Fic: Mythic Quest, "The Gross Way"

[anxietygrrl]

I tried for so long to be chill and sophisticated and not ship it. And then THAT HAPPENED? And now it only exists in GIF form? No. I do not accept it.

"The Gross Way"
Fandom: Mythic Quest
Pairing: Ian Grimm/Poppy Li
Rating: T
Words: 7000

The first time she said it was to David, just to clear up any misconceptions. At his constipated weasel expression, which she interpreted as confusion, she elaborated, “I mean sexually. When Ian and I say we love each other, which we’re very comfortable saying now, you’ve probably noticed–”

“I’ve got a lot of work to do and Montreal is on my ass nonstop so I haven’t really–”

“We don’t mean sexually.” She snorted to emphasize the absurdity. Imagine! Just imagine. She couldn’t. No matter how hard she tried. Which she didn’t. Because it was–

***

“What’s ‘the gross way’?” probed Jo. “Sexually? Romantically? As your female friend, I need clarity on this.” She paused. “As your superior, of course, I don’t care.”

“You’re not my– Are you?” Poppy squinted, and then flapped her hands to move the convo along. The blurriness of the MQ org chart was not the topic. “Yes, of course, sexually, romantically, all of that. I love Ian, and Ian loves me, but not, you know.” She grimaced.

“The gross way, got it. You and Ian physically repulse each other. Romantic love is disgusting.”

“Right. No! I mean, in this context–”

“Context is for the weak.”

“Then… yes.”

“Cool.” Jo quickly made a note on her phone, turned, and marched away.

“Is Jo my boss?” Poppy asked, leaning into the workspace of someone whose name she was almost 80% sure she knew.

She heard from across the office, “I said ‘superior’!”

***

“Thank you for telling me. Now, I have a question for you: do you think I waste a single nanosecond of my time thinking about your and Ian’s relationship?”

“Well, no, I guess not, but–”

“Do you think I’m ‘shipping’ you?” he said, with the most vicious airquotes she had ever seen.

“Of course not, I just–”

“Did you think you’d say ‘I love Ian’ and I’d clasp my hands and squeal, ‘Eeee! I knew it!’ and you’d have to let me down easy?”

“Okay, Brad, I get it–”

“Do you think you two are Mulder and Scully and we’re all constantly debating whether or not you should fuck?”

“Who are–”

“Get out of my office.”

***

“Get OUT of my office.” Carol pointed toward the door they had just walked through. “I do not need to hear it, I do not want to hear it.”

Poppy looked over her shoulder at Ian, who shrugged. “We just wanted to make sure you knew–that corporate knew–that everything was above board.” She mimed to emphasize her point, one hand a board, and the other hand…above it. “You know, we’re trying to be very emotionally open and available, and we thought you might have some questions.”

“I do not. And you should not be trying to be those things. You are at work.”

“Is it really that easy to put a hard boundary between work and life, though?” asked Ian.

“Yes,” said Carol.

“Especially for Poppy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Have you seen the rest of her life?” Ian continued to address Carol. “It’s not pretty.”

“I have a boyfriend now!” she protested. “What about your life?” She poked Ian in the abs, too hard, and they both said, “Ow.”

“What about it? It’s fully optimized. I want for nothing.”

“It’s hollow. Like a… like a hollow…like a tree, that’s hollow and rotted and…and a possum lives in it!”

“Are you the possum?” Ian tilted his head in an infuriating display of Ian-ness. “Aww.”

“I am not–”

“Fine,” Carol interrupted loudly. “You two win. I will file the Platonic Love Report with corporate.”

“Oh.” Poppy blinked, un-possumly. “Thank you.”

“I will explain that you have a boyfriend, outside of work, and that your work partner is merely like a tree you want to climb and live inside of.”

“What? No–”

“I will always give you shelter, Pop.”

Carol silently gathered her things from her desk and shut down her laptop. “I just want to make it clear that I’m not the…” Poppy trailed off as Carol brushed past her.

“You know,” said Ian, “I don’t think there is a Platonic Love Report.”

***

“So… like siblings,” said Rachel, with a very low degree of confidence. Dana said nothing.

“Ew, no.” Poppy pulled a face of mild disgust. “Siblings are awful. Do people really love their siblings?”

“Yes? I think so.”

Poppy scoffed. “Sure.”

“Okay, so, like best friends, then.” Rachel nodded, and looked to Dana for acknowledgment that she had met this challenge: she had solved the Riddle of Poppy and Ian. Dana said nothing.

Poppy withheld any accolades. With a sigh and an eye roll, she said, “That’s a very shallow and mundane way of looking at it, but I guess if that’s the way you need to understand it…”

“I think I get it.” Dana stepped forward. “The way you and Ian love each other…” She looked up and to her right, as if pondering the infinite heavens. “It’s on another plane.”

“Well, exactly.”

“It’s spiritual symbiosis.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“You don’t want to kiss him.”

“God, no!”

“You would never think about how soft his lips probably are.”

“Yuck.”

“Or how strong his arms are. Not too strong. Just strong enough to hold you against his hard, muscled body.”

Poppy backed up a tiny step as Dana’s descriptions became uncomfortably expressive. “Ugh, like… like hugging a…a bag of… a bag of staplers.”

“You and Ian, your love isn’t in this grubby little physical universe. It’s not the panting and heaving, sweaty, skin against skin, pleasure-soaked communion of his body with yours–”

“Augh!” Poppy mugged a comedia dell’arte mask of revulsion and fled the room.

Dana crossed her arms and smirked.

“I love you in the gross way, babe,” Rachel said.

***

“So you see the problem,” said Poppy.

Phil was frozen, eyes clenched shut, face the color of blanched cauliflower. The relentless, rhythmic whhrrsh-whhrrsh of the breast pump’s motor had already tunneled a new shaft into the cavern of his work-related nightmares. “Mmhm.” His head teetered rapidly in a way that could have been affirmative, negative, or sheer despair.

“It’s been weeks now, and of course we’ve sort of tabled it, because you know–baby. Obviously way more important.”

He had tried to leave. He had tried. As soon as she had barged in, declaring to an unseen someone outside, “This’ll do! It’s dark and quiet and no one’s in here,” Phil had jumped up from his desk, leaving his browser tabs and favorite pen vulnerable, and rushed toward the door.

But then she’d started talking at him, and it went, in the general direction of his life, downhill from there.

“Like everything was resolved, and then he had to go and be a COMPLETE IDIOT.” Whhrrsh-whhrrsh. “And then I thought, well, I’ll just leave it til I’m back from maternity leave.” She still had three months of maternity leave, but she had to come back to the office today, because…because dear god, what the fuck was she supposed to do for three…more…months?

“But then he came to the hospital, and he came to my house, and he kept coming back, and I didn’t even hate it. And he has to go and be sweet? And–and–” She forced the word out: “Paternal? Like what a fucking asshole, right?”

Whrrssh-whrrssh.

“Mmhm.” Phil had skipped lunch. He thought about the half-eaten Clif bar in his desk drawer.

“And let’s be honest here, I may look put together today–” Hair? Combed. Socks? Turned inside out from the day before. “But I am the most disgusting I have ever been. The last few months have been a horror show. I’ve barely slept, I’ve rarely showered. I am dripping, and leaking, and crusty with unknown residues. And he’s still there.”

Phil thought about the powerful THC gummies in his other desk drawer.

“Like where does he get off?” She lowered the pitch of her voice, much more than was strictly necessary. “‘Oh, I’m Ian Grimm. I spent absolutely ages telling Poppy and anyone else who would listen that I had NO romantic feelings for her. That was gross to me. But oh, now I’ve changed my mind and I’m all mwah mwah mwah mwah.’” It wasn’t a good impression–it sounded more like a cartoon dog than Ian, and the accent was…attempted–but it got the spirit across. “And then to never even mention it after? Unbelievable.”

Whrrssh-whrrsshhhh… The motor died, and there was a period of indistinct and slightly moist shuffling sounds that had Phil backing slowly toward the door. “God, I’m starving. Pumping really takes it out of you. Literally. Heh.” He heard the telltale sounds of rummaging. “Do you have any–? Ooh, gummies!”

“NO!” He rushed forward, his split-second calculation being that letting his breast-feeding boss go to the moon would be worse for him, professionally and psychologically, than accidentally seeing her boob. It was close, though.

“All right,” Poppy stood and moved away as he slammed the drawer. “You don’t have to be such a dick about it…” She squinted at him as she trailed off.

“Phil. It’s Phil.”

***

Ian paced. Not his usual pacing for an audience, a lion surveying his pride, imagining the savannah grasses thick under his velvety, masculine paws. He started and stopped, changed direction, bumped into furniture. Like a beetle trapped in a shoebox.

“This– What the fuck is this chair doing here?” He kicked it into a wobbly spin, and David ran over to save it before it toppled. When was he ever going to find another X4 at an estate sale?

“Just…living behind my desk, waiting for me to sit in it.” He gave its cervical support a reassuring pat.

“This is an untenable situation, David. Untenable!”

“Yeah, I’m getting that–”

“Un-ten-a-ble.”

