The thing about Rex was that he was the most infuriating person you had ever met in your life and you had been peripherally in love with him for eight months and those two facts were completely connected.
You hadn't meant for it to happen. Nobody meant for things like Rex to happen — he arrived in your life like a lit match in a room that had too much oxygen, all confidence and sharp edges and that smile that he deployed like a weapon, and by the time you'd figured out what was happening you were already burning.
The problem was that Rex knew exactly how he looked and what he did to people and he used it, casually, constantly, the way some people used a phone — just something he reached for without thinking when he wanted something.
And what Rex wanted, you had come to understand, was to want things just out of reach.
It had started three months ago.
Before that you'd been doing fine. You'd been fine. You were a professional, you were a teammate, you could be in the same room as Rex and it was fine.
And then he'd shown up to a team debrief in a t-shirt that was doing something criminal and leaned against the wall next to you and said something low and quiet that was technically about the mission and not at all about the mission, and you'd said something flirty back on pure defensive instinct, and he'd looked at you with those eyes doing that thing, and that had been the end of fine.
Since then it had been this — whatever this was. Circular, maddening, the kind of push-pull that had no resolution because neither of you would just say the thing.
Rex would get close and then get distant. Would say something that meant everything and then follow it up with nothing. Would look at you across a room in a way that made your brain static out and then turn around and flirt openly with someone else while you were watching, which was — that was a thing he did, specifically, and you'd started to think it was specific.
You'd started to think a lot of things lately.
Today you'd decided to do something about one of them.
The thing about Mark Grayson was that he was genuinely lovely.
This was relevant because your plan required a partner who was both believable as a flirtation and who you could trust not to read too much into it, and Mark, who was happily and obviously gone on Amber in a way that made the rest of the team roll their eyes fondly, fit that criteria perfectly.
"I need a favor," you'd told him, before the team gathering that was theoretically a debrief but had become a general hangout in the way these things did.
Mark had looked at you with appropriate wariness. "Last time someone on this team said that to me I ended up on the wrong side of a—"
"I need you to talk to me like we're having a good time," you said. "That's it. Just — be normal, but turned up slightly. Laugh at stuff. You know."
Mark had looked at you for a long moment.
Looked across the room to where Rex was currently leaning against a wall being effortlessly magnetic at no one in particular.
He then looked back at you.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, this is—"
"Are you in or not, Grayson."
"I mean I'm not going to not watch this unfold," he said. "Yeah, okay. But for the record I think you could just—"
"Right, yes, not my business," he replied, and handed you a drink, and smiled at you in the easy warm way that was just Mark being Mark, and you told yourself this was a reasonable plan made by a reasonable person and turned toward the room.
The thing about Rex was that he was almost impossible to read right up until he wasn't.
You'd learned this over eight months. The confidence was real — it wasn't a performance, he was genuinely comfortable in his own skin in a way that you'd stopped finding annoying and started finding, against your will, compelling — but it sat on top of something that was considerably less certain, and sometimes, in the right light, you could see the seam.
You weren't looking for the seam right now. You were talking to Mark.
Mark was, to his credit, doing a good job. He'd tilted toward you slightly, was giving you his full attention, laughed at something you said with the kind of laugh that read as I find you specifically entertaining, and touched your arm briefly to make a point — all things he did naturally with everyone but that, framed right, looked like something more specific.
You were watching Rex in your peripheral vision.
For the first five minutes — nothing. Rex talking to someone across the room, doing the thing where he smiled with just one side of his mouth, apparently unconcerned with anything happening over here.
For the next five minutes — a slight recalibration. Not obvious. You wouldn't have caught it if you hadn't spent eight months learning to read him. His posture changed, fractionally. His attention, which had appeared fully occupied, wasn't quite fully occupied.
You laughed at something Mark said — Mark had just said something that was actually funny, which you hadn't anticipated, he was making this very easy — and touched Mark's shoulder and said something back, and didn't look at Rex.
When you looked, thirty seconds later, Rex had moved.
He didn't come straight over. That wasn't how Rex operated.
He took a route that was technically a circuit of the room — stopped to say something to Atom Eve, accepted a drink from a passing— okay there wasn't actually a passing anything, he'd just materialized a drink, whatever — and arrived in your vicinity in a way that could plausibly be constructed as coincidental.
"Rex," Mark said, with the serenity of someone watching a nature documentary.
