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When I felt her cold fingers threaded with mine all of my petty jealousy was forgotten. She's here with me, and she's making a definitive statement that shows we are more than just colleagues.

"I found you on the camera, and she wanted me to bring her down here to you." Four says and I nod once at him. It's unspoken, but it's both an apology for my idiotic fit, and a thank you for him bringing her to me. He smiles briefly and shakes his head at me before heading back to work. Even though the two of us are always in some sort of competition, we're still actually friends, and in this moment I'm glad he gets me.

"Are you okay?" Tris asks and I sigh.

"I'm just being stupid." I tell her and she smiles at something past me.

"He's a big jealous baby. I'm Katelynn, but I also go by Kate, and you must be his mystery girl. This idiotic toddler can't stop talking about you, even if he's been keeping your identity hidden." I hear the humor in my best friend's voice and I glare at her.

"I'm Tris, and I've heard great things about you. It's lovely to finally meet you, Katelynn." Tris replies.

Katelynn recognizes the name, and even though she shoots me a look, she doesn't acknowledge that the woman I've been talking about non-stop is also the same Abnegation leader I've been working with for months. I know I'll have to answer to her eventually, but Kate being the awesome friend she is, says nothing.

"Do you drink?" She asks and Tris nods, "Eric's drinking buddies are actually dying to meet you, but I'm not subjecting you to that torture this late in the evening. How about the next time you're out here, we start the night sober, and I'll make sure everyone behaves." Katelynn grins at her.

"It's a date." Tris grins back.

Kate turns to me, "Now you stop being an idiot and spend time with Tris since you two aren't working," She raises her eyebrows, but gives me a much needed break, "I'll see you tomorrow."

"Maybe." I grumble at her and she shakes her head before walking away.

"Are you really okay?" Tris asks me and I sigh.

"I got jealous, it was stupid."

"Because of Tobias?" She asks and I nod, "Why?"

"I don't know."

"Can we have this conversation somewhere a little quieter?" She asks me and I nod, threading our hands together and leading her out of The Pit.

Once we're in my apartment, Tris just looks around in awe. She comments on the similar color scheme that my place shares with hers, and when she sees my kitchen she lets out a whistle.

"This is amazing. I could do so much in here." She says.

"Maybe one day you will." I reply and she turns to look at me.

"You'd want that?" She asks.

"Why wouldn't I?"

She trails her hazel eyes over me and I can see her contemplating her next question, "Did you live with Amanda?"

I nod my head, "Yeah, for a bit."

"Here?"

I shake my head, "No. I started in a smaller apartment, Kate and I shared a two bedroom right out of initiation when were just starting in leadership training. We had the choice to move once we'd graduated the program, but I liked having her there, and eventually Amanda moved in when things were getting serious. We only lived together a little less than a year before everything went to shit."

"She really hurt you." Tris says and I sigh before dropping down on one of the stools at my kitchen island. Tris drops down next to me, and I turn towards her.

"She fucked me up."

"Is that why you got so angry when I wanted to talk to Tobias?" She asks me softly.

"I don't know."

"Eric, why?" She presses.

"I got jealous. For a moment, it felt like you were choosing him." I shrug.

"I chose to have a conversation with him, Eric, I in no way chose him over you. He didn't realize that you were completely on our side when it comes to Jeanine. He's believed you were somehow cooperating with her because of your familial ties. I told him he was wrong, and he helped me to understand how the security would work for our sensitive files." She replies.

I know I overreacted, and I'm at a loss on how to make this right. I decide that I just need to be honest. I meet her hazel eyes, and I take a deep breath before exhaling slowly through my nose, "I overreacted. I am truly sorry."

"Apology accepted." She replies softly before leaning towards me and pressing her lips to mine.

We eventually move to the couch, and while our kissing definitely gets a lot more handsy than we do while together in Abnegation, I mentally decide that no matter how far things go, I don't want to have sex with her tonight. I need her to know that I wouldn't bring her here just for that, and she seems to sense my hesitancy.

"Is something wrong?" She asks me when we break apart briefly and I rest my forehead against hers.

