Author's Note: Okay, so I don't write well on a deadline, which is one of many reasons why I don't do this professionally. But at least I established a foundation before the new canon started up again.

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Chapter 4

Somewhere around the end of dinner was when it finally occurred to Jo that she was on a date with Zane. Not a fake date to keep up appearance in case Danny should walk in or at the very least hear about it. No, this was a real date, after which she was going to go back to Zane's place and "spend the night." She was a little horrified to realize that she had basically tricked Zane into being her boyfriend, at least for the next few weeks until he left for the Astraeus mission. She decided not to comment on this in case he hadn't noticed.

They had walked to Cafe Diem because it was a nice enough night for it. On the walk back to Zane's apartment, they fell into a silence that felt awkward to Jo. Now that she realized what she had done, she was not sure how to talk to him.

Zane picked up the slack in the conversation. "I'm still confused about one thing. Why does it matter if I have a doctorate? Does Major Danny have one?"

Jo was relieved to be talking about Danny. Anything to distract her from whatever was happening between her and Zane. "Don't call him that. And no, no doctorate. But he does have a masters degree from Georgia Tech."

"Well, I have one of those. From M.I.T., so. . ."

Jo was starting to realize that she probably should never have brought up anything about Ph.D.s. "Don't worry; you're definitely smarter than him." The only reason Danny's masters mattered at all was in comparison to herself, and she decided to explain that to Zane. "Me on the other hand? While he was getting a degree in mechanical engineering, I was majoring in practical weapons application."

Zane gave her a sideways glance. "Is that a real major at West Point?"

Of course it was not a real major. She could have pointed out that West Point was a real university, with four years of real coursework, but she went in a different direction instead. "Is it not one at M.I.T.?"

"Okay, now I really don't know if you're being sarcastic."

She smiled. "I majored in military history. But my point is that really I majored in being in the Army, whereas Danny got a real degree."

He gave that some thought. "So you've lived here for over five years, among the greatest scientific minds in the country, Nobel Prize winners, people I'm impressed to be working with, and it's Major Danny who makes you feel insecure?"

Now that he put it that way, it did seem absurd. Back in college, it made sense, but for her to still feel this way? "I guess it's twofold. One, he's a normal. I don't compare myself to you guys, but I can usually hold my own against the normals. And two, . . . just being around him, it's making me regress back to all that insecurity and uncertainty."

"That doesn't really sound like you. You've always been so strong and confident."

"Not always." Jo was a little flattered that he saw her that way. She decided not to mention how much of a wreck Zane had made her since Founders' Day. "College is just a confusing time. You're kind of an adult but not really, you're on your own for the first time, you're charged with securing peace and liberty for an entire nation. . ."

"That was not my experience in college."

"Yeah, and then you throw first love on top of all that. I mean, not . . . I didn't love him, but I thought I did at the time, and for a while after we broke up. Which happened when we were cows—" She realized that West Point jargon would be lost on Zane. The use of it was just another sign that she was regressing. "Or, um, juniors. With a year and a half left. And it's a small school, and we had a lot of the same friends. So I still had to spend a lot of time around him. And I just. . ." She shrugged. "I found it difficult to be as strong and confident as I wanted. And now he's here, and I still feel. . ." A few choices for the end of that sentence popped into her head, but she did not want to say any of them out loud. She was sure Zane got the point.

Zane did not say anything in response to that. He seemed to be giving something she said a lot of thought. Jo realized that he had not really asked about any of that stuff, and she was sure that he did not really want to hear her talk about her relationship with another man. Then she had to remind herself that Zane was not actually her boyfriend.

As they approached the building, Zane finally spoke again. "I probably should have asked this before, but what exactly are you looking for in a fake boyfriend?"

She had not really thought about that. She did not want to get into specifics, not after that realization she'd had at dinner. So she simply said, "You're doing great."

"Still," he said, opening the door for her. "We should probably at least get our story straight. When this started and all that."

The best thing was to keep it simple. "Right after you burned down my house." Then she remembered something Danny had said earlier about being able to pinpoint when it started based on disciplinary reports. That couldn't be right. "Our first kiss was after you were arrested for treason."

"And that's what you want to tell Major Danny?"

"Seriously, stop calling him that. And yeah, we'll just say everything happened the same way." Surely, he was going to notice now. "Except it was more serious," she added as a thin veil of cover. Something very important occurred to her. "But nothing about time travel."

