Oscar Levinson was a pretty smart guy.

Not many people knew how smart. The majority, if they even noticed him to begin with, took one look at his five-eleven height, messy dark hair, unremarkable features, and the run-of-the-mill suits which rendered him indistinguishable in the Manhattan office crowd, and immediately forgot about him. 

There was no need to take a mental note. He wasn't a threat to their job, their women or the scant few square feet of real estate they'd claimed as their kingdom. He was just a face in the crowd.

Wouldn't always be that way, but Oscar planned on enjoying it while it lasted. He didn't give a crap what anyone he didn't care about thought, anyway. Those who doubted his ability to make something of himself would be proved wrong soon enough, and he'd always thought it was better to be under-estimated than set on a pedestal so he had further to fall.

"Do I have something on my face?" he inquired. "Cos if it looks like cream cheese from the bagel I had on the way over, I'm saving it for later."

It was the third time in twenty minutes he'd caught Callie staring at him. Didn't take a genius to work out something was up.

She blinked. "What?"

Distracted, too. That wasn't good. Distracted paired with obviously working up to whatever the something was, usually meant an adventure.

"You've been staring at me."

"No, I haven't."

Oscar's eyes narrowed. If he didn't know better, he'd say the denial was accompanied by a slight hint of warmth on her cheeks. "Okay. Spit it out."

"Spit what out?" She blinked again, with more faux innocence than before, which meant whatever scheme she had planned was guaranteed to get him in trouble.

So much for that sweet little corner cubicle the guys in work seemed to think was his for the taking. They didn't know how much he hated his day job or how close he was to handing in his notice. But it would be nice if he could enlighten them in less than five-to-ten years.

"How big a felony are we talking this time?"

A sigh. "I've said it before and I'll say it again: It's not breaking and entering when you have a key."

"But we couldn't go during office hours."

"You work during office hours."

"And we couldn't turn on a light."

"I didn't want anyone to tell Rocko I'd been there. He might have thought I wanted us to get back together."

Ah, yes. Once met, who could ever forget Rocko? Large enough to be a one-man construction crew by day, with enough pent-up aggression left over to spew an endless stream of obscenities into a mike at the front of a grunge metal band at night. He barely made it to the six-week cut-off point with Callie before she decided he was less pussy cat than potential bunny-boiler. But truth-be-told, Oscar missed the guy. It was nice to have a visual reminder of how far man had evolved since the era of clubbing women over the head and dragging them back to their cave to feast on roast dinosaur. That, and Oscar never had to pretend he wasn't the smartest guy in the room when Rocko was around.

"You insisted we dress head-to-toe in black," he reminded her. "All that was missing was a sack with the word SWAG written on it."

"We didn't need a great big sack to carry one itty, bitty piece of jewelry." Callie pushed out her bottom lip and hit him with the soulful doe-eyed expression he'd never been able to resist. "And you know how I feel about my locket. If I lost it, I'd be devastated."

Yes, he knew all there was to know about that locket. It was constantly misplaced, forgotten or left behind and he got roped into helping her find it. Every. Damn. Time. Why she clung to a memento of the first person to break her heart still baffled and frustrated him. Who cared if it was an heirloom? Better it stayed in the past where it belonged. It wasn't even solid gold. And he'd always thought the whole point of a locket was to put pictures in it. But she never had.

'It's waiting for the right one,' Callie said with determination when he pointed it out. 'Someone special...'

Eight years later, that explanation still pissed him off. "If you don't want to lose the damn thing, you should try wearing it round your neck more often."

Callie rolled her eyes and raised a hand to dig it out of the neckline of her faded Mets T-Shirt. "Happy now?"

His nemesis swung menacingly on the end of the chain while Oscar silently added to the list of ways it could disappear. Tossed into the Hudson from the side of the Staten Island ferry. Shot into space by Elon Musk. Callie would get over it. Nothing got her down for long. It was one of the things he liked most.

"No," he replied honestly. "We still have shopping to do."

The prospect of shopping never made him happy.

"Five more minutes, ten tops, then we'll go."

Since time tended to evaporate when she worked on one of her creations, Oscar translated that to mean twenty minutes, more likely thirty.  For a couple of those minutes, he watched her select shards of recycled CD.'s from a tray, artfully gluing them into an intricate pattern while she worried her lower lip between perfectly straight teeth. 

He remembered the braces she'd worn to get those teeth, how determined she was they wouldn't undermine her self-confidence, and yet for a while, despite her best efforts to disguise it, her smile had less natural sparkle. Three days of some of the worst puns known to pun-kind soon brought it back. He saw to that. But puns wouldn't cut it this time.