"You're over here," he said, which was not a sentence.
"That's where I am, yes," you agreed.
Something moved through his expression. "What are you two—"
"Talking," you said. "You might have heard of it. Exchanging words with another person."
"Right," he said. "Cool." He did not leave.
Mark appeared to be having the time of his life. "We were actually just heading to get more drinks," he said pleasantly, and looked at you, and you took the exit he was offering.
"We were," you agreed, and followed Mark toward the table, and did not look back.
Rex was watching you go with an expression you'd never quite seen on him before. Not the charming one. Not the performative confidence. Something that was less composed, that had an edge to it, that was doing something complicated around his eyes.
You turned back around before he caught you looking.
"That was maybe ten percent as subtle as you thought it was," Mark said, handing you a drink.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You've been watching him watch you for like twenty minutes."
"I've been talking to you."
"You've been talking to me and watching him watch you, which honestly takes some coordination, I'm a little impressed." Mark leaned against the table and looked at you with the expression of someone who was genuinely fond of you but also thought you were being a little ridiculous. "Can I say something?"
"If I say no will that stop you?"
"Rex looks like someone told him his favorite thing was being given away," Mark said. "Which is good intel, I assume, based on your whole—" he gestured at the situation— "thing. But also you've both been doing this for a while and I've watched it from the outside and it's a lot."
"It's a lot," Mark said kindly. "That's all I'm saying."
You opened your mouth to say something deflective and smart and the room reconfigured around the specific sensation of someone coming up behind you — not touching, not announcing, just close, the particular force field of a specific person's proximity that you'd apparently memorized without meaning to.
"Can I talk to you," Rex interrupted, from approximately four inches behind your left shoulder.
He was close — closer than strictly necessary, closer than a casual conversation required — and he had the expression you'd caught across the room dialed up to something less concealed. The edge was more visible now. The composure was doing its best.
"Sure," you answered coolly.
Mark made a sound that was technically a cough.
"Alone," Rex said pointedly, looking at Mark.
"I'll be right here," Mark replied cheerfully, turning to examine the drinks table with exaggerated interest. He was absolutely still listening. You appreciated him enormously.
Rex walked, and you followed, because apparently that was something you did, into the slightly quieter anteroom off the main space — not deserted, not private, but enough.
"What?" you said innocently.
"What were you doing," he asked, his tone shifting.
"He's a person I know. Talking to people I know is a thing that—"
"Don't," Rex interrupted you firmly.
The word landed differently from the deflection-and-banter rhythm you'd been in. Shorter. More direct. Something in it that made the back of your neck prickle.
"Don't do the thing where you make everything a joke when something's actually happening." He held your gaze. Rex had, among his various infuriating qualities, the ability to look directly at you in a way that felt like it wasn't leaving anything out. "I'm not doing that right now so I'd appreciate the same."
"Something's actually happening?" you asked smally, and your voice came out less defended than you'd intended.
His jaw shifted. "You tell me."
"You were watching me," he stated knowingly. "The whole time. I was watching you watch me and you were watching me and you knew I was watching you and you kept going."
You had been banking on him being slightly less perceptive than this. This was, on reflection, naive. Rex was many things and perceptive was consistently on the list.
"So were you," you stated simply.
"Yeah," he said. No deflection. No charm-smile. Just — yeah. "I was."
The room was doing something.
"You flirt with people," you deflected, and it came out with more heat than you'd planned. "All the time. Right in front of—" you stopped.
"Right in front of you?" he asked with a knowing smirk.
"I wasn't going to say that."
"But that's what you meant."
"I was seeing if it bothered you," he said, and the bluntness of it knocked the air out of the conversation for a second. He looked like the admission had cost him something, jaw tight, not looking away. "It was a terrible way to find out. I know that."
"Stupid," he replied. "Yeah. I'm aware."
"I was going to say exactly what I was doing," you stated with exasperation.
"I was," you furthered, "With Mark. I was — seeing if it bothered you. He's not interested in me, I'm not interested in him, I just—" You pressed your lips together. "I wanted to see the thing your face does."
"What thing my face does," he deadpanned, very carefully.
"The thing," you answered "The thing where the — the front of it slips."
"You've seen that," he said.
"I didn't know you could—"
"I've been paying attention," you said. "For a while."