"I don't want to rush things with us. I didn't bring you here for sex, I just wanted you to spend time here with me. I want to do things the right way." I admit.

"Me too." She replies and we share one more chaste kiss before breaking apart again, "It's late."

"Do you want to stay?" I ask and she raises her eyebrows, "Not for that, just sleep. I can get you back in the morning. I actually have a grey sweater that you could wear over what you've got on tomorrow, and we'll just 'meet' at one of the job sites."

"I think that would actually work. My dad has an early meeting in Amity tomorrow, and wouldn't drop by my house that early." She smiles.

I grab her hand and lead her to my bedroom. I don't know where I will find the self-control with her, especially once we're both in my bed and kissing passionately again.

I can feel her legs wrap around me when I'm hovering over, pulling me closer and the hitch in her breathing when I press my erection against her core.

"Eric..." She whispers and I swallow the rest of her sounds with my mouth on hers. Her hands are pulling at my shirt and I finally move enough to get it completely off of me.

Her hands on my bare skin drives me wild, and I begin moving my hips against hers. Her tight shirt is pulled off, and I'm kissing the swell of her breasts while unhooking her bra when my common sense takes over and I pull myself away.

"Baby," I breathe out, "I want you so much, but I want to wait."

Her lips are swollen from our kisses, and her pale skin flushed, but she eventually nods, "Okay."

I move away from her, finding her clothes to sleep in and I watch as she walks into my attached bathroom to change. She's quiet when she finally crawls back into bed, and she seems more tentative than she has been all evening.

"Are you okay?"

She turns so she can face me, "It's not just you that's having a hard time with self control," She smiles at me almost shyly, "however, I also appreciate the respect you're showing me. It's not something I'm usually shown."

"I want every part of this with you, but I also want to ensure we establish the foundation of our relationship before we take that step."

"Relationship?" She asks through a yawn and I stop short.

"We'll talk more about it tomorrow. Goodnight." I say before shutting the light off on my nightstand and pulling her to me. Knowing she's here and in nothing but my t-shirt and a pair of my gym shorts tests my restraint a bit, but having her fall asleep with her head on my chest is well worth it.

We wake up early, and I finally cook an entire meal for her. Breakfast may be one of the easier meals to make, but I can tell she appreciates it and we spend our morning drinking coffee and enjoying the food. We get her back into Abnegation without a hitch, and I hang out in her living room as she takes a quick shower and dresses in something more appropriate, at least in her eyes. The grey sweater she wears hugs every curve she has, and the matching skirt is long but also hugs her shapely ass just right. While the outfit may the color the faction prefers, her dress is anything but appropriate for this place.

But in Dauntless, she would be perfect.

I can't stop staring at her, and when she stands and closes her office door, I hear her engage the lock and I'm shocked when she straddles my lap.

"See something you like, Eric?" She asks me in a low voice.

"This dress, you in it, I mean you have no idea how distracting you are." I admit.

"Maybe I do." She smiles at me.

"Tris…" I trail off before she presses her lips to mine.

My hands are everywhere, and I can't help but reach under her skirt and run them over her smooth thighs, then back to her ass as we continue to kiss. The way Tris is moving against me, I know she can feel just how hard she has me, and I moan a little into her mouth before I hold her still against me.

"This feels too good." She whispers when her forehead is resting against mine.

"I can't wait to make love to you." I breathe out.

"Not here-"

"Absolutely not," I interrupt, "our first time together won't be rushed, and it won't be somewhere like here. It's going to be somewhere where we can take our time, and I can savor every part of you." I tell her and this time when we kiss, it's much more chaste.

Eventually we both calm down and she unlocks her door and then turns to look at me, "We should head out to the sites, we have work to do."

"Yes ma'am." I grin at her.

I'd just gotten home from Abnegation when Kate found me in the hall, making my way to my apartment.

"Feel like making me dinner?" She asks with a smirk and I glance over at her.

"I could eat, but this is more than just a friendly dinner, isn't it?" I ask as I unlock my apartment door, and Kate follows me in.

