“It’s a hot one, guys!” he finally declares as he turns to go over to his desk. I smile at his enthusiasm as I bend over my work desk to get back to wiring the electrical stalling device I’ve been working on. When it’s done, it should be able to cause a blackout in any building for up to ten minutes. The goal is an hour, but we’ll work our way up to it through tests. It’s just a matter of the tension between radius and power and working against the struggle of that unequal distribution.
Most of the day, the team floods in and out of stations, hard at work for next week’s trial run. Tito told me they’ll take a handful of our tech and test it out in the real world. I wish I could go to see it in action, but I have an inkling it will be dangerous. It’s mostly because Tito winced when I mentioned how cool it would be to go. I dropped it after that.
After a long day of helping move the teams along, aiding with fusions, guiding electrical processing, and coding, everyone heads out to go to dinner together. I’m on my way out, too, following close behind the crowd, when I notice Tito is still lost in his work at his desk. I turn towards him, and one of the guys calls for me.
“Come on, Summers!”
“Yeah, I’ll catch up.” I turn my head to answer, not taking my eyes off Tito. The room grows quiet as I backtrack to him, and he turns his head slightly when he hears me.
“You should go eat with the others.”
“And you shouldn’t be so bossy.”
He tilts his head, raising an eyebrow, and I wince.I probably shouldn’t have said that.
“Well, I am your boss--” He turns back to look up at me, and I pull a chair beside him with a laugh.
“What’s this?” I point to the glassy pieces he’s connecting to a little navigation add-on for weapons.
“It’s going to make the map visible in real-time.”
“Hm,” I observe as he forms what looks to be an eyepiece. “Interesting.”
“You know, you really don’t have to stay—”
“Did you think I was being sarcastic?” I nudge him, and he turns his whole body towards me.
“Scout, I just… it’s— well, I’m—”
“You should make a translation device to decipher your frequent word-fumbling.” I laugh, and he tries to hide his grin as he turns back to his work.
“It would be useless to create something like that.”
“Why, because you’re too hard to read?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“It would be useless because it only happens when I’m with you.”
Both of us freeze the instant he says it, and Tito flushes, points of red high in his cheekbones. My heart stutters in my chest, the words tumbling over and over in my head,it only happens when I’m with you, but I know I need to give him an out. He can’t have meant to say it.
“You’re lying,” I say teasingly. “That’s absolutely ridiculous.”
He’s very still, though, his green eyes searching mine as if he’s trying to work out a solution to a problem he can’t fix, which is ridiculous, because I don’t think there’s a problem in this entire world that he’s not smart enough to solve.
“I’m not,” he says softly.
“Sure.” I force out a laugh, unable to let myself take him seriously. I can’t think of where we’d go from there.
“I’m really not.” His hand is on mine before I realize it, and my heart flips in my chest again.
“Tito—” My voice is a warning. Warning him off of this—me—us. His hand doesn’t move, his green eyes still fixed on mine, and I see a flicker of something there that makes my chest ache. A longing that I recognize, to be seen, to be wanted, to be appreciated.
Or maybe I’m reading way too fucking much into all of this. All I know is that the tension I feel now has been building since the day I walked into this room. Now my stomach is tightening, my mind is racing, my heart is beating a mile a minute, and I don’t want him to move his hand.
“You have soft hands for someone who works so hard,” he finally says, not quite meeting my eyes as he pulls away. It scares me that I didn’t want him to do that, that I wanted him to keep holding on for, I don’t know how long.