face and sat back against the bench. ”You didn’t mean to kiss me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

"Zoey?” He raised his eyebrows, clearly surprised by her reaction.

Confusion rattled around inside Zoey's stomach. "If you didn’t mean to kiss me, then why did you kiss me, Max?”

"I don’t know! That’s the point. I just got caught up in the nostalgia, or—or something.”

Zoey stared at Max, her lips just opening. The words stood still just inside her mouth. Then they ran.

“What if it meant something to me?”

He gaped at her, unnervingly silent. Zoey felt like her body wanted to turn itself inside out.

"What does that mean?" Max said. It came out at a whisper.

"I—" Zoey stopped herself with a sigh. She stared down at her dinner, now gone cold, poked at her chicken with a chopstick. When she looked up, he was still waiting.

Max furrowed his brow. "Zo—"

"I think I might have feelings for you again."

A wave crashed at the shoreline, loud enough to turn the heads of the joggers passing by. Zoey folded her arms around her chest, pulling her sweater closer to her skin. The wind had started to whistle.

"You have feelings for me?" Max asked. The corners of his lips had pulled down. 

She wanted to deny it, especially after seeing the downcast look on his face, but it had been eating at her so long, there was almost none of her left.

Zoey nodded.

Max puffed his cheeks full with air and braced his hands on his thighs. He rotated away from her to face the water. 

"I think I should go."

Panic. This was wrong. Everything was going so horribly wrong. How had they ended up here, three years later and so unrecognizably different from what they once were? Horrible. It shouldn't have ended up like this. This is all your fault, this is all your fault, this is all your fault. An explosion of guilt and fuckups. It was always goodbye.

"Max, wait, please! Can we talk about this?" Zoey's throat scratched, clawed the words out while he rose from the bench, packing away his food.

“I wish I could. I do. But…” Max shook his head. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry was all she heard.

She watched him walk away again.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t something either of them had brought up, but on Monday morning, Zoey and Max didn’t meet for their usual coffee.

She saw him when she caught the elevator, and a wormy feeling of embarrassment squirmed in her stomach. She pressed her lips together and tipped her head in a polite nod. Max nodded right back.

“Good morning.”

“Morning,” Max replied, shuffling against the back wall. Zoey stayed rooted to her spot, the pair of them like parallel lines. She focused her eyes on the floor.

The elevator was empty apart from the two of them, which meant there was nowhere to hide. To think that just a few days ago, Zoey was still holding her feelings for Max close to her chest like a secret. After the kiss, she felt like a billboard that screamed his name in bright, bold letters. She wished she could take it all back.

“How, uh, was your weekend?”

Zoey’s eyes shot up from the floor and glanced back over her shoulder. Max was smiling, but it was a forced one, the kind people wore to awkward situations.

“Quiet,” Zoey said. “Boring.”

Not much had happened since the bench. She’d spent most of the weekend wracking her brain for how things had gone so wrong, from her very first day at SPRQ Point to Leif's whole Distract Tobin scheme and the Exploratorium and Halloween and sitting on the couch in Max's tiny apartment as close as she had been to him in years. It was a mess of odd-ended puzzle pieces that just wouldn't fit together. Moments that all felt like part of a giant joke.

“How was yours?” she added as an afterthought, though she got the sense Max was just making small talk and wouldn’t mind if she just ignored him the rest of the elevator ride.

Max scratched the back of his head. “Good.”

He said nothing more.

Finally, the elevator reached the fourth floor and came to a stop. Max stood in place after the doors slid open, waving his hand out in front of him. “After you.”

Zoey returned the gesture with a terse nod, lengthening her strides to put distance between herself and Max even quicker. Before she could even make it past the receptionist’s desk, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Hey, uh, wait. Can we talk?”

Curse her too-short legs.

She pressed her lips together firmly and shrugged off Max’s hand. “I thought you couldn’t."

Max let out a wry chuckle. “Right. Well, I took some time over the weekend, uh… to think. And I’m ready to talk about it, Zo, if you are.”

Zoey felt all of the things she wanted to talk about with Max wrap around her throat and choke her. But all she could picture was his back as he walked away from her at their bench, at the Treehouse, again, and again, and again.

“Well, I don’t know if I am,” Zoey said quietly, and walked the rest of the way to her desk.

It was hard to feel wanted and unwanted all at once, to not know what was real and what was in her head. Zoey wasn’t sure if she could trust herself anymore. Because it did feel like something when Max kissed her on the bench. It felt like the first sunny day after a week of gray sky, like an espresso shot on a foggy mind, like coming home after a too-long vacation. She’d been missing that feeling for so long, not even realizing it.

But wanting something was one thing; keeping it was another.

While waiting for her computer to boot up, Zoey glanced over the top of her screen in the direction of Leif's standing desk. He was with Tobin, laughing at some axe-throwing video on his computer, not a care in the world on either of their faces. Why did Leif and Tobin get to have everything all figured out, while she and Max were sitting ducks?

