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Immediately after they kiss, the silence between them gets so pregnant that it’s like there’s a third—fourth—person in the room with them, but Ian has no idea what to say to break it.
It’s a first, frankly, and it’s freaking him out as much as the look on Poppy’s face right now. But kissing her has fired off so many hidden neurons in Ian’s already overactive brain that he feels like he’s jumped from Web 3 to Web 4.0 without even needing VR goggles and it’s making him dizzy. He’s used to being overwhelmed by his own genius, but this is like they made Elysium all over again, except this time they used their mouths and he’s still in the afterglow.
Poppy looks like she’s still stuck in the transition. He hopes it’s because it was such a damn good kiss, but he’s a little concerned it’s for other reasons.
Ian reaches for her—not to kiss her again, just to make sure she doesn’t topple over and injure herself or the baby—when she recoils, saying, “I’ve gotta piss,” before fleeing the office and Ian knows she’s not coming back tonight.
What is there to come back for? Her stuff is on its way to the Netherlands and all she’s left behind here is her taste on Ian’s lips and a yearning for more. He let her go and she turned an entire plane around to come back to him and now he’s done the one thing he swore that he would never do: complicate their relationship by admitting that actually he does want to kiss Poppy. Poppy, his partner. Poppy, his best friend. Poppy, the person he loves more than himself. Poppy, who’s about to have a baby by another man.
Yeah, this is gonna be a problem.
“No,” he tells the universe. “There is no problem. If we don’t talk about it, then it’s like it never happened. And if it didn’t happen, then there’s no problem—and it definitely won’t happen again.”
Resolved by his immaculate logic, Ian shuts down his computer and leaves the office. By the time he’s at the elevators, the memory of her lips hungry on his own and the regret that he’ll never feel it again are already fading.
His resolution lasts less than a day.
It’s not entirely his fault, though. They both show back up at MQ the next morning because David calls them in to deliver the news about Jo’s new role, none the wiser about Poppy having decided to flee the country and then changing her mind.
“So you see,” David is saying while Ian’s trying very hard not to look at Poppy not looking at him, “it’s not a demotion for me, per se. It’s an elevation for Jo. Which is, I’m sure, well-earned if you think about her as a blood-sucking tick and less as a human being who has done nothing but humiliate me.”
They both blink at David.
“Which I don’t! Think of her as. She’s just a regular, soup-eating person like the rest of us.” David cocks his head to the side. “Although… I don’t think she eats soup. I don’t really know what she eats. God, maybe she does eat blood.”
Poppy makes a retching noise and that immediately diverts David from down that dark path.
“The point is, you two still work for me!” He raises his fists and dances them victoriously. “And we have the world’s most beautiful expansion to put out. For which we’ve got the team back together.” More dancing fists. “To which we’re about to add a human expansion.”
“Don’t call her that,” Poppy says tightly.
“Yeah, David, that’s offensive,” Ian quickly agrees.
“Offensive?” Poppy turns on him and he’s just glad that she’s looking at him and he can freely soak in the sight of her in return, here at his side where he thought she’d never be again. She looks… not great. He’s not convinced she washed her hair this morning, and those are definitely the same pants she had on last night, when they kissed. His eyes drift to her mouth, which is moving in that awkwardly wide and mobile Muppet way she has as she yells at him about how he has no place to talk, doesn’t he remember when he compared their expansion to her baby, and he wonders what she would do if he kissed her again.
“Don’t,” she says, holding a hand up between them. He hasn’t even moved but he stops anyway, tucking the mental image away.
“Don’t what?” David asks, confused.
They both glance at him and then back to each other and agree with a look that they’re definitely not going to tell David about anything that happened the day before.
“Don’t… stop believing?” Poppy says weakly, her voice going up high at the end so that it’s a question.
David immediately brightens. “I love that song!”
“Of course you do,” they both say and Ian tries not to smile too widely in relief. He hasn’t broken anything between them at all. They’re still mind-talking and in sync. This will all be totally fine as long as he can stop thinking about kissing her again. She’s here, isn’t she? That’s all he needs.
Poppy pushes her glasses up her nose. “Look, David, if that’s all, I have some mods I want to make to Elysium that I need to get done before I drop this baby ball and the fireworks start.”
“Did you just compare your baby to the Times Square New Year’s Eve ball?” Ian asks incredulously.
“Yet I can’t call it a human expansion,” David says darkly.
Poppy waves her arms at the two of them. “It’s my baby, I get to call it what I want.”
Ian should just agree with her, but he can’t because it’s not true and it’s not true in a way that’s kind of a big deal. “Actually, it’s your and Storm’s baby.”
That’s the wrong thing to say, if the furious look on Poppy’s face is anything to go by.
“I know that,” she says, biting off each word like she’d rather be eating them, or throwing them like ninja stars at his eyeballs. “But he’s not here, is he? And I’m not there.” Ian doesn’t like the note of uncertainty he hears in that sentence. “I’m here, with you, and we’ve got a game to finish.”
“You’re right, Pop,” he says, because sometimes he knows exactly which dialogue wheel option to choose.
“Damn right I am,” she says, but she’s calmer, he can tell by the cockiness in her tone. He feels his shoulder muscles relax.
“Great!” David claps his hands together and then looks around. “Wow, Poppy, your desk is so clean. The baby is really doing a number on your personality, huh? It’s like you’re a completely different person.” And with that, he leaves them alone.
Poppy turns to look at Ian, which is great, but it’s with wide-eyed horror, which is not.
“I am not.” There’s horror in her voice, too.
“I didn’t say it,” he hurriedly assures her. “I think you’re the same.”
She furrows her brow. “I am not.” Less horror this time, but a lot more anger.
Ian squints. “Okay now I’m confused.”
“I don’t want to be either of those.” She runs her hand through her hair, making it look even worse. “I’m not completely different, but I’m not the same, either. If I’m Brand New Poppy then it means I can’t keep making something like Elysium. But Old Poppy would never have had a baby, or a boyfriend. Old Poppy wouldn’t have made her art pieces. Old Poppy wouldn’t have—” She halts abruptly and it doesn’t take a mind-reader to know what she’s thinking.
Old Poppy wouldn’t have kissed him. That’s fair, he supposes. Old Ian wouldn’t have kissed her either. And new Ian isn’t going to do that again.
“Okay, so, you’re upgraded Poppy. Version 1.1”
She wrinkles her nose. “2.0.”
“That’s a whole version jump, Pop. What about 1.5?”