“Have you asked your LLM about it? Maybe slap on the goggles and really dig in that way.”

“Of course I have,” Ian’s tone, while as discouraged as David had ever heard him, also clearly implied, Do you really think I’d come to you about this before AI? But he left it unsaid, which was something. “When I talked to AI Poppy about it she just turned into the Mr. Yuck face. Which means her training dataset is garbage, because there’s no way Poppy would know Mr. Yuck.”

“Whatever happened to Mr. Yuck?” David asked, a strong sense memory of drain cleaner and dank linoleum descending momentarily.

“I don’t know. Better child-proof caps, I guess. I already spiraled about babyproofing, David, can we please get back to me and Poppy?”

“And the untenable situation, right. Are we sure there’s not any way we could move the needle there? Because the you-and-Poppy drama is starting to bleed over into workplace morale, which, I know, is unprecedented–”

“I don’t appreciate sarcasm when I’m being vulnerable with you.”

“I guess I thought you were being vulnerable near me and I just coincidentally happened to be here.”

“This is serious shit, David. I kissed Poppy.”

“I know. We’ve all known about that for a while now.”

“And this isn’t, like, an HR thing,” he hastily explained. “She kissed me back. She hasn’t admitted it, ‘cause we haven’t really talked about it, but she definitely did.”

“You should probably talk about it. The two of you, with each other. Not each of you separately with everyone else in the company.”

“Poppy Li. My Poppy. I kissed her. With my mouth. My mouth, on her mouth.” He demo’ed with a two-handed gesture that David tried to look away from. “And hands…” He touched the back of his own head, and David thought Ian looked genuinely stricken in the moment before he turned toward the wall to do centering breaths.

David carefully made his way around the office furniture to stand beside Ian, approaching with calm, lateral motion, like he would a skittish donkey. (He really had to make more time to volunteer at the donkey sanctuary.) He stared at roughly the same spot on the wall that Ian was and reiterated, more kindly this time, “You really should talk to Poppy.”

“I do,” Ian said quietly. “We do. We talk all the time. Fucking constantly. About the baby, about the company, about games, about our families, about the fucking news. Everything but this. It’s…”

“Untenable.”

“Unbearable. And the worst thing–” He turned to David, more animated once again. “You know what the worst thing is, David? I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about kissing Poppy. Like there’s always a part of my brain that’s using resources thinking about it. David,” he said very seriously, laying a hand upon the other man’s shoulder, “I think about it more than I think about myself.”

David Brittlesbee, against his will, found himself honored. “Ian, are you…Are you confiding in me?” He would not cry.

Ian gave his shoulder a little squeeze. “I am.” After a long pause, he said, “Well?”

“Oh, you want a response.” David swallowed, searching for the right thing to say. “I think…” He paused, and then decided to just storm the castle. It wasn’t like things could get weirder around here. “I think you love Poppy.”

“Of course I do,” said Ian. He sighed, and said, “We’re partners,” in the saddest way the sentence had ever been uttered.

“Ian.” They were positioned a little awkwardly to manage a reciprocal shoulder squeeze, but David tried to put it into his voice. “You love Poppy.”

“Like… in the gross way? That’s what she calls it.”

“I know.”

“Because it would be so…you know…” He sighed again, with a terrible wistfulness. “Heinous.”

“And maybe that was true, in the past. But people change. Relationships change. You gotta allow for some evolution.”

Ian absorbed this. “A new version.” He nodded, slowly and then more vigorously, as he grappled a concept and leglocked it into submission. “Ian and Poppy 3.0!”

“Sure, that’s one way to think about it– Oh, we’re done,” David said, as Ian was already halfway out the door. “Good luck, I guess?”

Ian popped his head back in. “Thanks, man.”

“Any time, man!” he told the now empty doorway. He settled into his like-new ergonomic throne for a bit of contemplation. “Huh. Evolution.”.

***

“I FUCKIN’ KNEW IT!”

“Fuck you very much, Shannon, very mature.” Ian ended the video call on her cackling.

***

After the MQ movie fell through, various streaming services expressed interest in acquiring the rights for a series. Among these were: ploobi, tbs+, murbl, The San Diego Zoo and Safari Park in partnership with Jack Links Jerky and Best Buy, and Crackle.

Poppy was on a Zoom with the production team at the latter, giving them some background on story. Or, she had been on that call, but that meeting had ended twenty minutes ago, and since then she had been on what had turned into a very productive head-to-head Zoom with one of the executive producers.

“Like I was saying: I used to think broccoli was gross–”

“Broccoli is gross, though.”

“It’s just an example. Use any other food you want.”

“Sun Chips.”

“Okay. The point is, now I love broccoli. Sometimes I crave broccoli.”

“I don’t believe you, but I get the point.”

“People grow. We expand. We contain myriad possibilities. We shouldn’t cut ourselves off from them just because we’re scared.”

“He ate the pizza,” Poppy mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing. Thank you so much, Joe Manganiello. This has been incredibly helpful.”

***

“Hey, Sue, you’re a normal person, right?” Ian had scoured the building looking for consensus and had, at last, ended up in this forsaken place.

“I used to be!”

“O…kay. Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. Do you think people can change?”

“Oh yes!” She nodded enthusiastically. “They can get much worse!”

He backed silently out of her windowless lair. This was not the end of his labyrinth.

***

“Hey, Carol!” Carol looked up at the aggressive knocking on her regrettably open door. “Hey, girlfriend.”

“Oh god.”

Poppy swanned in with a casualness and bravado that suggested pure desperation. She plopped into the available chair and pulled her little legs up under her oversized hoodie, like an adorable but venomous-when-defensive small animal who should come with a Steve Irwin voiceover.

“Aren’t you still on maternity leave? For another six weeks?”

“Yes, it’s the worst. I mean, it’s great, of course, but I’m a little bit, you know.”

Carol knew, but probably not the same thing that Poppy did. “You literally shouldn’t be here.” In this building or in this office.”Where is your–? I should not ask this. Where is your baby?”

“With Ian,” she said, with no trace of anxiety.

“You left a human baby with that man?”

.”They’re fine. She loves him. It’s a little annoying actually. Hey, so Carol…”

“Here we go,” Carol muttered. Why didn’t she keep her damn door closed?

“Romantic love isn’t real, right? Like it’s just in movies, and like, stupid books. It doesn’t really happen like that in real life.” It was a scoffing, declarative statement. Wide, possum-brown eyes blinked up at her with secret hope from behind smudged glasses. “Do you, um. Do you read those books?”

Shit, thought Carol. She glanced at the time, hauled her purse out of her desk, and stood with a heavy sigh. “If we’re gonna talk about this, we’re going off premises. And we’re gonna get white girl wasted.”

Poppy scrambled up eagerly and trailed her down the hall. “I can’t really–Well, I guess I could have a little– It’s really a matter of timing– You know what? What the hell. Girls’ night! Margaritas!”

Give me strength, thought Carol, as she saw Poppy excitedly texting the only other adult women she knew. “You’re buying.”

***

“Right, but like–” Poppy leaned over the sugared rim and slurped a little out of her drink, something hideous and Midori-colored. “I’m not really, though, am I?”

“Yup” and “Yes” chorused round the booth, with Jo a late echo of, “...for fuck’s sake.”

“Okay, but ‘in love’.” Her loosey goosey quote fingers made her look like a drunk little Nixon. “That’s like… What even is that?” She scrutinized Rachel and Dana. “Like, you’re best friends. But you also have sex thoughts! And sometimes you want to hug them so much your stomach hurts?”

Rachel evaluated this for a second, looked at her partner, and said, “...Basically.”

Poppy wasn’t listening. The girls’ night energy she had begun the evening with (“Woo! Margaritas! Shots!”) had slipped down alcohol’s predictable slope to morose and confessional within two rounds. “And once like…you saw a picture of them as a little kid… and it made you want to cry so much you had to leave the room?”

“Jesus Christ,” Carol addressed her Negroni.

“You guys,” Poppy whispered, and she wouldn’t continue until they all leaned in. “I kissed him. I kissed Ian.”

They all leaned back immediately.

“We know.”

“You told so many people.”

“Still just the once?”

“Maybe,” said Dana, commanding the table’s attention. She gave the impression of casually tossing out wisdom the way she casually tossed back tequila. “Maybe the reason you’ve never been in love before is because your whole adult life someone has been parked in that space.”

Poppy gasped.

“Like a squatter,” said Jo.

“What do I do?” asked Poppy. “Do I have to move?”

Under her breath, Rachel said, “Like to the fuckin’ Netherlands?”

“Maybe by the time I come back from leave, it’ll have gone away. Cuz it’s just hormones. Or like a fever. Hormone fever. I’ll just…wait it out.”

Jo shook her head. “A squatter problem doesn't just go away. It requires street justice.”

“Look,” Carol interrupted, before the glint in Jo’s eye could become a fully powered laser beam. While it would make her life easier in some ways, she was a good enough person that she didn’t really want to see Ian Grimm get eaten by coyotes, or whatever. “Wild thought. What if instead of being weird as hell all the time, the two of you tried having a normal heterosexual relationship?”