"I know," Zane said, like he was almost insulted that she felt it necessary to tell him that.

"No, but it's especially important with Danny—Callahan." Maybe if she didn't call him Danny, Zane wouldn't either. "He can't even get a whiff of time travel. All you need to know about Callahan is that he's the kind of Army officer who gets promoted quickly. He takes protocol very seriously. So there was none of that, no ring; you kissed me in the sheriff's office for some other reason. And I avoided you between then and the fire for other reasons."

"What were they?"

Zane took a few innocent steps toward her, and the sudden proximity made her feel a little flushed. She stepped back and ran into the kitchen's breakfast bar. She tried to make that look natural. "It doesn't matter; he won't ask."

He placed his hands on either side of her. "But what if he does?" he asked with a slight hint of a smirk. "We don't want to have to make it up on the spot."

Jo told herself to focus. She looked into his eyes and ignored everything else. "Just say. . . Well, I don't know exactly why you kissed me. Probably because I defended you so vehemently on the treason charge, and you thought. . . I don't know what you were thinking; you just did it." There was a second part that she did not really want to expound on. "And I didn't realize that I had feelings for you until it happened, and even then I didn't want to admit it to myself, so I avoided you. And then you burned down my house, because you're crazy. That's the story we'll go with."

"That I'm crazy?"

She did not think that was the most important part, but if he wanted to focus on it, that was okay with her. "Yeah, you won me over with your fiery passion. Literally."

"So the story is that you fell for me because I committed arson? You're really pushing this bad boy thing, aren't you?."

"It is what most sets you apart from—" She almost forgot to use his last name. "—Callahan."

Zane narrowed his eyes and pondered that for a second. "What if we say that I burned down your house because of neural linguistic programming?"

Jo's eyes had started to wander to his mouth and neck and chest. She snapped them back up and shrugged. "You tell the story your way, and I'll tell it mine. Now, have we done enough talking for tonight?"

He smiled. "Oh, yeah." He leaned in to kiss her.

–

The next morning, Zane and Jo went into work separately. It was better not to alter their daily routine too dramatically, she said. Zane saw the logic in that, and it really supported his "nothing had actually changed" theory.

Zane did not have a lot of work at the moment. He had gotten through most of the month's checklist a couple weeks earlier after his pardons came through. So, he decided to spend his morning consulting with a colleague who was working in non-lethal weapons. It was not that surprising when Major Danny came by to familiarize himself with the project. The whole lab had Department of Defense implications.

Even though Jo considered one of Zane's assets to be his higher IQ, he chose to play it as someone with nothing to prove. It was important to give the impression that he was secure in his relationship, which he mostly was. Jo had said a couple troubling things the night before, but that conversation had ended in a really good place, so he was not too worried about it . He just treated Major Danny like he would anyone else. This was not even his project, so he did not have much to say about it.

When he had finished inspecting the prototype, Callahan approached Zane away from the other researchers. "Dr. Don—Mr. Donovan, sorry, we didn't really get a chance to talk yesterday."

All right, maybe he was doing that on purpose. "I didn't realize we had anything to talk about," Zane said amicably.

Callahan smiled. "No, I just –I knew Jo back in college, and I wanted to make sure she was in good hands."

Zane returned his smile. "She's in great hands. I'm not the one who cheated on her. Repeatedly." He was taking a chance with that, but "seeing a girl at Vassar" sounded like it happened more than once.

Callahan thought about that for a second, or at least he pretended to. "I did cheat on her at West Point, when we still basically kids. But technically in Georgia, she and I were cheating on my now ex-wife."

Zane tried so hard not to react to that. He knew he'd failed when Major Danny continued. "Oh, I'm sorry, did she not tell you about that?"

Zane was trying to think. Georgia sounded familiar, but his mind could not quite place it. "No. No, I don't think she mentioned anything about that. Of course, unless it happened in the last year, it's not really that important, is it?"

"Oh, no, this was awhile ago." He was really selling that he did not mean anything by it. "Long before you two got together."

Zane could only assume that he had stressed the word long to emphasize his history with Jo. He nodded. "I figured as much." Now that they had sufficiently sized each other up, there did not seem to be anything left for them to say. "Okay, good talk. I'm going to get back to work."

Callahan let him go easily. It was not until Zane was back to examining the prototype that he finally remembered Georgia Tech. A good engineering school, not a great one. Now he had a probable timeframe for whatever happened with Jo in Georgia. He was still going to do some research though.