“2.0,” she insists. “The old me is still there but there have been significant modifications.” She gestures at her very large belly. It’s a compelling argument.
“All right, 2.0,” he agrees.
“And an expansion,” she adds with a sly grin.
Ian blames what happens next on that grin. “I thought we weren’t calling her that?” he asks lightly, taking a step nearer.
She meets him halfway. “I said you can’t.” Her eyes are like lasers behind her glasses, pointed and burning. He forgets what they were even talking about.
“Whatever you say, Pop,” he tells her as they reach for each other at the same time. He wraps his hands around her hips and she fists her hands in his shirt and they’re kissing again, even though they never even talked about the first one.
It’s a little different this time—it’s daytime, first of all, and Ian can vaguely hear the sounds of others in the office filtering through the pounding drumbeat of his heart. But it’s also because they’ve done this before and now he knows a couple of things he didn’t before, like how Poppy isn’t hesitant in her approach, and how her hands do as much work during kissing as arguing, and how well his own hands span her back to pull her into him. They’re just starting to introduce their tongues when he hears David saying, “Hey guys, I wanted to ask yoH MY GOD” and they jump away from each other even more abruptly than last time.
“It’s not what you think!” Poppy says and Ian and David both give her the same skeptical look. She rolls her eyes. “Okay fine it’s what you think. But it doesn’t mean anything, right?”
That she direct to Ian and he plays it cool even though he feels like he’s drunk the entirety of one of her awful Big Gulps and all the caffeine is hitting him at once, leaving him jittery.
“Yeah,” he tells David. “We’re just… expending our creative energy.”
“Expending, exactly,” Poppy agrees loudly. “Expending it all over the place.”
“Ew,” David says. He covers his eyes with one hand and waves the other in their general direction. “I don’t want to know about it. If this is what it takes for you two to create something like Elysium, just do it where I can’t see it. Or where I have to clean up after it.” He peeks at them from between his fingers. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Ian says before Poppy can strenuously insist they’re not fucking and never will be. They’re not, obviously, but they don’t have to close all doors so loudly.
“Good.” David sighs and drops his hands. He looks at the two of them. “I knew it,” he says like a disappointed teacher, shaking his head before leaving the office.
“What does that mean?” Poppy asks. She strides to the window and swings it wide to poke her head out. “What does that mean?” she shouts. If David answers, Ian can’t hear it. Poppy grumbles and pulls her head back into the office, slamming the window shut again. “The nerve of him.”
“Yeah.” Ian’s hands feel empty now that they’re not grasping Poppy, so wraps them around each other in a poor substitution.
“So.” Poppy stares at him from a respectable distance across the office. They couldn’t even touch each other if they both stuck their arms out. Ian’s never felt so claustrophobic in his life. “That happened. Again.”
He’s certain that she’s about to say something terrible like, it was all a huge mistake and it can’t happen a third time or I was just double-checking that I hated it and wow do I—which would be insane because that second kiss was even better than the first—but Ian really cannot do rejection right now, not when his blood is singing her name, so he says, “I’m gonna go lift some weights” and this time he’s the one who flees from the room.
He does go lift weights. But it doesn’t help him forget a single damned second of either kiss.
“But what if you can turn one of the angels to help you kill god, and that’s how Lucifer becomes the devil?” Ian asks, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“What, like, he just had bad PR?” Poppy squints at him from where she’s sprawled in some random employee’s chair in the main floor, spinning in slow circles.
“Yes! Exactly!” Ian paces back and forth between desks, gesturing wildly. It’s late, and this brainstorm session has been going for hours, but it’s the best one they’ve had in days and Poppy seems willing to ride it out with him. “It’s a subplot about how sometimes people do the wrong thing for the right reasons, but all people will see is the act and the players have to decide if it’s a moral choice.”
Poppy steeples her hands on top of her belly, like a tree at the top of a sloping hill. She looks like a contemplative Buddha. “I like it,” she announces after a moment of meditative thought.
Ian pumps his fist in the air. “Yes! I knew you would!”
She smiles fondly at him and he does a sharp heel-turn away so he doesn’t have to see it. It’s been just over a week since their second kiss, which he’s also trying to forget. Now that there are two, it’s twice as difficult, but until today they’ve been keeping normal work hours and they never close their office door when they’re together, and it’s been working. Or at least, no one has kissed anyone again. Now that they’ve let this day get dangerously late, Ian knows he has to get out of here soon before the memory of those two kisses haunt him into recklessness.
He’s about to tell her good night and leave without looking, when Poppy groans and Ian spins back towards her, instantly on alert.
“Are you okay?” he asks, worried. He knows she’s only a few weeks from being due, and he remembers Shannon had Brendan a little early. “Should I call an ambulance?”
“What? No.” Poppy grimaces. “I’m just stuck in the chair.” She futilely tries to lever herself out of it a couple more times before dropping her head back again. “Just leave me here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ian says. “Let me help you.”
“No, it’s too humiliating,” she tells the ceiling.
Ian shakes his head. “This is not even close to the most humiliating thing you’ve done in front of me. Do you remember that night when we were building the first MQ dungeon and you had one too many bags of licorice?”
Her face pales and she clamps her hand over her mouth. “Don’t remind me,” she mumbles.
“Come on,” he urges her, holding his hands out. “I’m your partner. You can’t scare me off.”
Poppy looks up at him and blinks slowly with those big eyes of hers, before taking his hands. He lifts her out of the chair, mostly gently, though he does have to give it a bit of tug to get her free.
“Thanks,” she says once she’s standing again. They’re still holding hands.
“You’re welcome.” The light of a nearby screen reflects off of her glasses and Ian suspects if his hands weren’t so happy where they were, he’d take them off just to see her eyes even better.
It’s very quiet in the offices at night, especially these days. Jo keeps everyone on such a tight schedule as the new Playpen producer that people are finishing up all their work each day on time. They don’t get lunches, which Ian is pretty sure is illegal, but they seem to be happy to leave early so no one’s complained yet.
But it also means that there’s no one here now but him and Poppy and their still-grasping hands, a situation that he’s been successfully avoiding all week.
Ian clears his throat and reluctantly lets her go, taking a step back. “We should call it a night. Boundaries, right?”
“Right,” Poppy says slowly, like she either doesn’t entirely understand or doesn’t entirely agree with what he’s saying. She pulls out her phone and taps around before tucking it back in her pocket. “Right. I’ll just wait here for my Uber.”