“Listen up, everyone.”

Zoey looked away from the standing desk and saw Andy cross-armed on the stairs leading up to the Sandwich Bar. He liked to soapbox there at least once a day about team progress, assignments, whatever else he could run his mouth about for five or ten minutes. Zoey guessed it was a power trip sort of thing. She groaned silently and rotated her chair to face the stairs.

Andy clapped his hands together and pointed them toward the standing desk. “Leif is going to be the team leader for SPRQ Point Global.”

Zoey’s heart sank as she watched Leif walk up to the steps and awkwardly stand at Andy’s side, towering over him. She wanted to be the team leader for SPRQ Point Global. It was supposed to be her chance to prove herself, to show the guys she worked with that she was worthy of their respect, but it was going to Leif. The feeling was beyond disappointment. It was failure.

“Andy.” Zoey walked up to the fourth floor's manager, balling her fists at her sides to calm herself down. She didn't talk to Andy much—well, she didn't talk much to anyone at work apart from Max—but she did have to report to him for projects. He knew firsthand the kind of work she had been doing the past few months. "You picked Leif? Why? I've been at the top of team productivity for weeks!"

"You just don't seem like much of a leader, Zoey," Andy said boredly while half-ignoring her on the way back to his desk. "All you ever do is goof around with Max."

Zoey could feel her rage bubbling under the surface. Even after the lengths she had gone to, distancing herself from Max for so long, it was still all Andy had reduced her to. In a room full of coders, she was only a girl.

She took a deep breath. "I stay late more than anyone else on the team, I always get my assignments to you early, and I've caught more coding mistakes than anybody, including Leif."

Andy sat in his chair and flattened his lips into a slimy smile. Zoey watched him take a deep breath in through his nose, his shoulders rising, falling, preparing as if to deal with a toddler having a tantrum.

“You’re just not leadership material. Sorry.” Andy shrugged. “Be a team player and take it in stride, okay?”

Zoey nodded, her neck rigid. “Got it.”

She returned to her desk with slow, heavy steps and sat down with a deliberate loudness. Andy, that asshole. His sexism was underhanded, but it was as malicious as if he'd told her to get back in the kitchen and make him a sandwich.

Her computer made the sound of a Slack notification.

Max Richman (8:35 AM)
Zoey, I'm so sorry

Zoey's clenched jaw quivered as she read it over and over again. Zoey, I'm so sorry Zoey I'm so sorry so sorry so sorry so sorry.

Do you want me to kick his ass? I wasn't kidding. I'll kick his ass if you want me to.

She let out a sharp laugh and rubbed her hand over her eyes, which had started welling up. It was so freaking hard to feel bad about how things were with Max when he was making her feel so much better just by being himself.

Zoey typed back a response.

Zoey Clarke (8:36 AM)
No thanks.

She stared at the screen, her fingers relaxing against the keyboard, and exhaled. Before she knew it, four more words were written on the screen, and she was pressing send.

Let's talk about it.

Chapter Text

The meditation room door did not have a lock on it. Zoey knew this for a fact, having attempted to sequester herself inside the room just a few weeks after starting at SPRQ Point.

Tobin had been listening to a pulsating EDM song on his headphones at the time, and it was so loud that Zoey could hear the hum of it all the way over at her desk on the other end of the bullpen. None of her coworkers seemed to notice or care, but the sound crawled down her spine and itched at all the worst places, like ants spilling out of a hill.

The meditation room was the first empty room she had found, and she sat on the cold wood floor with her head between her knees, rocking back and forth until her skin stopped itching. Someone from PR had walked in with a yoga mat, seen her there, and quickly walked back out.

Zoey was not super keen for someone to walk in on her and Max’s conversation, but her confidence was quickly waning. It was now or never.

“You wanted to talk?” Max asked when they entered the low-lit room.

“Yeah.” Zoey nodded. She kneaded her left hand with her right and glanced up at Max. “I do, I just don’t really know what to say. So… maybe you could start?”

Max’s eyes flickered up from the floor, and his lips flattened into a sad sort of smile. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out. He cleared his throat. “You said you had feelings for me again. On the bench.”

Zoey nodded once. She did say that.

Max swallowed. Zoey could see his throat bob up and down, her eyes fixed to the spot. “I guess I was just surprised to hear you say that.”

“Really?” Zoey’s eyebrows bunched together. “Why?”

“Well, you were the one who broke up with me three years ago. You said we should stay away from each other when we both started here. I mean, we just started being friends again, Zo.”

The nickname zipped through Zoey like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart.

Max shook his head slightly. “Is this really what you want?”

Zoey inhaled a deep breath through her nose. “Max, I—”

Footsteps passing outside the room. Zoey’s heart jackhammered in her chest as she listened to them draw near, then recede. It was quiet again.