Poppy frowned. “Is that allowed?”

“I hear it works for some people,” said Rachel.

“Again, this is not a matter for…” Carol felt the corporate essence drain from her body. “Sure.” If it would keep them out of everybody’s hair, she would give them a golden Permission to Fuck certificate.

“He doesn’t love me, though. Not in-love love me. He thinks…” Her lower lip quivered, and the other women steeled themselves for the final implosion. Rachel took Poppy’s glass by the stem and slid it out of the blast zone. “He thinks it’s gross!” She crumpled onto the sticky bar table, a heap of snot and despondency, shaking with hiccupy sobs.

Dana’s hand hovered over Poppy’s back for a few seconds, then landed in a series of gingerly taps. “Maybe he changed his mind.”

“Yeah, you did,” Rachel said, she thought helpfully.

“He better have.” Jo slugged back her White Russian and slammed the rocks glass hard enough that the other women jumped a little in their seats. “He better.”

***

NOTHING’S RIGHT I’M TORN–

Poppy stirred a little, then drifted back to sleep.

NOTHING’S RIGHT I’M TORN–

“Whaa?” She fumbled for her phone in the back of the parked Waymo. “Ian?”

“Hey, Pop.” There was a knock, and she turned to see him at the window. They were in front of his house. “You want me to bring her out, or do you want to come in?” He looked her over. “I think you should come in.”

She went in. She laid down on his tragically expensive and uncomfortable sofa, iPad with the baby monitor app open propped on her chest. He filled a bottle of water, poured in a pouch of electrolytes, capped and shook it, inserted a straw, and set it down on the floor beside her.

“How was she?”

“Great.”

“That’s good.”

“How was girls’ night?”

“Good.”

“You probably needed a night out, huh?”

“I guess.” She rolled over and reached for the water. “My tolerance is for shit now. I got white girl wasted on two garga–.” She paused, and enunciated, “Margaritas.” She drank until the glass water bottle was half-empty. “Thanks.”

“You know I consider your adequate hydration my responsibility.”

“Somebody’s gotta do it.” She laid back down. “I think the Waymo left.”

“It did.”

“Can we stay over?”

“Absolutely.”

She stared up at him from the sofa. He stared down at her from a respectful distance. “Ian?”

“Yeah?”

“‘M’love you.”

“Love you too, Pop.” He picked up the half-full bottle and refilled it.

***

David had just poked his head in to say, “Hey, just poking my head in about–”

“Can’t talk now, David, I've got a ton of work to prep for this launch.”

“What launch?” David was instantly clammy. “Am I being boxed out again? Is Montreal in on this?”

Ian briefly shifted his focus away from his monitor to pin him with a disappointed look. “My launch. 3.0.”

“Three point–? Oh. The you and Poppy thing.” He slumped in relief. Whatever agita lay down this road, at least he wasn't out of the loop. “So you guys talked? Hey, that’s great.”

Ian didn’t answer, but his typing got louder.

“So you haven’t talked about it.”

“She’s back from maternity leave in three weeks, that doesn’t give me a lot of time for this rollout.”

“You’re…rolling out telling her you love her.”

Ian sighed the way he did when someone wasn’t seeing his vision.

“Maybe telling her that I’m in love with her. There’s a complex decision tree here, lot of paths to game out. Requires concentration.” He stopped typing and massaged his temples in a way that looked more like frustration than flow state.

“Okay, well, I’ll let you get back to it.”

“Hang on, man.” Ian stopped him at the door, his surface confidence flaking off to reveal an undercoat of pleading. “Would you…? Can I focus group some of these scenarios on you?”

David shut the office door. If there had been a chair in reach, he would have spun it around and sat backwards. “Lay it on me.” The ‘bro’ was silent.

“Option one.” Ian’s presentation required him to stand, so David backed up and gave him the floor. “Don’t tell her. Love her in secret. Very medieval knight, very chivalrous. Suffer nobly in silence. Maybe go on a pilgrimage.” He paused for feedback.

“That’s– Don’t get me wrong, I can see it in theory. But I don’t think that’s going to work, man. She’d find out eventually.”

“No, the whole thing is in this scenario it would be a secret.”

“Uh huh, I get that. How long do you think you could be noble without telling someone about it?”

“Option two. I tell her I’m in love with her, but she fails to be in love with me back. I gracefully exit the company to spare her the embarrassment.”

“To spare her…”

“Option three: In-game marriage proposal.”

“NO.” David’s receding cortisol flood surged anew.

“Okay, well, options four though eight are all kind of in that same vein.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled through a document. “Hot air balloon. Announcement on Jimmy Kimmel.” He looked up at David’s strangled groan. “But if you think that’s going too big…”

David rubbed his forehead, and tried out his best ‘hey, kiddo’ tone. It usually worked on the donkeys. “I get that you want to go big. That’s very you. But is it very Poppy?”

Ian tapped his phone against his thumb ring, a rapidly ticking metronome of his internal angst. Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap. Reluctantly, he concluded, “No.”

“Is there an option where the two of you, I don’t know, have an honest adult conversation about it and decide what comes next?”

Ian cringed, but he conceded, “That does feel more Poppy.” He looked down at his phone and started typing. “I’ll put it on the list.”

***

Poppy adjusted her headphones and tried to ignore how the Gen Z music they played on triple j now sounded, well, bad to her. Was this how Ian felt about Millennial culture, even though it was objectively good? Then she frowned, because she was thinking about Ian again, when she was supposed to be thinking about her code. Her beautiful, orderly, unromantic code. Of the thing she built with–

“What are you doing here?”

Her headphones fell off as she let out a surprised yelp, but Ian was the one who looked like he’d been caught.

“Working.”

“But you’re on leave for two more weeks.”

“I just wanted to check in on our baby.”

He scanned the office, including under the desk. “Where–?”

“Not the– my actual baby. Elysium. I wanted to come work on Elysium.”

“But you can do that from home.”

“I don’t like my setup at home as much as the one here.”

“We can get you a new setup. 72 inch OLEDs, a new Herman Miller, whatever you want.”

“Ian, do you want me to leave?”

“Of course not.” He craned his neck to look at her screen. “You didn’t see a file open on that called ‘Strategic Planning Document’, did you?”

“Ew, no.”

“There’s a mind map…?”

“Is this something I should know about?”

“It’s a personal project.”

“Okay, well, don’t worry, I didn’t see the secret map of your mind.” He seemed anxious, so she smiled to let him know she wasn’t annoyed. Even though she was a little annoyed. “I needed to not be at home,” she explained. “Walls closing in, you know?”

“Yeah, sorry. I just didn’t expect to see you here today. Haven’t seen you much at all since the night you drooled on my couch.”

“Not true, you saw me the next morning. I remember because you made me eat something revolting.”

“It was spinach and egg whites with broiled hamachi.”

“Fish. For breakfast.”

“You need your leafy greens and Omega-3s!”

“Yuck.” She got pins and needles in her heart from making him laugh.

“So where is she?”

“Left her in the car.”

“The nanny lead worked out, huh?”

“Yes, thank you, I have now hired a part-time nanny so I can feel full-time inadequate. I’m now my daughter’s third-favorite person, it’s fantastic.”

“Come on, Pop, you’re an amazing mom.”

Part of her knew she had baited him into saying it, but she liked hearing it so much. “I’ll be bringing her here with me most of the time, though, I hope you don’t mind. I mean, I’ll still do it even if you do, but I hope you won’t.” She had dangled it, on purpose, and he did the trick she wanted.

“Why would I mind? That’ll be awesome.” She knew he was already re-furnishing the office in his head: custom modded Bumbos, Herman Miller high chairs, Playpen themed playpens.

Stop it, she thought. Stop being wonderful when I’m deeply familiar with all the ways you’re not.

She had counted those ways, repeatedly, over her weeks of avoiding him. But it would inevitably lead her to enumerate her own flaws, of which there were many, all of which he also knew. How could either of them love each other when they knew each other so well? And yet they did. And she did, especially, in the way she wasn’t supposed to, had never wanted to, and now couldn’t stop.

All because this fucking asshole went and kissed the hell out of her all those months ago.

“Okay, well…good.”

In this very room. Right over there.

“I think,” he said, and then paused. It wasn’t lag; he was building energy, nervous but serious. She wasn’t prepared for serious Ian. The micro twitches in his face filled her with dread. “If we’re going to be cohabitating again.”

Oh no, she thought in the gap.

“We should probably discuss the incident.”

“What incident?” fell out of her mouth immediately.

“The– You know, the, the– Are you kidding me?” She crinkled her nose, and he stared at her, dumbfounded. Now this was lag. “The night you didn’t go to the Netherlands. You came back here…” He waved a hand in an et cetera gesture.

“A lot’s happened since then.” Maybe, maybe she could get away with this. “I had kind of a major life change.”

“Which is why we shelved it, but I thought at some point we would circle back.”

“Circle back to…?” If she could pull this off, it might be the solution. Let his ego take the hit. He wasn’t the lovesick one, it was only fair.