“Pop.” Ian purses his lips, annoyed. “I’m not going to make a pregnant woman take an Uber home after ten at night.”
She mimics his expression. “Ian. I am still perfectly capable of taking an Uber home at any time of night. This is just like having an extra large bag with me at all times.”
“You literally could not get yourself out of the chair a minute ago,” he says, gesturing at the trap in question.
“That’s different,” she insists, folding her arms over the top of her belly.
This time, he mimics her, without the belly of course. “I can give you a ride home instead.”
“I don’t think… that would be wise.” He can see her body tense, the way she grabs her own elbows a little tighter, like she’s protecting herself from him. Great, he thinks. Now she doesn’t trust me to control myself.
Even if Ian has forgotten about the kisses—which he will eventually, he’s sure of it—Poppy hasn’t. Maybe they should talk about it before this tension she’s feeling gets worse and infects the rest of their relationship.
“Pop, can I… we should talk.”
She swallows and then nods slowly. “Okay. But I’m not getting back in the chair.”
Ian huffs a laugh and looks around the room. Standing and staring awkwardly at each other while they hash this out seems like it will make it worse; they need somewhere they can be relaxed. His eyes go immediately to their office, with the comfortable couch they’ve both fallen asleep on before. The office where they’ve kissed twice. No, that’s a terrible choice.
Then he spots the weirdly skinny window of the tester room. “There!” He ushers Poppy towards the space, and stops dead when they enter, and instead of a couch there are two gaming chairs.
“Where did the couch go?” Ian asks, confused.
“Dana brought it to Brad’s crazy porn house, remember?” Poppy wrinkles her nose. “I bet they fucked on that couch, I can’t believe I sat on it.”
Ian waves his hands around, trying to dissipate the mental image. “Oh, god, don’t say that.”
He steps into the room and sits down in one of the chairs, testing it. He should put a pillow under his shirt and see how difficult it is to get up out of it before he lets Poppy sit down. Although a pillow doesn’t have enough weight. He’d need like a bowling ball or something. He swivels his chair to stare at her protruding stomach. God, she has a whole bowling ball in her body.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks, clasping her hands over her belly like she’s trying to hide it.
Ian yanks his gaze back up to her face. Fifteen years he’s been looking at that face, and he’s never wanted to kiss it as much as he has this last week. Maybe it’s the pregnancy hormones. He’s about to suggest that that’s all this is when Poppy strides up to him and stops right at his knees. He has to crane his head back to look at her, which is strange for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it’s hot as hell to have her looming over him, looking at him like he’s a coding problem she needs to solve.
“Well?” she demands.
“Uh.” He gets a little worried that his lack of words lately might be sign of some early onset dementia. Maybe it’s the dementia that’s causing all this. “Um.”
“Shut up,” she says before straddling his knees and placing one shockingly strong hand on his chest and shoving him fully back in the chair. “I changed my mind: I don’t want to talk.”
“Fine by me,” he says just as she lunges for his mouth with her own.
He barely has time to prepare for the onslaught, but he welcomes it gladly, wrapping his arms around her as she rocks into him in a way that makes him realize he wants to do a whole lot more than kiss her, actually.
The barest moan escapes him, and Poppy freezes for a moment, her tongue thrust deep in his mouth, her fingers curled in his hair, before she grips a little tighter and then rolls her hips again. It mostly serves to push her stomach into his, but it’s enough. He slips his hands down to grip her ass and this time, she moans.
“Oooooh girl I told you!” he hears from the doorway. It’s faint through the fog of lust that they’re trapped in.
Poppy’s tongue pops out of his mouth and she gasps, staring at him with wild eyes. Ian stares back at her wondering why the baby is talking already.
“You didn’t tell me anything, I told you.” That strident voice he would recognize anywhere, and he peers around Poppy’s body to find the ex-testers standing in the doorway.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he says, his rising sharply. He’s really struggling to think now. Maybe it’s all just boner-induced dementia.
“Same thing you are from the look of it,” Dana says archly.
Poppy wiggles off of Ian’s lap and he has to bite down hard on his lower lip to keep from making an indecent noise. She brushes her hair back from her head and re-settles her glasses on her face and none of that makes her look any less like they were just heavily making out.
“We’re not… wait, you came here to have sex?” Poppy glares at them, though Ian is very interested in the connection she’s making.
“Not in those chairs,” Dana scoffs.
“What does that mean?” Ian asks.
Dana waves him off. “Did you two come in here to have sex?” she asks Poppy, one part curiosity and one part interrogation.
“No,” Poppy says hurriedly. “We came to talk.”
“Uh-huh.” Dana gives Ian a scrutinizing once-over and he hopes she can’t see his erection in this position. He hunches over a little just in case. “You were doing something with your mouths, but it sure didn’t look like talking.”
“I think it’s adorable,” Rachel says. “You guys are just like us!”
“Take that back!” Ian shouts. “Poppy make them take it back.”
Poppy gets that scary-angry face she has and jabs her finger at them. “We are nothing like you. You take that back. You take it back now.”
“Okay, god.” Rachel rolls her eyes. “It’s probably for the best. We don’t want to be like you two either. Your whole thing is weird.”
Poppy gasps, affronted. “We’re not weird, you’re weird.”
Rachel snorts. “We’re weird? Uh, how long did it take for us to work together before we hooked up compared to you two?”
“We’re not hooking up! Kissing is not hooking up!” Poppy gestures at Ian like he’s a mannequin. “Look at him! He’s still got all his clothes on!”
Everyone looks at Ian, including himself, as if he’s somehow forgotten that she’s right.
“Yeah,” he says weakly. Now that she’s suggested it, he kind of wishes he’d at least had his shirt off.
Ian’s close enough to Poppy’s ass that he hears her phone ding and she reaches for it quickly. “My ride’s here,” she explains. Unnecessarily, he thinks, but at least it doesn’t make it seem like she’s leaving only because she’s ashamed the ex-testers caught them kissing. She even pauses to look at him, and for a heady moment Ian thinks she’s going to invite him to come home with her. The yes is already on his lips when she says, “Let’s talk later.”
He gives her the yes—though with far less enthusiasm than he hoped—and she’s gone, again. Three times they’ve done this now, and twice Poppy has fled the scene like it was a hit and run. It’s an appropriate metaphor, really: Ian feels like he’s been flattened by a truck.
The ex-testers are still standing in the doorway, staring at him expectantly.
“Are you really gonna fuck in here?” he asks them.
