The last thing Jess expected was to see Antonio come in before Nicole, and to see him as upset as he seemed. It wasn't her place to ask about what must have happened to put the depressed look on his face but she was curious…
"Nic coming in too?" she asked, nonchalantly. They hadn't received a new case – a record, when dealing with Pollock and being his best team – and Jess was too bored with the paperwork to look at another report.
"I think so." Now Jess knew something was wrong. Antonio was never this blasé about Nicole.
"You want to talk about it?"
"I wouldn't know where to start," he replied scathingly. Jess, who'd leaned over his desk as he sat down, straightened in surprise.
"That bad, huh?"
"She doesn't talk to me," he finally said, having looked around for any eavesdropper.
"She doesn't talk to anyone," Jess answered, her tone suggesting the statement was obvious.
"But she should talk to me." She could understand where he was coming from, but if there was something that both had learned about Nicole in the time they'd known her, it was her reluctance to talk to anyone.
"This is something new to her too," Jess tried to reason. "It shouldn't surprise you that she's reluctant to dive into any blatant sharing."
They didn't get any further. Jess could tell the angry clicks of Nicole's heels a mile away and bolted back to her desk, trying to motivate herself with the reports. She looked up cluelessly as Nicole sat in the desk beside her.
"Morning."
"Morning," Nicole mumbled back.
"You good?" Jess asked, knowing full well she wasn't.
"Fine," Nicole answered, opening the top file on her desk and absorbing herself in the words. Jess looked from Antonio to Nicole and sighed. If they weren't going to talk to each other, it was going to be a long day.
Maybe Jess should stick her finger in the matchmaking pool, just to get them to work through it. I'm thinking the planning of a really great dinner date...