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It's an odd feeling.
The last time she saw Dash was at his wife's funeral, more than three months ago, a day shrouded in despair.
They were both a wreck, crying over the memory of their shared best friend, unable to speak to each other without breaking down.
But he looks good.
Maybe grief is a colour only she wears badly, because he strides into the hospital with a brave smile and solid, straight shoulders and he embraces her with a thrum of intention underneath his skin.
And she is pleased to see him. She smiles up at him, acknowledges the warm feeling of his hand on back, the familiar scent, and wonders if this is the universe finally giving her a break.
Dash is a good man, was a good husband, and being around him is easy. Nothing to hide, no complication. Nobody will tell them this is wrong.
But if that's true, she wonders why it still feels like it is when she looks past his shoulder to see Neil standing, watching, saying nothing, before he disappears.
"He asked me on a date," she tells him, when he tracks her down in the locker room later and sits down beside her.
"What did you say?" he asks, carefully neutral, a question he's trying so hard to keep from being loaded, but there's no escaping the way his dark eyes bore right into hers, and make her want to wring a confession from his lips.
"Nothing yet," she says, shrugging slightly. Keeping her eyes on him. "I stammered, then I fled."
"You should go," he says, trying for levity when he smiles at her. She looks straight past his careful front and sits there unsmilingly.
"Why?" she asks, and knows the words are a challenge fired through the narrow space between them. For a moment, it's like the air crackles, and there's a magnet pull, his eyes flicking to her lips and back before finally he looks away.
"Because he's a good guy," he says, and he lets out a tiny sigh. The tension dissipates like smoke, and Claire smiles tiredly at this well-rehearsed dance of theirs. "Because you deserve to be with someone who can give you everything, and maybe he can."
She looks at him and the words unspoken lie heavy between them. Because I can't, he's saying, and she's wishing that he wasn't right.
So tomorrow will come around, and she'll have dinner with Dash. It'll be sweet and a bit awkward but there'll be familiarity and shared history and the lack of complexity that comes with an old friend who's got nothing to hold back from her.
And at the end of the night, he'll lean down to kiss her and at first she will let him, will think maybe she can do this and be happy.
And then.
Then, she will remember every single time Neil Melendez has ever touched her skin and she'll know that Dash is not the right guy.
There'll be no leap in her heart, no flood of electricity when their eyes meet. No desperate longing for more.
So in the end, her and Dash will smile and part as friends, and she'll be fine with that.
She'll wait.
Because someday, someday not too far away, it will turn out that everything does exist, and it can be given.
It will show itself in the touch of a gentle hand on her lower back after a long day in surgery. In a lingering hug after he drops her at her apartment after dinner. In the slow, spreading smile he gets when he walks into a room and sees her standing there, and the way he watches her move like she's a work of art.
And one day, it'll be made clear in the words I love you that finally, finally pour from lips made desperate with wanting, and the fever pitch of longing and desire which has been rising since the very first day they met.
It will be in wedding vows, and the name of their first child.
In every day of the rest of their lives.