Dana lifts one brow but Rachel’s nervous over-denial gives it all away.
Ian shuts his eyes and shudders. At least his erection is gone. “Fine. But if they find a mess in the morning, I’m telling on you.”
“If you tell on us, then we’ll tell on you,” Dana says. Dammit. He taught her too well. This is just like with Brendan. “And I bet you want to keep all that talking with Poppy a secret.”
He hesitates because—does he? David knows about the one time, but not the others and Ian’s sure he’s too afraid of both of them to tell anyone. But does it really matter if word gets out to others that he and Poppy are occasionally kissing? He’s certainly enjoying it, and he doesn’t give a crap who knows, not really.
But then Ian thinks about that look on Poppy’s face after the first time that he’s still trying to forget, the regret and confusion and shock mixed in with the decaying hints of desire, and his shoulder slump.
“Yeah, I want to keep it a secret.”
“Then we have an understanding.” Dana smiles, but it’s not sweet. “Now, if you’ll excuse us?”
Ian shuts the door behind him as he goes, cutting off the sounds of their conspiratorial giggling, and for the first and last time, he’s jealous of the ex-testers.
Two more weeks pass. No matter what Poppy said before she left the testers’ room, she and Ian don’t talk about anything but the game. They also don’t have any more late-night work sessions. And they definitely don’t kiss again.
He keeps waiting for her to make the first move, whatever move it might be, but she just re-establishes her work-work-life boundaries and they keep operating more smoothly than he expects and he’s honestly too afraid to do anything to shake it all apart.
Enough time passes, and Poppy creeps closer and closer to her due date, that Ian does actually start to forget about kissing her. Or rather, he starts to forget the details, which is worse. He can still remember her like a bony furnace in his lap, but not how she sounded or smelled or tasted. He thinks it was bubblegum, but that’s probably not true because she still can’t eat any candy or candy-adjacent foods.
But in his mind, she tastes like something sweet. Something he shouldn’t be having but he wants all the time anyway.
She snaps her fingers in front of his face and he jerks back, startled.
“Earth to Ian. Have you heard a word I’ve said?” Poppy asks. She’s standing in front of his desk, though he swears she’d just been working diligently away behind her own.
“Sorry, no.” He rubs a hand down his face and sighs. “Just… noodling.”
“Right.” He suspects she doesn’t believe him, but she decides not to press the lie because she says, “I need some lunch and this stupid kid only wants salad.” She makes a vomit face and it’s absurdly cute. “I figured you’d know the best place around here to get some rabbit food.”
Ian leans back in his chair, but then he’s reminded of Poppy crawling onto his lap and abruptly sits up again. “I do. Do you want me to DoorDash you something here?”
“Nah. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I need a walk. Makes all the organs fall into place more comfortably. This baby isn’t even out and she’s already ruining me.” She starts for the door and then pauses, looking back at him. “You coming or what?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” Ian doesn’t exactly leap up, but he’s not slow as he hurries after her. Going for a lunchtime walk with Poppy to go get salad is something he’s definitely dreamed about doing over the last fifteen years, though her being massively pregnant never figured into it. “I know the perfect place, about a block from here. You’ll love it.”
“I doubt that.”
It’s easy between them as they stroll at Poppy’s waddling pace to a little cafe Ian’s been trying to get her to go to since they opened seven years ago. The sun’s out, the cars are relatively few, and the joggers they pass all smile at them like he and Poppy are a cute couple out for a walk. Ian thinks about taking her hand, but she’s busy using both of them to imitate with vicious glee the murder scene in the horror movie she watched last night.
“Blood everywhere,” she crows. “You should’ve seen it, mate.”
It all crystallizes in his head: him and Poppy on his couch while some raucous, blood-soaked movie plays, healthy popcorn in a bowl on his lap because hers is full with a sleeping baby. They’re pressed against each other from shoulder to hip to bare feet, and as the movie ends, Poppy’s snoring against his chest.
I want that, Ian thinks and nearly slams into a telephone pole in shock.
“Wow, you are really out of it today,” Poppy says as she drags him to safety. “What’s wrong with you?”
He shakes his head and he can feel the way his face creases into a semi-hysterical smile. “Me? Nothing. I’m not the one who wanted salad for lunch.”
“You always want salad for lunch.”
She has him there. “Yeah, but I don’t want a walk in the sunshine.” The look she gives him puts him in a chokehold. “Fine, but I… I hate horror movies.”
“Three terrible lies in a row, that’s a new record.” Poppy stops and turns him to face her. “Seriously: what’s wrong? Is it the expansion? Did David tell you something about it? Ian, did someone delete my expansion?” Now she looks hysterical and he grabs her shoulders.
“Our expansion,” he reminds her. “And no, it’s fine. It’s not a work thing. It’s… personal.”
“Personal.” For some reason, that doesn’t make her look any more relieved. “Like… like girl troubles?”
Ian bobs his head back and forth with a grimace. “Sort of.”
“Is it Shannon? Because if it is, I don’t want to hear about it.”
“No, it’s not Shannon. She’s been seeing that guy I hired to help Brendan train.” That had felt a little like a kick in the nuts, mostly because she also said that this is the first guy she’s brought home that Brendan likes. Ian’s been trying not to panic about what that means, but he figures it’s not worth worrying about until they pass the six-month mark, which Shannon never does; they’ve only just passed four.
“Then who?” Poppy asks. It’s truly astonishing to Ian that she honestly doesn’t seem to know that it’s her. It’s always her, even before they started kissing.
He’s struggling with how to tell her that, here outside of the cafe, when she waves her arms. “You know what, never mind. Boundaries, right? If you don’t want to say, you don’t have to. Besides, we’re here, and I need to murder a salad like that serial killer murdered his victims.”
A woman walking by with her baby in a stroller gives them a disapproving look.
“Keep your judgy looks to yourself,” Poppy snaps and the woman sniffs and hurries on. “I hope your baby gets obsessed with scream metal when it’s a teenager!”
Ian has never loved Poppy more.
“You told her,” he says fondly and Poppy nods ferociously at him.
“Yeah I did. Stupid judgmental super-moms.” She lifts her chin, but he knows her too well to miss the nerves in her smile. “I’m gonna out-mom all of them.”
“You’re gonna out-mom the shit outta them,” he agrees. He believes it, too. “This baby is gonna get mom’d so well it’s not gonna know what hit it.”