"Maybe. I just want to catch up, E. I never see you anymore." She pouts.

"Blame Max." I reply and she quirks an eyebrow at me.

"Really? So is he also the reason you're choosing to spend any of your extra time with another faction's leader?"

"Kate..." I trail off.

"I just want to know more about her. You literally snuck her in a couple weeks back, and didn't even warn me that the girl you've been talking about non-stop is the very leader he forced you to work with. You've got to give me something here. Is this just a hook up?" She asks and I pull a frozen pizza out and preheat the oven.

"No." I admit.

"So this thing is serious?" She asks.

I shrug, "I've chickened out when it comes to defining things. I like her. She's not an Abnegation. She never should have been there."

"Why is she there?" She asks.

"Jeanine's dumb ass idea to force the dependents into the faction that they received on their aptitude. Tris got Abnegation, so she was stuck." I reply.

"So she gets an aptitude for Abnegation, but you're telling me she's not an Abnegation?" She raises her eyebrows at me.

"That's what her test was entered as." I reply evenly and she nods once.

"I figured." She sighs, "You still trust Max?"

"I do." I admit.

"I hope you know what you're doing." She sighs.

We eat pizza and talk more, sharing a couple of beers and keeping things low-key. Kate smirks at me when she catches me continuously texting Tris, and I take her ribbing in stride.

"You've been single for awhile too. What gives?" I ask her and she shrugs.

"Can't a girl just live?" She grins at me.

"Of course you can, I feel like we've done a lot of living over these past several years."

"We have." She admits, "I think I'm close to being ready for something more though."

"I am too." I nod and when I meet her eyes again, she raises her eyebrows at me.

"With Tris?"

"Is that such a bad thing?" I counter.

"I've heard stuff." Kate says vaguely, and I realize that she also knows about the affair between Brandon and Tris.

"Let me guess, an affair between inter faction leaders that led to Candor getting involved." I reply angrily.

"Eric-"

"No, you don't get to judge her. Do you know it was with a fucking Erudite? And I know him, Kate, he's my childhood best friend, and when I talked to him recently he admitted that he lied to her about his marital status repeatedly."

"I didn't realize." She replies.

"No one does. They just want to paint Tris as this home wrecker, when her only actual issue was falling in love with someone completely unavailable to her. Why do we blame the victim?"

"I'm sorry for assuming the worst. I just don't want to see you get hurt if this is a pattern of behavior for her. I don't want you to be used as a way to get her out of Abnegation." She explains in a gentle voice.

"Is that what people actually think of her?" I ask and she nods.

"She's got a reputation for pushing the envelope to the point of almost expulsion if her father wasn't in charge. I don't want to see you hurt."

I want to lash out, but I know my friend, and she's coming to me from a place of love and concern, much like I have with her over the course of our long friendship.

"I promise you I'm being careful." I reply simply and she nods, knowing the conversation is done for now.

"You're exhausted." Tris says to me one evening during a late night video call.

I'd stayed out in Abnegation as late as I could get away with on a Friday night, and when it became obvious that her father wasn't going to give us even a second alone, we decided to stop pretending like we were still working and just call it a night. I came home, and immediately ran into Kate, who dragged me downstairs to The Pit and drinks with our friends.

"I'm tired, and a little buzzed." I admit and smile at her.

"You needed a good night out with your friends, you've been neglecting them." She grins at me, "You should get some sleep."

"No." I reply grumpily, "I miss you. I've missed you all night."

"You saw me all day today. All week-"

"It's not enough. I want you here. Are you ready to move here yet?" I ask.

"You'd totally get tired of me." She smiles at me.

"Nope." I reply and I smile at her, "You're so fucking pretty. How the fuck am I so lucky to be able to look at you? Like, this shit is a privilege Tris. You're perfect."

"And you're drunk." She chuckles at me.

"Mmhmm, but also right."

"Where did you all end up tonight?" She asks and I move the phone so I can flop down on my bed.

"The Pit. Same old shit. Was fun though."