Something shifted in his expression — the composure, the performance, the assembled confidence that Rex wore like a second skin, all of it doing something different, rearranging into something that was less Rex, Invincible Team member and more just — Rex. The one underneath.
"This is a mess," he mused. Not with heat. Just — accurately.
"Little bit," you agreed.
"We've been doing this for months."
"Making each other—" he stopped. Looked at the ceiling briefly. Looked back. "I don't actually want to watch you with other people. That's not— it's not a game to me. When you were over there with Mark I wanted to—" He stopped again. His hands, at his sides, had done the thing where they were thinking about becoming fists. "I didn't like it."
"I didn't like it when you did it either," you retorted.
The particular charge of the space between you — eight months of it, accumulated, the push-pull wearing the distance thinner and thinner — was doing something now that it hadn't done before, because for once neither of you was pretending it wasn't there.
"I like you," Rex admitted and it came out rough at the edges, like he'd been carrying it a long time and the putting-it-down was harder than expected.
"That's— that's the whole thing. I like you and I didn't know how to just say that so I did everything except say that and it turns out everything except saying the thing is a lot worse than just saying the thing."
Your chest did something complicated.
"You could have just said the thing," you said.
"Yeah, I'm getting that now."
"I like you too," you admitted. "For the record."
He looked at you for a moment — the unguarded look, the one you'd been trying to catch for months, and now here it was at close range and it was a lot, it was genuinely a lot, there was something in Rex's eyes when he wasn't performing that was—
He exhaled — not quite a laugh, something that was releasing tension more than expressing amusement — and looked at you with the beginning of the real smile, the one that wasn't a weapon.
"You used Mark," he stated with an eye roll.
"He very much did. He said he wasn't going to not watch it unfold."
Rex closed his eyes briefly. "I'm going to—"
"He's right there," you added helpfully. "You can tell him whatever you want."
"I'm going to be normal about this," Rex replied, opening his eyes, “I'm going to be a completely normal person about the fact that you specifically recruited Grayson to make me jealous."
"Are you going to be a normal person about it?"
He considered this for a genuine moment.
"No," he decided, “Probably not."
"That's fair," you shrugged with a snort.
He was still close — hadn't moved, the four-inch proximity that he'd arrived with maintained through the whole conversation, not pushing but not retreating either. You were very aware of it.
"Yes," you agreed breathlessly.
He laughed — the real one, surprised out of him — and you felt it somewhere in your sternum.
"I didn't finish the question."
"I know what the question was."
"You don't know what the question was."
"I've been paying attention," you said, "for a long time."
He kissed you with the particular intention of someone who had been making a decision for months and had finally made it, and it was nothing like the performance and everything like the underneath, and the eight months of accumulated tension resolved into something that felt simultaneously like relief and like the beginning of something considerably more complicated.
You were, you reflected, completely fine with complicated.
When you came back into the main room, Mark was leaning against the drinks table with an expression of pure vindicated serenity.
Rex pointed at him. "Don't."
"I didn't say anything," Mark stated with a goading laugh.
"I was going to say congratulations and that I think this is very healthy and mature."
"You were going to say something annoying."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." Mark picked up his drink and looked at you. "Good talk?"
"Great." He nodded pleasantly. "I'm going to go find Amber and tell her she owes me twenty dollars."
"You guys bet on this?" you asked with a laugh.
"Half the team bet on this," Mark corrected you with a boyish grin, "Cecil might have a spreadsheet."
"The spreadsheet's probably about the timeline," Mark mused thoughtfully, already walking away. "I said three months, she said before the end of the year, I think Eve said—"
"Grayson," Rex barked out.
Mark waved without turning around.
Rex looked at you with an expression that was exasperated and something warmer underneath the exasperation, the composure entirely unassembled, and you thought about the seam you'd been trying to see for eight months and how it turned out the thing underneath it wasn't uncertainty at all.
"A spreadsheet," he stated.
"We're never telling them they were right."
"Absolutely not," you agreed.
He was still close. He'd been close this whole time. He reached over and straightened something on your sleeve for no reason — a Rex-gesture, unnecessary, deliberate, the kind that said you're mine to reach for now without using any of those words — and you let him.
"Same page?" he said raising a brow.
He nodded and looked at the room. Rex then turned his gaze back at you with the real smile, the beginning of it.
It was a terrible word for what was happening.
You were entirely okay with it.
Cecil did have a spreadsheet.
You found out three weeks later.