“Yeah!” Poppy raises her fist victoriously. “Just like… mom’ing so good they’re gonna write books about me.”
“Well, that’s… I mean, that’s not how parenting books work.”
“They will now! Or maybe I could write a book.” She’s rolling with it now, he can see the familiar light of creativity coming into her eyes. “Poppy Li’s Guide to Parenting: How Not To Be A Judgy, Shit Mom.”
“Is that the working title?” he asks and she laughs, because she remembers that moment fifteen years ago, too.
“You do not get to noodle on my title,” she tells him, playfully smacking his cheek. Her hand ends up staying there, the fingers pressing a little into the skin. “Especially on a parenting book.”
“Ouch,” he says, though the barb doesn’t really hurt so much as ache.
“Sorry.” She brings her other hand up, cupping his face. Her eyes search his intently. “You’ve done really well at the pre-parenting part though.”
Ian’s heart lights up at the praise. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. You’ve really been in the piss with me.”
He feels her palms wrap around his smile. “Most of that piss was at the beginning, anyway.” Then, squinting he asks, “You did wash your hands recently, right?”
Poppy rolls her eyes. “Of course I washed my hands.” He’s just relaxing back into the feeling of her fingers on his skin when she adds, “I’m like ninety percent sure.”
“Poppy,” he starts, but she interrupts him by leaning up and kissing him gently there out on the sidewalk under the sunshine. It’s not at all like the devouring kisses of the first three times, but the tenderness of it shakes him more deeply.
“Oh, shit,” he hears Brad say off to the side.
Poppy’s eyes fly open and Ian waits for her to jerk away, but she just pulls back more slowly, her hands still on his face. “Bradley,” she says.
Ian glances to the side and sees Brad sipping a mochaccino with an amused smirk.
“Poppy,” Brad says. “What a surprise to see you here.”
She turns and folds her arms over her chest. “Why?”
Brad lifts one brow, glancing between them. “I didn’t think you ate non-processed food,” he answers lightly.
Jo appears behind him, a huge paper bag of takeout clutched to her chest. “This is our order,” she announces stridently, like she’s being accused.
“No one asked,” Ian says.
“She’s looking at me like I stole it.”
Poppy gapes at her. “I am not!”
“Then why do you look so suspicious?” Jo narrows her eyes. “Are you here to steal someone else’s DoorDash order because the gig economy is undermining the value of the everyday assistant?”
Ian and Poppy look at each other.
“They were kissing,” Brad helpfully explains.
“So?” Jo says with an annoyed huff. “I’m more concerned with the fact they’re blocking the sidewalk. You’ve cost me a full minute getting back. My boss will be furious.”
“I thought you weren’t assisting anymore?” Ian asks curiously.
“I’m assisting myself. And she’s a stone cold bitch.” Jo shoves between them. “Get out of my way, I have to make sure the peons aren’t slacking off while I’m gone!”
“She is terrifying,” Ian notes.
“Should make a horror movie about her,” Poppy agrees.
Brad shrugs. “Not the worst boss I’ve ever had. Hey, Jo, wait up,” he calls out. Jo just flips him off over her head and keeps striding onward. Brad grins happily as he follows after.
“They’re weird together,” Poppy says.
“So weird.” Ian tilts his head to the side. “You don’t think—”
“No, I don’t. I don’t want to think about that at all.” Poppy glances casually at him. “Bad enough I have to think about us so often,” she adds with a mischievous smile before entering the cafe.
Ian feels shellacked into place, not entirely certain what she means, though certain enough that it’s not a bad thing. She thinks about us. He watches her through the glass door of the cafe, how she scrunches up her whole face to peer at the overhead menu. How she picks the underwear out of her asscrack without caring who watches. Poppy’s brain is the most beautiful thing Ian’s ever seen, and knowing she’s using part of it to think about them makes him feel… safe. Ian has always been the big idea guy, the one who throws out the impossible, while Poppy has handled the details. She’s always been the only person who not only can make it happen, but doesn’t make him clean up alone afterward, too.
He threw out the idea of kissing and now Poppy’s thinking about it. For the first time since their first kiss, Ian feels serene. Whatever she comes up with, he knows it’s gonna be better than if he tried it on his own. He just has to give her time and trust the process, two things he’s good at doing with her.
And if they need to kiss a little—or more—in the meantime, who is he to stop a genius at work?
“OWWWWWW WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME YOU LITTLE SHITBIRD?”
Ian winces, not just from the volume of Poppy’s voice but also the crunch of his fingers in her viselike grasp.
“It’s gotta be time for an epidural soon, right?” he asks the hospital room at large, but it’s just the two of them in there at the moment.
It’s been a few hours since they left the cafe, and most of it since has been a blur. While waiting for their food, Poppy had started having contractions, which hadn’t seemed too bad at first.
“It could be Braxton-Hicks,” Ian had suggested. He’s done a lot of research since Poppy got pregnant, refreshing what he learned with Shannon and updating on things that have changed since Brendan was born.
“It could be,” Poppy had said, diving into her salad with the enthusiasm of a lion falling on a wildebeest. There had been lettuce everywhere. Ian hadn’t known someone could make eating a salad so horrifying.
“Pop,” he’d said at one point, “you gotta slow down or you’re gonna choke on a cherry tomato.”
Which was when everything had gone very quickly downhill. Because she did start choking on a cherry tomato, but not from eating too fast. Just as she was swallowing one, a harder contraction hit and the pain had made her gasp and the tomato had gotten stuck. Ian vaguely remembers the rest: trying to do the Heimlich without hurting the baby, a tomato falling out of her mouth onto the floor with a plop, a ride to the hospital in an ambulance without the siren on while Poppy asked the EMTs over and over if they could just turn it on for her one time and then cursing them out when they refused and the contractions hit again.
At the hospital, the nurse got her in a wheelchair and up to a room in record time—Ian insisted everyone have excellent health insurance since Covid—and then had left the two of them alone promising to be back when Poppy was ready.
That was two hours ago. The nurse has dropped in on them a time or two, but she only glanced at Poppy and then decided she still wasn’t ready. Ian’s not sure if Poppy is going to get more ready than she is right now, squeezing his hand into a pulp and screeching like her character was PK’d by some twelve-year old min-maxer.
Poppy flops back into the bed and drops Ian’s hand after the contraction passes. His fingers are throbbing.
“Where’s the goddamn nurse?” she demands. “It’s been like ten hours.”