Max had been standing at a distance, kneading his hands together, occasionally looking down at the floor or up at the ceiling or to the side. He was always fidgety, usually seemed a little on edge, but there was more of a sharpness to his movements now. Zoey could feel it prickle her every time he shifted.

“What’s been bugging me, Max, is why are you really here?” Zoey asked. Max stopped fidgeting long enough to meet her eyes. “In San Francisco. Why didn’t you go to New York? You said you were supposed to, but you didn't.”

Max stopped fidgeting. His eyes darkened, clouded over with a look Zoey pinpointed as shame. “I did.”

Zoey froze. "What?"

He sighed. "What I told you was the truth, mostly, except I did go to New York after graduation. I even started at Columbia in the fall, started dental school, for my dad. He was thrilled. Told everyone he knew that I was gonna be the new star of the family practice. But I was so depressed, Zo. I was going to all those classes and feeling like shit because I didn’t want to be there. All I could think about was that the last time I was really happy was here,” Max took a shallow breath. “With you.”

Zoey sucked in her bottom lip. She dug her teeth into the inside of her mouth, tasting the sting of pain. There was an itchiness, then, behind her eyes.

"A few weeks in, I got on a plane to San Francisco without telling my dad. I wanted to reach out, to come visit you, but I didn't think you'd want to see me, so I chickened out. My dad figured out I was skipping class, and he tried to get me to come back, but I couldn't do it. He was furious, and rightfully so. I mean, it was crazy. I was throwing away my entire future. That’s why he cut me off, why I started working at the first startup I could find. When I started looking for jobs in the area, I saw there were openings at SPRQ Point. So I interviewed here, and I got the job. And maybe… maybe there was a small part of me that hoped I’d see you here, too.”

Max stopped talking. The corner of his mouth lifted in a lopsided smile.

“Glad I was right.”

Zoey puffed her cheeks full of air. She nodded repeatedly at the floor, then blew all the air out in one quick gust. “Wow.” It wasn’t a declaration of love, not really, but it made her chest buzz all the same.

“So that’s why I’m here,” Max said. “Because of you.”

Zoey laughed. She couldn't help it. She laughed and wiped at her eyes, with one hand, crossing the other over her chest. Max's forehead creased with concern. He stepped toward her and set a hand on her arm, and she fisted her hand in the collar of his shirt and pulled him to her.

Max returned the kiss in full force this time. He held Zoey's face with both hands as she clawed at his biceps to balance on her tiptoes, kissing his top lip, then sucking his bottom lip between her teeth. "Max," she whispered, tugging on his shirtsleeves.

"I got you," Max murmured, bracing his hands under Zoey's thighs and lifting her to his height. She giggled against his neck as he stumbled forward to the nearest curtained wall, laying Zoey's back against it. He remembered just what she liked.

Zoey wrapped her legs around Max's back, sliding a hand up the nape of his neck. Weaving her fingers through his hair, the curls she'd loved so much, pulling lightly. She could hear the catch in his breath, the way his kisses got faster. She remembered what he liked, too.

Max's lips just below her earlobe, his mouth sucking at the sensitive skin of her neck. Zoey tightened her legs around Max, pulling him closer to her, shifting her hips against him as the pressure between her thighs mounted. She wanted this, had been wanting him for weeks. Ever since he set foot on the fourth floor. 

Max bit just above the collar of her shirt, and Zoey sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth.

More footsteps.

Anxiety multiplied Zoey's heartbeat immediately. She broke the kiss and pressed a finger to Max's lips, craning her head over his shoulder to listen better. Once again, the footsteps receded, and she let out a relieved exhale. Max cleared his throat.

"I kind of forgot we were at work for a minute," he whispered sheepishly.

A laugh broke out of Zoey, and she slapped a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound. She released her legs from around Max and slid to the ground, landing awkwardly on one foot. "Me too." She glanced down at the bulge protruding from Max's pants, her cheeks blazing at the sight. "Um, Max…?"

Max looked down and covered himself with both hands, swearing under his breath. "I—fuck, that's embarrassing."

"No, it's…" Zoey blushed, rocking back on her heels. She smoothed out the wrinkles in Max’s shirt with her palm and cleared her throat. "I was really turned on just now."

Max swallowed heavily. "Me too."

Zoey leaned onto her tiptoes and pressed a soft kiss to Max's lips. Then another. It was only with great reluctance and a shaky sigh that she pulled away before a third. "We should go back before anyone notices we're missing."

"Yeah," Max agreed. He reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind Zoey's ear. "We should."

Zoey steeled herself with a deep breath, then marched off in the direction of the door. She looked back over her shoulder and saw Max still rooted to his spot, covering himself with an awkward smile. "I'm gonna need a minute."

With a quiet giggle and a lingering look at Max, Zoey opened the door and stepped back into the hallway.