As the day of reckoning approached, he'd started to imagine how she would react. Would she look at him like she didn't know him, treat him differently, be mad he hadn't told her, or worse still, hurt? He hoped not, particularly when it came to the last one. He swore a long time ago he would be the one guy in her life she could rely on to never cause her any pain.

Feeling restless, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and wandered around the tiny room she'd converted into a workshop. After a lap which took less than fifteen seconds, he felt a tingle on the back of his neck, glanced at Callie and saw her face turn away. Had she been staring at him again? He took a hand out of his pocket and casually ran the palm over his face. When he checked, it was clean. 

 Wasn't that, then. So, what was it?

Turning ninety degrees, he reached for the base of an ornate, Tiffany-inspired lamp, and moved it around until he could see what was happening behind him on the reflective surface. At first, he thought his guilty conscience made him paranoid - her head remained bowed and she seemed focused on what she was doing -  then she stilled, glanced at him from the corner of her eye and, convinced he wasn't watching her, turned her full attention to him. Only this time, she did more than stare. An intense scrutiny began at the top of his head, travelled down his body, and lingered on what Oscar was pretty certain was his butt. 

Wait. Was she? She couldn't be. She was, wasn't she? 

Callie Morris was checking him out.

It was such a shock to Oscar's system, his hold on the base of the lamp slipped, tilting it dangerously close to the edge of the bench. He scrambled to save it before it fell, the sparkly things dangling from the shade tinkling in alarm. When it was upright, he glanced over his shoulder and found Callie focused on her work again.

"If you break that it'll cost you three hundred bucks," she commented dryly.

Oscar examined the lamp. It appeared to be intact, but what did he know? 

"You'll take a check, right?"

"From your account?" she chuckled. "I'd prefer cash. But I'll take installments, cos I'm helpful that way."

If only she knew. But that was a discussion for another day. It had just been bumped down the agenda to make way for more urgent business.

Feeling a bit like a Californian who experienced a major seismic shift beneath his feet, Oscar put his hands back in his pockets and continued roaming around the room. He needed to work his way through what happened logically. There had to be a reason for what she'd done. What was going on in her head? Why now? Had something changed? 

No, that was presumptive. Before he tried to find the answers to those questions, he had to be one hundred percent certain he was right.

"Oscar."

"Mmm-hmm?"

"You're pacing."

"Right, sorry." He knew she found it distracting when he did that. And while it was tempting to ask if there was anything else she'd found distracting lately...

He stood still and sucked in a long breath, grimacing at the chemical scent. The glue fumes probably weren't doing either of them any good. He'd mentioned his concerns about the ventilation in her tiny workshop a time or two. Maybe he was high and hallucinating.

"What's this one supposed to be?" he inquired in relation to the next item on the bench.

"It's a mirror."

"Really? And you made this one, too?" It was cool. Looked a bit like a spaceship.

"Yes," Callie replied while she continued working. "Making stuff and selling it to people is what I do. Remember?"

He did. It was one of the few constants in her life. She'd always been artistic and saw the potential for beauty in ordinary, everyday things, and that she'd finally started paying her bills doing something she loved made him both happy and proud. But instead of saying any of that, he feigned surprise.

"Wow. You made all this stuff?" He nodded at a shelf below the window. "Even that yellow thing, over there?"

"No," she said patiently. "That one makes coffee. As you well know."

"You gonna offer me some at any point?"

"Since when did you stop helping yourself?"

"When you started being weird," Oscar said bluntly. "What's going on?"

"Nothing."

"There's something."

"No, there isn't." And it was obvious from her tone she was starting to get miffed. 

Her eyes widened in a brief look of warning. Then her gaze dropped down his body, she sucked in a sharp breath, and jerked her face in another direction so fast she probably got whiplash.

Oscar froze, unable to believe what he'd witnessed. After a moment, he marched to the coffee machine, surreptitiously checking his fly wasn't undone along the way. 

Nope. Still zipped. What the hell was going on?

"We should probably go," her voice said.

"Uh-huh."

"I'll grab my things and meet you in the hall."

"Okay." Oscar frowned and left the room, dazed and more than a little confused.

The most worrying thing was his physical reaction to what she'd done. It should have felt weird or uncomfortable or a half-dozen other things which reminded him they were friends.  But it didn't. If anything, it reminded him that she was female and he was male. 

A fact he'd done his damnedest to ignore since puberty.