“It’s been—” Ian starts, and then thinks better of it. “I’ll call her.” He pushes the call button and leans forward, elbows on knees. “Do you want any ice chips?”
“Why would I want ice chips? Is it gonna shiver the baby out of me faster?”
He considers and then discards that. “I don’t think so. I think it’s a dehydration thing. And you know how concerned I am about your hydration, generally speaking.”
“Ian, I’ve had enough water over this pregnancy to give birth to this baby in a pool of my own urine. I do not need more water.”
“That’s… disgusting, but all right.” He studies her flushed face and sweaty hair, the way her eyes already look tired. “It’s too bad we can’t figure out a better way for this part to work.”
“No shit,” she says, but he can see the suggestion has distracted her a little, because she’s getting a faraway look in her eyes. “I wonder if the human body can be hacked?”
Okay that might be a little too far. “Have you decided on a name yet?”
He’s asked her this periodically over the last six months, and she’s always avoided it, but this time she tucks her hands into themselves and stares down at her belly.
“I think I have,” she says without any of the usual Poppy Li confidence.
“You have?” He beams at her. “That’s great, Pop. What is it? I want to make sure they get it right on the birth certificate in case you’re out of it or something.”
“I’ve decided to call her Hera.” She glances up at him, a plea for validation in her expression. “What do you think?”
Hera. Poppy’s project that almost broke them apart. The one she wanted his help on that he could never figure out how to give because it wasn’t his own. Not until the end, when she’d almost slipped away from him entirely. A second chance to do it right this time. Ian swallows hard and nods.
“I think it’s great, Pop. Hera Li.”
“I’m going to give her my full last name: Hera Liwanag.”
Ian smiles wide. “It’s perfect.”
“Yeah.” She smiles too, relieved. “Yeah, I thought so, too.” She picks at the blanket scrunched around her body. “Why didn’t you name Brendan after you? I always thought you’d be an Ian, Jr. kind of guy.”
He presses his lips together and shakes his head. “I couldn’t do that to a little baby.”
“What, force him to live in your shadow?” she says it dryly, like she’s in on the joke, but this is one thing he’s never let her understand.
“No. I couldn’t force him to carry that burden. He’s better off without it.” He idly rubs the spot on his arm where his own father had burned him and then pats her knee, trying to distract them both. “I thought you might go the Poppy Jr. route yourself.”
She makes a face. “Ugh, no way. What kind of a name is Poppy anyway? Do I look like a flower?”
He stares at her for a beat too long before saying, “You do to me.”
The smile she flashes him is sweet as honey before it curls into a jagged comb and she’s groaning again as another contraction hits her, and the only flower she reminds him of is a Venus fly trap with its mouth open wide.
Once she’s ridden that one out—and he’s checked that all of his bones are still intact—Ian moves to sit on the side of her bed. It puts him in easier reach for the next contraction. “The nurse should be here in a minute,” he promises, brushing stray strands of hair out of her eyes.
“Good,” she says, panting. “This sucks.”
“Yeah. It looks like it.” She grins limply at him and he wishes he could do something more for her. Some distraction or reward for getting through this shitty part before the baby comes. I guess there’s one thing, he thinks. He licks his lips. “Hey, can I kiss you?”
Poppy goggles at him from behind her fogged up glasses. “What? Now?”
“Well, yeah. I’m afraid you’ll bite me if I do it during a contraction.”
“You want to kiss me like this?” she gestures at herself and then the room. “Here?”
“Pop, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but lately I always want to kiss you.” He lifts his shoulders helplessly. “And I thought it might be a good distraction between all the other stuff.”
“So like… after every contraction you want to kiss me?” She really seems like she’s not getting it.
“Yes,” he says firmly. “But only if you want to. Which I was a little confused about after the first three times, but at the cafe, it seemed like you wanted to.”
“I did. And you’re okay with that?”
Her glasses are clear now, so he knows she can see the sincerity on his face.
“Very okay.”
“You ran away from me after the second time.”
“You ran away the first and third times,” he retorts. “And we never talked about it.”
She cocks her head to the side. “We’re talking about it now.” She winces and he prepares for another onslaught, but she merely shifts in the bed and sighs. “My back is killing me.”
“Do you want another pillow?”
“I want some drugs. But I’ll take a pillow for now.” Ian hurries to oblige, and she exhales slowly once he’s helped her. As he starts to sit back down in the chair, she grabs his wrist and tugs him back. “I do want you to kiss me,” she tells him, and he happily obliges her in that, too.
It’s tender and unfortunately short because almost as soon as he starts, she bites down on his lip when another contraction hits and then they’re both shouting.
Once she’s through it, he grabs a tissue and dabs at his lip. A spot of blood but nothing major.
“Sorry,” Poppy tells him. “You don’t have to kiss me again, it’s probably too dangerous.”
“Come on, Pop,” he says fondly, leaning over her. “You know I love danger.”
“That’s not true,” she says before he kisses her again.
“Well that is just too sweet.” One of the other nurses comes in, interrupting them, her electronic clipboard clutched to her chest. She sounds startlingly like Sue, though Ian’s relieved to see that she’s not. “You rarely see fathers so loving at this point,” she coos.
“Oh, I’m not the father,” Ian says, sitting back down.
“Yeah, he’s my work partner,” Poppy says proudly.
The nurse’s mouth drops open in shock, and then twists in disapproval. “All of these modern relationships these days, I can’t keep up,” she mutters, hurrying in. “Sit back and let me check you.”
She does, which Ian respectfully keeps his back turned towards. That gives him a chance to watch Poppy, make sure the judgy nurse isn’t hurting her too much as she pokes around places Ian can’t imagine are comfortable in this moment.
“Looking good,” the nurse announces. “A few more hours at least.”
“A FEW MORE HOURS?” Poppy thunders at her.
“You’re barely four centimeters, dear, and it can take a while to get all the way to ten.”
“Ian, make her give me the epidural,” she pleads.
“Your ‘work partner’—” Ian can hear the mental invisible quotes she’s using “—doesn’t have to make me do anything. If you want an epidural, you simply have to ask for one.”
“I want one. Now.” Poppy’s hands are clenched into fists at her side and Ian wonders if she’d swing at anyone who got within range.
“Fine. I’ll get the nurse anesthetist and be right back.” She bustles out of the room and Poppy collapses back into her pillows.
“Thank god. I was promised I could watch tele and the thing would slide out of me.”
Ian wrinkles his brow. “I don’t think it works like that even with the epidural.”
