Turn 43 of 233

Ask him how he's been since work. Good he says. He asks me out. I turn him down gently. the both of us realize a relationship won't work because we are too different. I am also not attracted to him like that

Lena lets the crew talk around her for a while. Derek sits at the end of the booth nursing a glass of whatever he ordered and he doesn't try to insert himself into the conversation about the Angels' rotation and he doesn't try to impress Frank or Marco and Lena watches him not do these things and she thinks: he's trying. He's genuinely trying. He just doesn't know how to be here.

When there's a gap in the noise — Tuki is in the bathroom, Frank is arguing with Ray about something — Lena turns to him and says, "So. How've you been?"

Derek straightens. He adjusts his glasses with one finger, the reflexive gesture of a man who has rehearsed conversations in his head and is now surprised to be having one.

"Good," he says. "Good. Work's the same. They moved me to the second floor after you — after you left. New cube. Better window, actually." He laughs, short and thin.

"I can see the parking lot now instead of the fire escape."

"Living the dream," Lena says, and she means it without cruelty. She drinks her beer.

"I went by your desk," Derek says. "Last Monday. I had — I was going to ask you if you wanted to get coffee. Priya said you weren't there anymore. She wouldn't say anything else. I looked you up on LinkedIn and you'd deleted it." He pauses.

"I didn't know where else to find you. I was at a client meeting on Fourth Street today and I saw the sign on the construction site and I — I don't know. I recognized you. From across the lot."

He looks at her when he says it. Not at her body this time. At her face. And Lena sees the thing she suspected — the attraction is real, it's been real for weeks, maybe months, but it's the attraction of a man who built it from a distance, from the safety of a cubicle and a hallway and the particular fantasy of a woman he watched but never touched. The reality of her — six-three, barefoot, golden, belching, farting, covered in construction dirt and sweat — is not what he fantasized about. She can see it landing on him in pieces. The awe and the confusion and the slow dawning recognition that the woman in front of him is not the woman he watched eat a donut at her desk.

"Can I ask you something?" Derek says.

"Sure."

"Would you want to get dinner sometime? This week? Or — I don't know. A movie. Whatever you want."

Lena looks at him. She looks at his loosened tie and his laptop bag and his soft hands and his glasses and the particular earnestness of a man who has finally said the thing he's been thinking for months and is terrified of the answer. And she feels — nothing. Not contempt. Not pity. Not attraction. Nothing. He is a decent man who watched her from across an office and built a version of her that doesn't exist and is now sitting in a bar with the version that does and the two don't match.

"Derek," she says. She sets her glass down.

"No."

He nods. He nods quickly, like he was ready for it, and then his face does something else — a slow settling, a different kind of understanding. He looks at her again. At the belly and the tan and the bare feet on the sticky floor and the crew around her and the pitcher she's been draining all night. And Lena watches him arrive at the same place she's at: the recognition that they are not different versions of the same path. They are different paths entirely.

"You're right," he says. "I know."

"You're a good guy," Lena says. "This just isn't — we're not —"

"I know," he says again. He finishes his drink.

"You're a completely different person than when I first — than when you were at the office."

"No," Lena says. "I'm more myself than I've ever been. That's the difference."

Derek looks at her for a long moment. Then he nods — a real nod this time, not the nervous one — and he stands and picks up his laptop bag and says, "Good luck with the houses, Lena." And Lena says, "Thanks for the pitcher," and Derek walks out of the bar and into the evening and the door swings shut behind him and Marco leans over and says, "Friend of yours?" and Lena says, "Something like that," and drains her glass.