We keep talking, and I know I'm pretty drunk but I can't help but wanting to just see her for as long as I can. I know by her reactions that I'm probably making no sense, but it's okay just to see her sweet smile and to hear her laugh.

"You should sleep." She says again when I almost nod off.

"Stay until I fall asleep?" I ask her. I know I'm being ridiculous but I can't find it in myself to care.

"Okay." She replies softly.

After another busy week in Abnegation with Tris, on Friday it's a rare office day for me. Max went out to Abnegation today to work with Andrew and he asked me to stay behind. I've been texting with Tris, and she told me she's been giving the grand tour to her father and Max, and I let her know how proud I am of her.

She's amazing, and she doesn't hear it nearly enough. I'm going through the pictures she's sending me of the construction sites, and then the couple of selfies she was able to sneak, and I'm staring at one of those when I hear rapping on my door frame. I look up and see Uriah for the first time in over a month, grinning at me.

"Can I come in?" He asks.

"Yeah." I gesture to the chair across from my desk and he closes the door before he sits.

"How are things?" He asks and when I look up at him he gestures towards my phone, "You seem distracted."

"Work shit." I shrug and place my phone back down on my desk, just for it to alert me again.

"You okay man? I can come back." Uriah asks and I nod my head.

"I'm good, what's up?"

"Just wanted to check in to see how things are going with Abnegation. I kind of miss working with them sometimes." He grins and I narrow my eyes at him.

"Why is that?" I ask.

"Well, not most of them, just Tris. She's a different one. I heard you had her here a few weeks ago." He replies.

"I did."

"What was that all about?" He presses.

"Why are you digging for information?" I ask.

He puts his hands up with the palms out and shakes his head, "Not trying to dig, just interesting to me that you had her here."

"Interesting enough to wait this long before mentioning it?" I ask, "Kate put you up to this?"

"Dude, I've been onsite in Erudite for weeks now. Have you not noticed my empty and dark office? Or how quiet it is without me up here? I literally just got back today." Uriah shakes his head and then has the nerve to grin at me, "Why are you so freaking grumpy?"

"I'd not noticed you were gone because I've been in Abnegation every day. Today's my first office day in months."

"Yeah, I know, how's the life of grey?" He asks, "It must be pretty interesting for you."

"Uriah…." I sigh, "What did Kate tell you?"

"Look, I heard you had her here, and that you were really cozy with her, and she spent the night." He raises his eyebrows.

"It wasn't like that." I huff.

"Really, because I heard you two were holding hands and kissing. You like her. How the hell did that happen?"

"Uriah, go away-"

"You abhor Abnegation. Max sent you there to punish you. Are you telling me that in that time you've developed a crush on their resident rebel?" He chuckles.

"Uriah, I'm almost twenty-seven years old, not sixteen, I don't have a fucking crush. I don't have time for gossip, so unless you're here for a reason maybe you should type up your report on Erudite. I surely don't remember seeing it." I smirk at him and his smile drops.

"I actually came in here to talk to you about Erudite. Jeanine told me she's your mother-"

"She's not anything to me." I replied angrily.

"I get it, but she's still got plans for you, plans she expects you to follow since she's your mother."

That gets my attention, "What kind of plans?"

Uriah shakes his head, "She misread me, I mean I just was my usual charming self, but she got real comfortable talking to me about some pretty personal shit." He replies.

"What do you mean comfortable?" I ask.

"Maybe I purposely put her at ease when she made me wonder why she was acting so fucking shady." He shrugs, "It worked though."

"What did she tell you?"

"She started talking about Divergent, and some sort of list she has. Eric, do you know anything about it?" He asks.

"I know she's been obsessed with Divergent for as long as I can remember, and that she wanted to test serums on then, but nothing about a list. What did she say about this list?"

He pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and tosses it on my desk, "Not just told me, she showed me," He says as I unfold the paper, scanning over the list of names written in Jeanine's familiar neat penmanship.

Beatrice Prior.

She's the first one, with a percentage of ninety to one hundred percent Divergent.

"What the fuck is this?" I bark out.