“Whatever, give me your hand I’m about to—” She’s not finished before the panting and squeezing and, surprisingly, growling hit. Once it’s over, she lifts her head up to him and he kisses her again, tasting the sweat from her exertions.
He keeps it short, for both of their sakes, but she looks calmer when he pulls away.
“Is this a labor-only agreement?” she asks, her eyes dancing.
The side of Ian’s mouth tugs into a grin. “It doesn’t have to be. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know.” She waves one hand airily. “We could make out after every time I get some really rocking code done.”
“You hate being bothered when you’re coding,” he reminds her.
“Yeah, but I really like kissing you.”
Ian’s smile blooms full on his face. “I’m sure we could work something out.”
The nurse and the anesthetist come into the room then and start moving Poppy around the bed to prepare her for the epidural. Ian steps to the side, though not too far. Which is good, because another contraction hits before the anesthetist has the giant fucking needle ready.
Ian walks her through it and then, as promised, lifts her chin to kiss her again. Her legs are hanging over the side of the bed and she looks exhausted already and they have an audience but it’s still one of the best kisses of his life because she wraps an arm around him like he’s the only thing holding her up and lets him kiss her as long as he wants.
“He’s not the father,” the first nurse stage-whispers to the other one while he’s still kissing Poppy.
“No, he’s not,” he hears Storm say from the door. “I am.”
Ian doesn’t knock on Poppy’s door like normal. He texts her to let her know he’s there and then fidgets outside of it, hoping she hasn’t changed her mind since her message half an hour ago.
It’s been three weeks since Hera was born, and though Ian has offered to come help, Poppy’s declined because Storm has been there instead.
Once Storm had arrived at the hospital—surely giving the nurses one of the best nights of gossip of their lives—Ian had stumbled over himself trying to explain what was happening. But then the anesthetist had insisted she’d needed to get the epidural done before another contraction hit and Storm had politely asked if he could also be at Poppy’s side for the birth and then he and Ian had sat in opposite chairs in the room while Poppy had watched television and they’d all tried to ignore what Storm had walked in on.
Storm hadn’t seemed mad or hurt or even all that surprised. He just asked the occasional neutral question about MQ and Elysium, talked about his show in the Netherlands, and checked in on Poppy. When the baby started to come, they each took one of Poppy’s hands while she grunted and pushed, and it felt weirdly perfect that Storm was there after all.
The nurse gave the baby to Poppy first, and when she was done snuggling Hera, she handed her to Storm, and Ian was shocked to realize that he wasn’t jealous.
“Hello, Hera,” Storm said with an awestruck smile, and Ian knew exactly how he felt. He looked up at Ian and held the baby a little out to him, like an offering. “Do you want to hold her?”
I don’t really do babies, was the first thing that came to Ian’s mouth, but he bit it back. Not because of Storm, or the nurses, or even Poppy, really. But because Ian had promised this time he would help with Hera, and he wasn’t going to let her down at the beginning.
“Sure,” he said, letting Storm sort of slide the baby into his arms, and Ian remembered holding Brendan for the first time, too. Brendan had started crying as soon as they’d put him in Ian’s arms, and Ian waited for Hera to do the same. But she only hiccuped and tilted her head towards his heart.
It had hurt a little to give her back.
So, yeah, he’s wanted to see Poppy again since then, but he wants to see Hera, too. What he doesn’t want is to shove Storm out of the way to do it, so he’s sent food and he’s sent well wishes and once he sent a maid service, but he’s stayed away himself. Respecting boundaries and all that.
The door opens and there’s Poppy and Ian feels a piece inside of him that’s been off-kilter all this time slide back into place. It’s the longest he’s gone without seeing her in fifteen years, which is probably a sign of something that he doesn’t want to pay much attention to.
“Hey, there she is! Mom of the year!” he says and Poppy immediately bursts into tears. “Woah, hold up, what’s going on?”
“It’s just hormones,” she wails through the sobbing, ushering him in. She wipes frantically at her cheeks and takes a few shuddering breaths while Ian stands there awkwardly. “Storm left yesterday and I’ve been alone with Hera and I’ve been freaking out. I’m glad you’re here.”
She motions for him to sit on the couch and then checks the video baby monitor sitting on the end table. When Ian looks, he sees Hera sleeping peacefully in her crib.
“Thank god,” Poppy mutters, throwing herself onto the couch next to him. “She hates sleeping. Why do babies hate sleeping so much? It’s the only thing they’re good at and even then they can barely manage it without sleep sacks and shit.”
“It’s a great mystery of life,” Ian agrees. He wants to kiss her and he wants to pull her into him and cuddle her close and he wants to run and leave all of the complications this is going to bring behind. “Storm left?”
“Yeah.” Poppy sighs. “He had to get back to his gig in the Netherlands. He’ll be back in a few months. He says he’s planning on getting an apartment somewhere near us so he can help with Hera.”
“A separate apartment?” Ian asks, even though she basically just said it.
Poppy gives him a strange look. “Of course. He’s not gonna live here.”
“Oh. I just thought, you know, he came all this way back and you two get along so well, and he’s a great guy.”
She raises her brows. “Do you want to move in with him?”
“No. But aren’t you two still… together?”
Poppy laughs, loud and obnoxious, and then clamps her hands over her mouth and they both check the video monitor. Hera shifts a little but remains asleep.
She smacks Ian on the shoulder. “Why would you think that?” she loudly whispers. “I broke up with him as soon as the plane turned around. Did you think I was cheating on him? We kissed like ten times in the last month.”
“Eight,” Ian says automatically. He doesn’t even have to do the math; no matter how hard he’s tried to forget each one, they follow him around every corner.
Poppy rolls her eyes. “Fine. Eight. My question still stands: were you doing it thinking I was cheating on my boyfriend?”
“I… I thought maybe you were on a break or had an arrangement or something. Storm seems like a very understanding guy.”
Poppy makes a noise of agreement. “Yeah, I can see that. But no, there was no arrangement. I didn’t even know he was coming back for the birth. It’s crazy that he left the Netherlands when he did, or he wouldn’t have been here in time.”
Ian frowns. “I didn’t think about that. How did he know you were at the hospital?”
“He said he’d gone to the MQ offices to surprise me and Jo told him.”
“How did Jo know you were there?”
“She probably has tracking devices on all our phones now.” Poppy says it matter-of-factly, but Ian whips out his phone and tosses it across the room. “You’re already in my apartment, dummy.”