He spread his arms beseechingly as he insisted, “You must remember this.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Are you really–? We kissed.”

“We did WHAT?”

She probably played that a little too big, but he was too busy contracting in on himself to notice. “No.” He shook his head, backing away from her. “I will not be gaslit about this. It happened. I know you remember.”

“Of course I remember,” she rushed to say, regretting her stupid gambit entirely. She hadn’t thought it would actually hurt him. “I was only joking! I’m sorry, I suck. It’s…awkward, that’s all. It was just such a weird thing!”

He was relieved, but not quite ready to forgive her. “‘Weird’ is what you’re going with?”

“Well wasn’t it?”

“It was a black swan event, stipulated, but I would not say the kiss itself was weird.”

“Sorry, when you wanted to discuss this, were you looking for a review?”

“Well not if it was so disgusting you had to memory hole it, no.”

“I didn’t say disgusting, of course it wasn’t disgusting, that’s what was weird!” She tried to think how to be honest without being forthright. “It was…well executed. Technically immaculate. Conceptually intriguing. And if you have any notes for me, please keep them to yourself.”

“Conceptually–? It was a kiss, not a Christopher Nolan movie.”

“Ugh, could you imagine if a kiss lasted as long as Oppenheimer?”

He considered it. “I mean, I think ideally it would open with kissing and then the rest of the runtime would be filled out with other stuff.”

Poppy was aghast. “But as long as Oppenheimer?”

“God, I want to make a Sting reference so badly right now, but you wouldn’t get it, why do I still always want you to get it?”

“I don’t know. I get you. Isn’t that enough? For the rest there’s Wikipedia.”

He smiled, but it faded quickly. “You do get me.”

“You get me, too. And maybe you’re right, maybe we did need to address it. We did the gross thing, and it wasn’t that gross. Fine. So what?” There was suddenly a lump in her throat, like she’d swallowed a Nerds Cluster. “People kiss all the time and it doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“Not like that, though,” he said softly.

“It was a random glitch. It didn’t even change anything! We’ve been fine. We’ve actually been really good this whole time. Nothing has to–” She cleared her throat, but could not dislodge the lump, which now felt like a cluster of Nerds Clusters. “Nothing has to change.” She coughed. “Now we’ve acknowledged it, and we can move forwa–” Her voice gave out for a moment. “...Like normal,” she croaked. “Right back to–” A spasm of dry hacks finally broke her chain of logic. “For FUCK’S sake,” she gritted out as he rushed over to rub her back while she recovered.

He hesitated over a Hydroflask and a Super Big Gulp on the corner of the desk, then handed her the plastic cup. She took a careful sip, but still dribbled on her shirt.

“Jesus Christ, Pop, are you okay?”

She looked up at him with wide, wet eyes. He looked worried, maybe even scared. Scared and a little bit sad. Scared, sad, and annoyingly, utterly lovely.

“I’m in love with you,” she said.

He backed away as if she’d shoved him.

“Barf, right?” She shrugged helplessly, drawing her hands into her sleeves and wrapping her arms around her torso like an ineffective cuirass. “Sorry. I know it breaks everything. I didn’t mean to, if that helps.” Ian had covered his face with his hand while he was buffering. She didn’t think she wanted to see his expression when it fully rendered. “If you need to leave the company, I totally understand.”

That stalled his processing. Brow furrowed, he dropped his hand. “Why would I have to leave the company?”

“Because…” Would she? Yes, she would play the card. “I’m a single mum. This kind of stress isn’t good for me.”

“But why would I have to leave if you’re the one with the problem?”

“Because you’re the cause of the problem!”

“How does that–?” He shook his head. “No. If I was in love with you and you weren’t in love with me, I would leave the company. I already decided.”

“Why would you have decided that?!”

“Because I’m in love with you!”

Poppy clapped both hands over her mouth and blared “WHAT?” into them.

“Was that not–? Is that not clear?”

“With me?”

“Yes! Who else would I be in love with?”

“In love. Like, the–?”

“The gross way, yeah.”

Her insides were fizzing. “But you’ve always said…” she whispered.

“I know. So have you.”

“I know.”

“You said it a lot.”

“I meant it at the time.” She took a moment to reevaluate. “Ninety percent of the time. Maybe it was a teensy bit of denial? I don’t even know now!” She stopped at a sudden realization. “Wait, so you were jealous of Storm,” she accused gleefully.

“No,” he denied. “That was not sexual jealousy.”

“But if he came back now?”

“I would trust you to make the right decision, and internally lose my fucking mind in ways that would cause me to act out inappropriately.”

She found this both touchingly honest and surprisingly insightful. “Wow, you really have thought this through, haven’t you?”

“Exhaustively, yes. It’s been most of my mental load for a while now.”

“I…may have spent some of my limited spare time obsessing. Not as productively, apparently.”

“I knew it,” he said with pride. “I knew that was a paradigm shifting kiss.”

“Oh, did I shift your paradigm? Maybe I will take that feedback now.” She grinned, and they began to draw toward one another. He smiled in a way that made heat rise up her neck, victorious and humble and exclusively for her.

He brushed the back of her hand with his, and their fingers hooked together. “Poppy Li. I would like to kiss you for at least as long as Tenet.”

She laughed, and her whole body leaned toward him with a sigh. “We’re such a cliche.”

“I know,” he said, happily resigned to it.

“We thought we were so cool and unique, and now look at us. We’ll never live it down. We played ourselves, Grimm.”

“Or we evolved. Like into a new–”

“Like an expansion,” it occurred to her. “We’re expanding the map…of our relationship.”

“Sure,” he agreed, “but what if it was actually more like a new version? 1.0, Mentor and Protege. 2.0, Equal Partners: Love and Respect. 3.0…you know.”

“Oh. You have thought about this.”

“Yes, and I can’t believe you said it first. I had so many good ideas for this pitch. Do you like Jimmy Kimmel?”

“Oh no, Ian. What’s our history with grand gestures?”

“Mixed?”

“Mixed at best.”

“That wasn’t the only option. I could show you my strategic planning document.”

“Is that really what you want to show me? Do you have a hard copy?”

“Poppy, please, I’m being earnest here, don’t make it vulgar.”

“You said ‘load’ earlier.”

“Oh my god.”

“3.0 is sex, though, right?”

“Yes, of course it’s sex, but it’s also, you know…”

“Maybe if you said it again,” she suggested, closing the remaining space between them. “Just to make it absolutely clear we’re on the same page before I get on board with this expansion.”

“Maybe if you said it again–”

She took his face in her hands and pressed her lips to his. It was, even with all the leadup, shockingly fervent. He responded with matching intensity, his arms going all the way around her in ways both previously fantasized and excitingly new. She gripped his hair and panted into his mouth as they separated, “I think I could do a Memento.”

He laughed, and briefly rested his forehead against hers. “I’m in love with you.” With sincere determination, he said, “I really think we can do this, Pop.”

Over time Poppy had learned the difference between trusting him and basking in his reflected overconfidence. “I actually really believe you,” she said. He hugged her, fiercely and mostly non-erotically, and that was when she finally started to cry a little.

***

Ian wiped his eyes on his sleeve as he squeezed Poppy tight. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to see all his feelings; there were just a lot of them stacking up in his inventory right now and he needed to prioritize.

“Let’s do it,” she was saying. She was also stroking his back in a way that made it difficult to focus on her words. He pulled back just enough for upper body separation. “I’m in,” she said firmly. “What the hell. Let’s do 3.0.” To see her near-maniacal sense of purpose suddenly fixed on this particular objective was fucking exhilarating. He kissed her stubborn, beautiful face. She pulled him to her so hard that the obvious next step was to back her toward the desk and lift her on top of it. He registered her tankard of Dr. Pepper crashing to the floor, but they’d have time to worry about replacing the carpet later.

“See, it really is more like a new version,” he said against her throat, “‘cause we’re adding new features.”

Her hands slipped under his shirt. “Yeah we are!”

God, he loved her.

***

“It is gross.” Jo stared, goggle-eyed but unable to look away.

“Is it, though?” mused Dana, stepping to one side to get a better angle.

“Aww, HEA, you guys,” said Rachel.

“Stop shipping it and figure out how we can monetize their potential wedding and virtually certain divorce.”

“Aw, Brad. You’re a romantic. You said ‘virtually’ certain.”

David approached the rapidly agglomerating clump of employees in the bullpen with equal parts suspicion and FOMO. “What are we all looking at?”

“I’m not,” Dana tilted her head, ”...sure.”

David turned. “Oh, hey, he finally said something, good for him. Oh… Oh. Holy mother of Zeus!” He turned and flailed at them, “All right, move along! Quit rubbernecking, for cripes’ sake, just…get back to work. We’re all going to have to live with this later.”

“You hush,” said Carol. “We earned this.”

Mikey the Tester sidled up to the edge of the group, unacknowledged. “Whoa,” he said. “I did not see this coming.”

***

The day Poppy officially returned from maternity leave, after two very restorative weeks during which she’d learned many interesting things–like that Ian owned way more candles than she would have expected–there was a browser tab open, full screen, to–also interesting–poets.org.