"She's been analyzing those aptitude tests in that stupid 'Needs Review' folder, apparently she had assembled an actual team to determine a suspected Divergent percentage. She was mad that the person she had in charge couldn't give her satisfactory data so she started looking into it herself. She also introduced me to this dude that claims he knows you, but she was really evasive about who he is or what he does."

"Pale guy my age with blonde hair and blue eyes, right?"

Uriah nods, "Yeah, he mentioned you two knew each other before."

"We were close when we were kids." I shake my head, "We're not overly close now, but he has been gathering information on Dalton and Jeanine, and he hadn't had anything concrete to pin on them as of yet."

"She's got this list now, with Tris and Four at the top, and my brother down here at the bottom. Do you know anything about this, Eric?" He asks.

I look over the list, seeing the other familiar names, "She gave you this?"

"Not exactly. She showed it to me, went over it, and I may have snagged it from her desk when she was distracted by that dude."

"I'm fucking impressed. Did she say exactly what this is for?" I ask.

"It's a list of people she wants brought to Erudite for testing, and if she doesn't find them useful she wants them gone."

"Gone?"

"By any means necessary according to her." He replies slowly.

"Fuck."

"I played along just so I could figure out what the fuck her crazy ass is doing, but she's already trying to get more people invested in this. She told me that she's been trying to meet with you and get you involved, especially since she knows you've spent the last several months working with Abnegation on that networking shit." He replies.

"Uriah, you're absolutely sure she's about to act on this?" I ask.

He nods his head, "If she can get any support, yeah I think she will. She thinks I'm on her side, and she has no idea that my own brother's name is on there. She's so self-absorbed that she can't put two and two together that Max, Zeke and I have the same last name. No offense I find her to be batshit crazy."

"None taken, I've known she's batshit crazy my entire life. Abnegation and Erudite aren't exactly allies, so maybe Tris will be okay as long as she doesn't leave the faction."

Uriah shakes his head, "That girl doesn't like staying in that faction, she's always out and about, just like how she easily came here with you. You're going to have to warn her. I'm a bit worried about making any obvious moves since you and I swapped factions."

"We need to talk to Max about this when he's back."

"She was insinuating that Max is cooperating with her, but there's no way in hell, right? He's my uncle, he helped raise me and Zeke when our dad died, you know he's a good dude. He wouldn't do this." Uriah says.

I realize that Uriah has absolutely no idea that his uncle was likely involved in the plans at one time, and that he's been romantically involved with Jeanine for years.

"Uri, I think you should take this to Max. Trust me, he would want to know, especially since Zeke is on there, and even Four."

"Okay, I will, but what about Tris? This shit makes me nervous." He replies.

"I'll talk to her tonight. She should be home by now, I can just text her." I reply after glancing at my watch. I send several texts, and when I get no response I call her. It's unusual for her not to answer, at least a simple code word that we use anytime her dad is around, and I was getting a little apprehensive.

"She's not answering?" Uriah asks and I frown and shake my head.

"No. Maybe I should head out there and check on her." I say as I begin locking up my drawers.

"Dude, you can't just go door to door in Stiffland." He sighs.

"I won't, I'll just go to her house."

Uriah's eyes widened, "You know where she lives?"

"Yeah, hasn't she had you over for lunch while you worked with her?" I ask.

He shakes his head, "Never. Her dad would have flipped shit. I always had to eat that nasty ass cafeteria food they had. She's made you lunch? She cooks for you?"

"We usually cook together, but yeah, every day that I've been there I've eaten lunch at her house. What the fuck is so funny?"

Uriah continues laughing, and when he finally composes himself he speaks, "Dude. You're the last person I imagine cooking in an Abnegation house, but yeah you should totally pay her a visit and tell her that her name is on the batshit lady's list."

"Yeah." I scrub my hand across my face, "I'll do that."

"Eric, all kidding aside, do you have any idea how to protect her? Tris is a good one, and she's capable, but in Abnegation she's nothing but a sitting target." Uriah replies.

"I actually do." I nod and make my way out of the office.