“I’m leaving it there. I do not want that lunatic knowing my every move.” He shivers with dread at the idea of it.
Poppy still looks bizarrely unbothered as she rests her head against the couch and stares at him. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Storm has big shoes to fill but I’ll do my best.” Ian’s trying so hard not to be bitter as he says it, but Poppy punches him in the shoulder again.
“Don’t be a baby. One’s enough.”
“I just…” Ian wiggles his mouth around in consternation. “I’m not sure what’s going on with us anymore. There’s the work and there’s the kissing and there’s your art and now there’s a baby, and I don’t want to take Storm’s place but I don’t want to be too far away from you either.” He lays his head against the couch, too, and they look at each other across the expanse of the thin fabric.
“There’s plenty of space for both of you.” Poppy rests her hand on his knee. “Ian, Storm and I are Hera’s parents, but we’re not together. You’re not Hera’s dad, but you’re my partner. I wanted to give Storm a chance to get to know his daughter this first few weeks because he’s leaving and you’re not.” She pokes him. “You’re not, right?”
“Not unless you tell me to,” he promises.
“That’s not likely to happen unless you start trying to get Hera into too many sports.”
Ian doesn’t say anything, because he had been planning exactly that, but they’ve got time to work it out.
Poppy narrows her eyes at him. “I refuse to learn the rules of baseball.”
“You won’t have to,” he reassures her. “I’ll handle all of that.”
She harrumphs but squeezes his knee. “Storm may handle some of it.”
“Sure, of course,” Ian says quickly. “He gets first choice on parenting stuff.”
“No.” Poppy straightens and leans towards him. “You get first choice on some things and Storm gets it on others and I get to override both of you.”
Ian grins. “That seems fair.”
“Yeah. But the point is: this is gonna be weird as shit, but we’re going to figure it out as long as we both stay here.”
“Poppy, I love you, but I cannot live in this house. I’m pretty sure this couch fabric is going to give me hives.”
She hits him a third time, harder. “Not here physically, but here metaphorically. I don’t know what’s going on with us either. I hate to admit it, but David was right: we’re both different people—and thank god for that. But it means that we’re both working with some new features. And a really stinky expansion.”
“So you’re saying we need version release notes?”
“Exactly. Except we’re not going to know all of them going in. Like the kissing addition. I thought, that first time, it was just all the emotion of the moment. But then I kept wanting to do it. I liked it.” She sounds more surprised about that than Ian thinks is entirely fair. “I mean I really liked it. It was crazy.”
“It’s not that crazy,” he mutters. “I’m a good kisser.”
“Yeah, I know that now. Shannon was right about you.”
Both of Ian’s brows soar up into his hairline. “You talked to Shannon about kissing me?”
“Not like you’re thinking. Don’t worry about it. The point is, after the first few times, I realized it was an upgrade I really wanted to make to our relationship. And a thing I wanted to stop doing with Storm. Though he’s also a very good kisser, by the way.”
“Yeah.” Ian muses over it for a moment almost dreamily. “I bet he is.”
Poppy looks intrigued. “I’m filing that away for later,” she says. “For now, I think the kissing is a thing we should keep doing. I think Poppy and Ian 2.0 deserve to try some new activities together. But it doesn’t mean we have to give up Elysium, or working on other projects. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop making my art, even if it’s sometimes with Storm. It just means that we’re leveling up.”
“I like that,” Ian says with a nod. “Though I have two questions, if you’ll indulge me?”
“I’ll allow it,” she says grandly.
Ian scooches closer. “What if our work starts to suffer because we’re kissing too much?”
“You really think you’re that good of a kisser that you can keep me from coding long-term?” She says it jokingly, but he knows she’d accept the challenge if he offered it. He’s definitely going to offer it later.
For now, he shakes his head. “That wasn’t what I meant. I meant what if it breaks what makes us work at work, and we have to choose?”
Poppy shrugs. “I don’t know. Then we have to choose. But as long as there’s a choice, it’s not all bad, right? Either way, we still stay together, it would just be with whatever boundaries we want for a change.”
Ian sits back into the very uncomfortable couch cushion, struck by the simplicity of it. “Huh. I guess you’re right. That leads me to my second question, then: What if we did more than kissing?”
This time, Poppy’s eyebrows fly upward. “You mean like sex?” She starts to lift her arms and he knows she’s going to make that appalling wrist banging gesture so he grabs her hands with her own.
“Yes, like sex. If we’re leveling up, then I’d like to put in a ticket request to upgrade to sex at some point.”
“That’s very romantic,” she says dryly. “I’ll put it right on my kanban board.”
He snorts. “See? You are getting funnier. It’s not just because I miss you.”
“Poppy 2.0, baby.” She pulls him closer to her, until their faces are separated by only a few inches. Her breath smells sickly sweet; she’s definitely back on the candy. “I do think we should add sex to the features list. Once I’m all healed up down there, I’ll let you kanban my board whenever you want.”
“Don’t call it that,” Ian murmurs as he leans forward to kiss her. He tries to keep it light, because there’s some part of him that expects to be interrupted again, if not by Hera then by some random coworker popping out behind a curtain or something. But nothing happens except Poppy’s breath catching when Ian gently prods at her lips with his tongue, and then her mouth opens and all her heat and wanting overwhelms him.
She crawls up onto his body and they fall backward onto the couch and Ian’s breath abandons him in a rush when his shoulders hit the rock-hard arm of the couch, but it doesn’t stop his hands from snaking under Poppy’s shirt to feel the sweaty, bumpy line of her spine as she writhes on top of him.
She kisses her way down his neck like an indecisive lamprey and he groans and clamps his hands on her hips. When he grinds against her, he feels her wince against his skin.
Ian immediately goes still. “Sorry, sorry,” he says between heaving breaths. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“It’s okay,” she mumbles against the shirt caught at the curve of his neck. Shirt off next time for sure, Ian swears. “I thought I was more ready than I was.” She lifts her head and blinks down at him. “Christ, this is gonna make focusing at work even more difficult.”
“Yeah. But it’s gonna make post-release parties way more fun.”
Poppy gives him the happy, lopsided grin that he first fell in love with. “You have the best ideas.”
“They’d be nothing without you to implement them.” He can’t help it when the words dip into a sincerity that normally makes them both uncomfortable, but it settles far more easily these days.
“Well, I’m gonna implement the shit out of them. I’m gonna implement them so hard—”
He kisses her before she can ruin the moment, and then he just keeps on kissing on her.