A Post-It with a large, Sharpied asterisk was stuck to the monitor at the end of the first line, with another placed underneath the entire text.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. *
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.


* 1. Gross.The first time she said it was to David, just to clear up any misconceptions. At his constipated weasel expression, which she interpreted as confusion, she elaborated, “I mean sexually. When Ian and I say we love each other, which we’re very comfortable saying now, you’ve probably noticed–”

“I’ve got a lot of work to do and Montreal is on my ass nonstop so I haven’t really–”

“We don’t mean sexually.” She snorted to emphasize the absurdity. Imagine! Just imagine. She couldn’t. No matter how hard she tried. Which she didn’t. Because it was–

***

“What’s ‘the gross way’?” probed Jo. “Sexually? Romantically? As your female friend, I need clarity on this.” She paused. “As your superior, of course, I don’t care.”

“You’re not my– Are you?” Poppy squinted, and then flapped her hands to move the convo along. The blurriness of the MQ org chart was not the topic. “Yes, of course, sexually, romantically, all of that. I love Ian, and Ian loves me, but not, you know.” She grimaced.

“The gross way, got it. You and Ian physically repulse each other. Romantic love is disgusting.”

“Right. No! I mean, in this context–”

“Context is for the weak.”

“Then… yes.”

“Cool.” Jo quickly made a note on her phone, turned, and marched away.

“Is Jo my boss?” Poppy asked, leaning into the workspace of someone whose name she was almost 80% sure she knew.

She heard from across the office, “I said ‘superior’!”

***

“Thank you for telling me. Now, I have a question for you: do you think I waste a single nanosecond of my time thinking about your and Ian’s relationship?”

“Well, no, I guess not, but–”

“Do you think I’m ‘shipping’ you?” he said, with the most vicious airquotes she had ever seen.

“Of course not, I just–”

“Did you think you’d say ‘I love Ian’ and I’d clasp my hands and squeal, ‘Eeee! I knew it!’ and you’d have to let me down easy?”

“Okay, Brad, I get it–”

“Do you think you two are Mulder and Scully and we’re all constantly debating whether or not you should fuck?”

“Who are–”

“Get out of my office.”

***

“Get OUT of my office.” Carol pointed toward the door they had just walked through. “I do not need to hear it, I do not want to hear it.”

Poppy looked over her shoulder at Ian, who shrugged. “We just wanted to make sure you knew–that corporate knew–that everything was above board.” She mimed to emphasize her point, one hand a board, and the other hand…above it. “You know, we’re trying to be very emotionally open and available, and we thought you might have some questions.”

“I do not. And you should not be trying to be those things. You are at work.”

“Is it really that easy to put a hard boundary between work and life, though?” asked Ian.

“Yes,” said Carol.

“Especially for Poppy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Have you seen the rest of her life?” Ian continued to address Carol. “It’s not pretty.”

“I have a boyfriend now!” she protested. “What about your life?” She poked Ian in the abs, too hard, and they both said, “Ow.”

“What about it? It’s fully optimized. I want for nothing.”

“It’s hollow. Like a… like a hollow…like a tree, that’s hollow and rotted and…and a possum lives in it!”

“Are you the possum?” Ian tilted his head in an infuriating display of Ian-ness. “Aww.”

“I am not–”

“Fine,” Carol interrupted loudly. “You two win. I will file the Platonic Love Report with corporate.”

“Oh.” Poppy blinked, un-possumly. “Thank you.”

“I will explain that you have a boyfriend, outside of work, and that your work partner is merely like a tree you want to climb and live inside of.”

“What? No–”

“I will always give you shelter, Pop.”

Carol silently gathered her things from her desk and shut down her laptop. “I just want to make it clear that I’m not the…” Poppy trailed off as Carol brushed past her.

“You know,” said Ian, “I don’t think there is a Platonic Love Report.”

***

“So… like siblings,” said Rachel, with a very low degree of confidence. Dana said nothing.

“Ew, no.” Poppy pulled a face of mild disgust. “Siblings are awful. Do people really love their siblings?”

“Yes? I think so.”

Poppy scoffed. “Sure.”

“Okay, so, like best friends, then.” Rachel nodded, and looked to Dana for acknowledgment that she had met this challenge: she had solved the Riddle of Poppy and Ian. Dana said nothing.

Poppy withheld any accolades. With a sigh and an eye roll, she said, “That’s a very shallow and mundane way of looking at it, but I guess if that’s the way you need to understand it…”

“I think I get it.” Dana stepped forward. “The way you and Ian love each other…” She looked up and to her right, as if pondering the infinite heavens. “It’s on another plane.”

“Well, exactly.”

“It’s spiritual symbiosis.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“You don’t want to kiss him.”

“God, no!”

“You would never think about how soft his lips probably are.”

“Yuck.”

“Or how strong his arms are. Not too strong. Just strong enough to hold you against his hard, muscled body.”

Poppy backed up a tiny step as Dana’s descriptions became uncomfortably expressive. “Ugh, like… like hugging a…a bag of… a bag of staplers.”

“You and Ian, your love isn’t in this grubby little physical universe. It’s not the panting and heaving, sweaty, skin against skin, pleasure-soaked communion of his body with yours–”

“Augh!” Poppy mugged a comedia dell’arte mask of revulsion and fled the room.

Dana crossed her arms and smirked.

“I love you in the gross way, babe,” Rachel said.

***

“So you see the problem,” said Poppy.

Phil was frozen, eyes clenched shut, face the color of blanched cauliflower. The relentless, rhythmic whhrrsh-whhrrsh of the breast pump’s motor had already tunneled a new shaft into the cavern of his work-related nightmares. “Mmhm.” His head teetered rapidly in a way that could have been affirmative, negative, or sheer despair.

“It’s been weeks now, and of course we’ve sort of tabled it, because you know–baby. Obviously way more important.”

He had tried to leave. He had tried. As soon as she had barged in, declaring to an unseen someone outside, “This’ll do! It’s dark and quiet and no one’s in here,” Phil had jumped up from his desk, leaving his browser tabs and favorite pen vulnerable, and rushed toward the door.

But then she’d started talking at him, and it went, in the general direction of his life, downhill from there.

“Like everything was resolved, and then he had to go and be a COMPLETE IDIOT.” Whhrrsh-whhrrsh. “And then I thought, well, I’ll just leave it til I’m back from maternity leave.” She still had three months of maternity leave, but she had to come back to the office today, because…because dear god, what the fuck was she supposed to do for three…more…months?

“But then he came to the hospital, and he came to my house, and he kept coming back, and I didn’t even hate it. And he has to go and be sweet? And–and–” She forced the word out: “Paternal? Like what a fucking asshole, right?”

Whrrssh-whrrssh.

“Mmhm.” Phil had skipped lunch. He thought about the half-eaten Clif bar in his desk drawer.

“And let’s be honest here, I may look put together today–” Hair? Combed. Socks? Turned inside out from the day before. “But I am the most disgusting I have ever been. The last few months have been a horror show. I’ve barely slept, I’ve rarely showered. I am dripping, and leaking, and crusty with unknown residues. And he’s still there.”

Phil thought about the powerful THC gummies in his other desk drawer.

“Like where does he get off?” She lowered the pitch of her voice, much more than was strictly necessary. “‘Oh, I’m Ian Grimm. I spent absolutely ages telling Poppy and anyone else who would listen that I had NO romantic feelings for her. That was gross to me. But oh, now I’ve changed my mind and I’m all mwah mwah mwah mwah.’” It wasn’t a good impression–it sounded more like a cartoon dog than Ian, and the accent was…attempted–but it got the spirit across. “And then to never even mention it after? Unbelievable.”

Whrrssh-whrrsshhhh… The motor died, and there was a period of indistinct and slightly moist shuffling sounds that had Phil backing slowly toward the door. “God, I’m starving. Pumping really takes it out of you. Literally. Heh.” He heard the telltale sounds of rummaging. “Do you have any–? Ooh, gummies!”

“NO!” He rushed forward, his split-second calculation being that letting his breast-feeding boss go to the moon would be worse for him, professionally and psychologically, than accidentally seeing her boob. It was close, though.

“All right,” Poppy stood and moved away as he slammed the drawer. “You don’t have to be such a dick about it…” She squinted at him as she trailed off.

“Phil. It’s Phil.”

***

Ian paced. Not his usual pacing for an audience, a lion surveying his pride, imagining the savannah grasses thick under his velvety, masculine paws. He started and stopped, changed direction, bumped into furniture. Like a beetle trapped in a shoebox.

“This– What the fuck is this chair doing here?” He kicked it into a wobbly spin, and David ran over to save it before it toppled. When was he ever going to find another X4 at an estate sale?

“Just…living behind my desk, waiting for me to sit in it.” He gave its cervical support a reassuring pat.

“This is an untenable situation, David. Untenable!”

“Yeah, I’m getting that–”

“Un-ten-a-ble.”

“Have you asked your LLM about it? Maybe slap on the goggles and really dig in that way.”

“Of course I have,” Ian’s tone, while as discouraged as David had ever heard him, also clearly implied, Do you really think I’d come to you about this before AI? But he left it unsaid, which was something. “When I talked to AI Poppy about it she just turned into the Mr. Yuck face. Which means her training dataset is garbage, because there’s no way Poppy would know Mr. Yuck.”

“Whatever happened to Mr. Yuck?” David asked, a strong sense memory of drain cleaner and dank linoleum descending momentarily.

“I don’t know. Better child-proof caps, I guess. I already spiraled about babyproofing, David, can we please get back to me and Poppy?”

“And the untenable situation, right. Are we sure there’s not any way we could move the needle there? Because the you-and-Poppy drama is starting to bleed over into workplace morale, which, I know, is unprecedented–”

“I don’t appreciate sarcasm when I’m being vulnerable with you.”

“I guess I thought you were being vulnerable near me and I just coincidentally happened to be here.”

“This is serious shit, David. I kissed Poppy.”

“I know. We’ve all known about that for a while now.”

“And this isn’t, like, an HR thing,” he hastily explained. “She kissed me back. She hasn’t admitted it, ‘cause we haven’t really talked about it, but she definitely did.”

“You should probably talk about it. The two of you, with each other. Not each of you separately with everyone else in the company.”

“Poppy Li. My Poppy. I kissed her. With my mouth. My mouth, on her mouth.” He demo’ed with a two-handed gesture that David tried to look away from. “And hands…” He touched the back of his own head, and David thought Ian looked genuinely stricken in the moment before he turned toward the wall to do centering breaths.

David carefully made his way around the office furniture to stand beside Ian, approaching with calm, lateral motion, like he would a skittish donkey. (He really had to make more time to volunteer at the donkey sanctuary.) He stared at roughly the same spot on the wall that Ian was and reiterated, more kindly this time, “You really should talk to Poppy.”

“I do,” Ian said quietly. “We do. We talk all the time. Fucking constantly. About the baby, about the company, about games, about our families, about the fucking news. Everything but this. It’s…”

“Untenable.”

“Unbearable. And the worst thing–” He turned to David, more animated once again. “You know what the worst thing is, David? I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about kissing Poppy. Like there’s always a part of my brain that’s using resources thinking about it. David,” he said very seriously, laying a hand upon the other man’s shoulder, “I think about it more than I think about myself.”

David Brittlesbee, against his will, found himself honored. “Ian, are you…Are you confiding in me?” He would not cry.

Ian gave his shoulder a little squeeze. “I am.” After a long pause, he said, “Well?”

“Oh, you want a response.” David swallowed, searching for the right thing to say. “I think…” He paused, and then decided to just storm the castle. It wasn’t like things could get weirder around here. “I think you love Poppy.”

“Of course I do,” said Ian. He sighed, and said, “We’re partners,” in the saddest way the sentence had ever been uttered.

“Ian.” They were positioned a little awkwardly to manage a reciprocal shoulder squeeze, but David tried to put it into his voice. “You love Poppy.”

“Like… in the gross way? That’s what she calls it.”

“I know.”

“Because it would be so…you know…” He sighed again, with a terrible wistfulness. “Heinous.”

“And maybe that was true, in the past. But people change. Relationships change. You gotta allow for some evolution.”

Ian absorbed this. “A new version.” He nodded, slowly and then more vigorously, as he grappled a concept and leglocked it into submission. “Ian and Poppy 3.0!”

“Sure, that’s one way to think about it– Oh, we’re done,” David said, as Ian was already halfway out the door. “Good luck, I guess?”

Ian popped his head back in. “Thanks, man.”

“Any time, man!” he told the now empty doorway. He settled into his like-new ergonomic throne for a bit of contemplation. “Huh. Evolution.”.

***

“I FUCKIN’ KNEW IT!”

“Fuck you very much, Shannon, very mature.” Ian ended the video call on her cackling.

***

After the MQ movie fell through, various streaming services expressed interest in acquiring the rights for a series. Among these were: ploobi, tbs+, murbl, The San Diego Zoo and Safari Park in partnership with Jack Links Jerky and Best Buy, and Crackle.

Poppy was on a Zoom with the production team at the latter, giving them some background on story. Or, she had been on that call, but that meeting had ended twenty minutes ago, and since then she had been on what had turned into a very productive head-to-head Zoom with one of the executive producers.

“Like I was saying: I used to think broccoli was gross–”

“Broccoli is gross, though.”

“It’s just an example. Use any other food you want.”

“Sun Chips.”

“Okay. The point is, now I love broccoli. Sometimes I crave broccoli.”

“I don’t believe you, but I get the point.”

“People grow. We expand. We contain myriad possibilities. We shouldn’t cut ourselves off from them just because we’re scared.”

“He ate the pizza,” Poppy mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing. Thank you so much, Joe Manganiello. This has been incredibly helpful.”

***

“Hey, Sue, you’re a normal person, right?” Ian had scoured the building looking for consensus and had, at last, ended up in this forsaken place.

“I used to be!”

“O…kay. Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. Do you think people can change?”

“Oh yes!” She nodded enthusiastically. “They can get much worse!”

He backed silently out of her windowless lair. This was not the end of his labyrinth.

***

“Hey, Carol!” Carol looked up at the aggressive knocking on her regrettably open door. “Hey, girlfriend.”

“Oh god.”

Poppy swanned in with a casualness and bravado that suggested pure desperation. She plopped into the available chair and pulled her little legs up under her oversized hoodie, like an adorable but venomous-when-defensive small animal who should come with a Steve Irwin voiceover.

“Aren’t you still on maternity leave? For another six weeks?”

“Yes, it’s the worst. I mean, it’s great, of course, but I’m a little bit, you know.”

Carol knew, but probably not the same thing that Poppy did. “You literally shouldn’t be here.” In this building or in this office.”Where is your–? I should not ask this. Where is your baby?”

“With Ian,” she said, with no trace of anxiety.

“You left a human baby with that man?”

.”They’re fine. She loves him. It’s a little annoying actually. Hey, so Carol…”

“Here we go,” Carol muttered. Why didn’t she keep her damn door closed?

“Romantic love isn’t real, right? Like it’s just in movies, and like, stupid books. It doesn’t really happen like that in real life.” It was a scoffing, declarative statement. Wide, possum-brown eyes blinked up at her with secret hope from behind smudged glasses. “Do you, um. Do you read those books?”

Shit, thought Carol. She glanced at the time, hauled her purse out of her desk, and stood with a heavy sigh. “If we’re gonna talk about this, we’re going off premises. And we’re gonna get white girl wasted.”

Poppy scrambled up eagerly and trailed her down the hall. “I can’t really–Well, I guess I could have a little– It’s really a matter of timing– You know what? What the hell. Girls’ night! Margaritas!”

Give me strength, thought Carol, as she saw Poppy excitedly texting the only other adult women she knew. “You’re buying.”

***

“Right, but like–” Poppy leaned over the sugared rim and slurped a little out of her drink, something hideous and Midori-colored. “I’m not really, though, am I?”

“Yup” and “Yes” chorused round the booth, with Jo a late echo of, “...for fuck’s sake.”

“Okay, but ‘in love’.” Her loosey goosey quote fingers made her look like a drunk little Nixon. “That’s like… What even is that?” She scrutinized Rachel and Dana. “Like, you’re best friends. But you also have sex thoughts! And sometimes you want to hug them so much your stomach hurts?”

Rachel evaluated this for a second, looked at her partner, and said, “...Basically.”

Poppy wasn’t listening. The girls’ night energy she had begun the evening with (“Woo! Margaritas! Shots!”) had slipped down alcohol’s predictable slope to morose and confessional within two rounds. “And once like…you saw a picture of them as a little kid… and it made you want to cry so much you had to leave the room?”

“Jesus Christ,” Carol addressed her Negroni.

“You guys,” Poppy whispered, and she wouldn’t continue until they all leaned in. “I kissed him. I kissed Ian.”

They all leaned back immediately.

“We know.”

“You told so many people.”

“Still just the once?”

“Maybe,” said Dana, commanding the table’s attention. She gave the impression of casually tossing out wisdom the way she casually tossed back tequila. “Maybe the reason you’ve never been in love before is because your whole adult life someone has been parked in that space.”

Poppy gasped.

“Like a squatter,” said Jo.

“What do I do?” asked Poppy. “Do I have to move?”

Under her breath, Rachel said, “Like to the fuckin’ Netherlands?”

“Maybe by the time I come back from leave, it’ll have gone away. Cuz it’s just hormones. Or like a fever. Hormone fever. I’ll just…wait it out.”

Jo shook her head. “A squatter problem doesn't just go away. It requires street justice.”

“Look,” Carol interrupted, before the glint in Jo’s eye could become a fully powered laser beam. While it would make her life easier in some ways, she was a good enough person that she didn’t really want to see Ian Grimm get eaten by coyotes, or whatever. “Wild thought. What if instead of being weird as hell all the time, the two of you tried having a normal heterosexual relationship?”

Poppy frowned. “Is that allowed?”

“I hear it works for some people,” said Rachel.

“Again, this is not a matter for…” Carol felt the corporate essence drain from her body. “Sure.” If it would keep them out of everybody’s hair, she would give them a golden Permission to Fuck certificate.

“He doesn’t love me, though. Not in-love love me. He thinks…” Her lower lip quivered, and the other women steeled themselves for the final implosion. Rachel took Poppy’s glass by the stem and slid it out of the blast zone. “He thinks it’s gross!” She crumpled onto the sticky bar table, a heap of snot and despondency, shaking with hiccupy sobs.

Dana’s hand hovered over Poppy’s back for a few seconds, then landed in a series of gingerly taps. “Maybe he changed his mind.”

“Yeah, you did,” Rachel said, she thought helpfully.

“He better have.” Jo slugged back her White Russian and slammed the rocks glass hard enough that the other women jumped a little in their seats. “He better.”

***

NOTHING’S RIGHT I’M TORN–

Poppy stirred a little, then drifted back to sleep.

NOTHING’S RIGHT I’M TORN–

“Whaa?” She fumbled for her phone in the back of the parked Waymo. “Ian?”

“Hey, Pop.” There was a knock, and she turned to see him at the window. They were in front of his house. “You want me to bring her out, or do you want to come in?” He looked her over. “I think you should come in.”

She went in. She laid down on his tragically expensive and uncomfortable sofa, iPad with the baby monitor app open propped on her chest. He filled a bottle of water, poured in a pouch of electrolytes, capped and shook it, inserted a straw, and set it down on the floor beside her.

“How was she?”

“Great.”

“That’s good.”

“How was girls’ night?”

“Good.”

“You probably needed a night out, huh?”

“I guess.” She rolled over and reached for the water. “My tolerance is for shit now. I got white girl wasted on two garga–.” She paused, and enunciated, “Margaritas.” She drank until the glass water bottle was half-empty. “Thanks.”

“You know I consider your adequate hydration my responsibility.”

“Somebody’s gotta do it.” She laid back down. “I think the Waymo left.”

“It did.”

“Can we stay over?”

“Absolutely.”

She stared up at him from the sofa. He stared down at her from a respectful distance. “Ian?”

“Yeah?”

“‘M’love you.”

“Love you too, Pop.” He picked up the half-full bottle and refilled it.

***

David had just poked his head in to say, “Hey, just poking my head in about–”

“Can’t talk now, David, I've got a ton of work to prep for this launch.”

“What launch?” David was instantly clammy. “Am I being boxed out again? Is Montreal in on this?”

Ian briefly shifted his focus away from his monitor to pin him with a disappointed look. “My launch. 3.0.”

“Three point–? Oh. The you and Poppy thing.” He slumped in relief. Whatever agita lay down this road, at least he wasn't out of the loop. “So you guys talked? Hey, that’s great.”

Ian didn’t answer, but his typing got louder.

“So you haven’t talked about it.”

“She’s back from maternity leave in three weeks, that doesn’t give me a lot of time for this rollout.”

“You’re…rolling out telling her you love her.”

Ian sighed the way he did when someone wasn’t seeing his vision.

“Maybe telling her that I’m in love with her. There’s a complex decision tree here, lot of paths to game out. Requires concentration.” He stopped typing and massaged his temples in a way that looked more like frustration than flow state.

“Okay, well, I’ll let you get back to it.”

“Hang on, man.” Ian stopped him at the door, his surface confidence flaking off to reveal an undercoat of pleading. “Would you…? Can I focus group some of these scenarios on you?”

David shut the office door. If there had been a chair in reach, he would have spun it around and sat backwards. “Lay it on me.” The ‘bro’ was silent.

“Option one.” Ian’s presentation required him to stand, so David backed up and gave him the floor. “Don’t tell her. Love her in secret. Very medieval knight, very chivalrous. Suffer nobly in silence. Maybe go on a pilgrimage.” He paused for feedback.

“That’s– Don’t get me wrong, I can see it in theory. But I don’t think that’s going to work, man. She’d find out eventually.”

“No, the whole thing is in this scenario it would be a secret.”

“Uh huh, I get that. How long do you think you could be noble without telling someone about it?”

“Option two. I tell her I’m in love with her, but she fails to be in love with me back. I gracefully exit the company to spare her the embarrassment.”

“To spare her…”

“Option three: In-game marriage proposal.”

“NO.” David’s receding cortisol flood surged anew.

“Okay, well, options four though eight are all kind of in that same vein.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled through a document. “Hot air balloon. Announcement on Jimmy Kimmel.” He looked up at David’s strangled groan. “But if you think that’s going too big…”

David rubbed his forehead, and tried out his best ‘hey, kiddo’ tone. It usually worked on the donkeys. “I get that you want to go big. That’s very you. But is it very Poppy?”

Ian tapped his phone against his thumb ring, a rapidly ticking metronome of his internal angst. Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap. Reluctantly, he concluded, “No.”

“Is there an option where the two of you, I don’t know, have an honest adult conversation about it and decide what comes next?”

Ian cringed, but he conceded, “That does feel more Poppy.” He looked down at his phone and started typing. “I’ll put it on the list.”

***

Poppy adjusted her headphones and tried to ignore how the Gen Z music they played on triple j now sounded, well, bad to her. Was this how Ian felt about Millennial culture, even though it was objectively good? Then she frowned, because she was thinking about Ian again, when she was supposed to be thinking about her code. Her beautiful, orderly, unromantic code. Of the thing she built with–

“What are you doing here?”

Her headphones fell off as she let out a surprised yelp, but Ian was the one who looked like he’d been caught.

“Working.”

“But you’re on leave for two more weeks.”

“I just wanted to check in on our baby.”

He scanned the office, including under the desk. “Where–?”

“Not the– my actual baby. Elysium. I wanted to come work on Elysium.”

“But you can do that from home.”

“I don’t like my setup at home as much as the one here.”

“We can get you a new setup. 72 inch OLEDs, a new Herman Miller, whatever you want.”

“Ian, do you want me to leave?”

“Of course not.” He craned his neck to look at her screen. “You didn’t see a file open on that called ‘Strategic Planning Document’, did you?”

“Ew, no.”

“There’s a mind map…?”

“Is this something I should know about?”

“It’s a personal project.”

“Okay, well, don’t worry, I didn’t see the secret map of your mind.” He seemed anxious, so she smiled to let him know she wasn’t annoyed. Even though she was a little annoyed. “I needed to not be at home,” she explained. “Walls closing in, you know?”

“Yeah, sorry. I just didn’t expect to see you here today. Haven’t seen you much at all since the night you drooled on my couch.”

“Not true, you saw me the next morning. I remember because you made me eat something revolting.”

“It was spinach and egg whites with broiled hamachi.”

“Fish. For breakfast.”

“You need your leafy greens and Omega-3s!”

“Yuck.” She got pins and needles in her heart from making him laugh.

“So where is she?”

“Left her in the car.”

“The nanny lead worked out, huh?”

“Yes, thank you, I have now hired a part-time nanny so I can feel full-time inadequate. I’m now my daughter’s third-favorite person, it’s fantastic.”

“Come on, Pop, you’re an amazing mom.”

Part of her knew she had baited him into saying it, but she liked hearing it so much. “I’ll be bringing her here with me most of the time, though, I hope you don’t mind. I mean, I’ll still do it even if you do, but I hope you won’t.” She had dangled it, on purpose, and he did the trick she wanted.

“Why would I mind? That’ll be awesome.” She knew he was already re-furnishing the office in his head: custom modded Bumbos, Herman Miller high chairs, Playpen themed playpens.

Stop it, she thought. Stop being wonderful when I’m deeply familiar with all the ways you’re not.

She had counted those ways, repeatedly, over her weeks of avoiding him. But it would inevitably lead her to enumerate her own flaws, of which there were many, all of which he also knew. How could either of them love each other when they knew each other so well? And yet they did. And she did, especially, in the way she wasn’t supposed to, had never wanted to, and now couldn’t stop.

All because this fucking asshole went and kissed the hell out of her all those months ago.

“Okay, well…good.”

In this very room. Right over there.

“I think,” he said, and then paused. It wasn’t lag; he was building energy, nervous but serious. She wasn’t prepared for serious Ian. The micro twitches in his face filled her with dread. “If we’re going to be cohabitating again.”

Oh no, she thought in the gap.

“We should probably discuss the incident.”

“What incident?” fell out of her mouth immediately.

“The– You know, the, the– Are you kidding me?” She crinkled her nose, and he stared at her, dumbfounded. Now this was lag. “The night you didn’t go to the Netherlands. You came back here…” He waved a hand in an et cetera gesture.

“A lot’s happened since then.” Maybe, maybe she could get away with this. “I had kind of a major life change.”

“Which is why we shelved it, but I thought at some point we would circle back.”

“Circle back to…?” If she could pull this off, it might be the solution. Let his ego take the hit. He wasn’t the lovesick one, it was only fair.

He spread his arms beseechingly as he insisted, “You must remember this.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Are you really–? We kissed.”

“We did WHAT?”

She probably played that a little too big, but he was too busy contracting in on himself to notice. “No.” He shook his head, backing away from her. “I will not be gaslit about this. It happened. I know you remember.”

“Of course I remember,” she rushed to say, regretting her stupid gambit entirely. She hadn’t thought it would actually hurt him. “I was only joking! I’m sorry, I suck. It’s…awkward, that’s all. It was just such a weird thing!”

He was relieved, but not quite ready to forgive her. “‘Weird’ is what you’re going with?”

“Well wasn’t it?”

“It was a black swan event, stipulated, but I would not say the kiss itself was weird.”

“Sorry, when you wanted to discuss this, were you looking for a review?”

“Well not if it was so disgusting you had to memory hole it, no.”

“I didn’t say disgusting, of course it wasn’t disgusting, that’s what was weird!” She tried to think how to be honest without being forthright. “It was…well executed. Technically immaculate. Conceptually intriguing. And if you have any notes for me, please keep them to yourself.”

“Conceptually–? It was a kiss, not a Christopher Nolan movie.”

“Ugh, could you imagine if a kiss lasted as long as Oppenheimer?”

He considered it. “I mean, I think ideally it would open with kissing and then the rest of the runtime would be filled out with other stuff.”

Poppy was aghast. “But as long as Oppenheimer?”

“God, I want to make a Sting reference so badly right now, but you wouldn’t get it, why do I still always want you to get it?”

“I don’t know. I get you. Isn’t that enough? For the rest there’s Wikipedia.”

He smiled, but it faded quickly. “You do get me.”

“You get me, too. And maybe you’re right, maybe we did need to address it. We did the gross thing, and it wasn’t that gross. Fine. So what?” There was suddenly a lump in her throat, like she’d swallowed a Nerds Cluster. “People kiss all the time and it doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“Not like that, though,” he said softly.

“It was a random glitch. It didn’t even change anything! We’ve been fine. We’ve actually been really good this whole time. Nothing has to–” She cleared her throat, but could not dislodge the lump, which now felt like a cluster of Nerds Clusters. “Nothing has to change.” She coughed. “Now we’ve acknowledged it, and we can move forwa–” Her voice gave out for a moment. “...Like normal,” she croaked. “Right back to–” A spasm of dry hacks finally broke her chain of logic. “For FUCK’S sake,” she gritted out as he rushed over to rub her back while she recovered.

He hesitated over a Hydroflask and a Super Big Gulp on the corner of the desk, then handed her the plastic cup. She took a careful sip, but still dribbled on her shirt.

“Jesus Christ, Pop, are you okay?”

She looked up at him with wide, wet eyes. He looked worried, maybe even scared. Scared and a little bit sad. Scared, sad, and annoyingly, utterly lovely.

“I’m in love with you,” she said.

He backed away as if she’d shoved him.

“Barf, right?” She shrugged helplessly, drawing her hands into her sleeves and wrapping her arms around her torso like an ineffective cuirass. “Sorry. I know it breaks everything. I didn’t mean to, if that helps.” Ian had covered his face with his hand while he was buffering. She didn’t think she wanted to see his expression when it fully rendered. “If you need to leave the company, I totally understand.”

That stalled his processing. Brow furrowed, he dropped his hand. “Why would I have to leave the company?”

“Because…” Would she? Yes, she would play the card. “I’m a single mum. This kind of stress isn’t good for me.”

“But why would I have to leave if you’re the one with the problem?”

“Because you’re the cause of the problem!”

“How does that–?” He shook his head. “No. If I was in love with you and you weren’t in love with me, I would leave the company. I already decided.”

“Why would you have decided that?!”

“Because I’m in love with you!”

Poppy clapped both hands over her mouth and blared “WHAT?” into them.

“Was that not–? Is that not clear?”

“With me?”

“Yes! Who else would I be in love with?”

“In love. Like, the–?”

“The gross way, yeah.”

Her insides were fizzing. “But you’ve always said…” she whispered.

“I know. So have you.”

“I know.”

“You said it a lot.”

“I meant it at the time.” She took a moment to reevaluate. “Ninety percent of the time. Maybe it was a teensy bit of denial? I don’t even know now!” She stopped at a sudden realization. “Wait, so you were jealous of Storm,” she accused gleefully.

“No,” he denied. “That was not sexual jealousy.”

“But if he came back now?”

“I would trust you to make the right decision, and internally lose my fucking mind in ways that would cause me to act out inappropriately.”

She found this both touchingly honest and surprisingly insightful. “Wow, you really have thought this through, haven’t you?”

“Exhaustively, yes. It’s been most of my mental load for a while now.”

“I…may have spent some of my limited spare time obsessing. Not as productively, apparently.”

“I knew it,” he said with pride. “I knew that was a paradigm shifting kiss.”

“Oh, did I shift your paradigm? Maybe I will take that feedback now.” She grinned, and they began to draw toward one another. He smiled in a way that made heat rise up her neck, victorious and humble and exclusively for her.

He brushed the back of her hand with his, and their fingers hooked together. “Poppy Li. I would like to kiss you for at least as long as Tenet.”

She laughed, and her whole body leaned toward him with a sigh. “We’re such a cliche.”

“I know,” he said, happily resigned to it.

“We thought we were so cool and unique, and now look at us. We’ll never live it down. We played ourselves, Grimm.”

“Or we evolved. Like into a new–”

“Like an expansion,” it occurred to her. “We’re expanding the map…of our relationship.”

“Sure,” he agreed, “but what if it was actually more like a new version? 1.0, Mentor and Protege. 2.0, Equal Partners: Love and Respect. 3.0…you know.”

“Oh. You have thought about this.”

“Yes, and I can’t believe you said it first. I had so many good ideas for this pitch. Do you like Jimmy Kimmel?”

“Oh no, Ian. What’s our history with grand gestures?”

“Mixed?”

“Mixed at best.”

“That wasn’t the only option. I could show you my strategic planning document.”

“Is that really what you want to show me? Do you have a hard copy?”

“Poppy, please, I’m being earnest here, don’t make it vulgar.”

“You said ‘load’ earlier.”

“Oh my god.”

“3.0 is sex, though, right?”

“Yes, of course it’s sex, but it’s also, you know…”

“Maybe if you said it again,” she suggested, closing the remaining space between them. “Just to make it absolutely clear we’re on the same page before I get on board with this expansion.”

“Maybe if you said it again–”

She took his face in her hands and pressed her lips to his. It was, even with all the leadup, shockingly fervent. He responded with matching intensity, his arms going all the way around her in ways both previously fantasized and excitingly new. She gripped his hair and panted into his mouth as they separated, “I think I could do a Memento.”

He laughed, and briefly rested his forehead against hers. “I’m in love with you.” With sincere determination, he said, “I really think we can do this, Pop.”

Over time Poppy had learned the difference between trusting him and basking in his reflected overconfidence. “I actually really believe you,” she said. He hugged her, fiercely and mostly non-erotically, and that was when she finally started to cry a little.

***

Ian wiped his eyes on his sleeve as he squeezed Poppy tight. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to see all his feelings; there were just a lot of them stacking up in his inventory right now and he needed to prioritize.

“Let’s do it,” she was saying. She was also stroking his back in a way that made it difficult to focus on her words. He pulled back just enough for upper body separation. “I’m in,” she said firmly. “What the hell. Let’s do 3.0.” To see her near-maniacal sense of purpose suddenly fixed on this particular objective was fucking exhilarating. He kissed her stubborn, beautiful face. She pulled him to her so hard that the obvious next step was to back her toward the desk and lift her on top of it. He registered her tankard of Dr. Pepper crashing to the floor, but they’d have time to worry about replacing the carpet later.

“See, it really is more like a new version,” he said against her throat, “‘cause we’re adding new features.”

Her hands slipped under his shirt. “Yeah we are!”

God, he loved her.

***

“It is gross.” Jo stared, goggle-eyed but unable to look away.

“Is it, though?” mused Dana, stepping to one side to get a better angle.

“Aww, HEA, you guys,” said Rachel.

“Stop shipping it and figure out how we can monetize their potential wedding and virtually certain divorce.”

“Aw, Brad. You’re a romantic. You said ‘virtually’ certain.”

David approached the rapidly agglomerating clump of employees in the bullpen with equal parts suspicion and FOMO. “What are we all looking at?”

“I’m not,” Dana tilted her head, ”...sure.”

David turned. “Oh, hey, he finally said something, good for him. Oh… Oh. Holy mother of Zeus!” He turned and flailed at them, “All right, move along! Quit rubbernecking, for cripes’ sake, just…get back to work. We’re all going to have to live with this later.”

“You hush,” said Carol. “We earned this.”

Mikey the Tester sidled up to the edge of the group, unacknowledged. “Whoa,” he said. “I did not see this coming.”

***

The day Poppy officially returned from maternity leave, after two very restorative weeks during which she’d learned many interesting things–like that Ian owned way more candles than she would have expected–there was a browser tab open, full screen, to–also interesting–poets.org.

A Post-It with a large, Sharpied asterisk was stuck to the monitor at the end of the first line, with another placed underneath the entire text.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. *
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.


* 1. Gross.