They go out for sushi, but he can tell something's on her mind as their date progresses.

Most notably, she's picking at her food, which is unlike her – sushi is her favorite – and she's oddly quiet.

"What's the matter?" Tim asks after watching her for a solid minute, not taking a bite or speaking a word, figuring there's no sense in beating around the bush.

"Huh?" her head jerks up and she looks at him, confused, as if she's just been jolted back to reality.

"What's bothering you?" he repeats, leaning back and crossing his arms, locking his eyes with her.

She shrugs a little and uses a chopstick to pick at her food again, pushing it around her plate. "Was that interview weird?"

She knows he'll agree, she knows he was agitated during the whole thing, so she's not sure why she's even asking. He's hated being interviewed for all three of the documentaries that the station has participated in. She knows he hates it even more when they're trying to get information on his personal life. This time she was only interviewed with him briefly, and she can only imagine his irritation when he was filmed alone in his office.

He'd been the one who reacted so strongly to the interviewer's suggestion that maybe their relationship could suffer the same fate as Jake and Sava's. She could see his frustration and knew he was about to get upset, so she'd calmed him down with a touch of the hand and did what she always does: puts her optimism out into the universe. Of course they're not Jake and Sava, of course nothing is guaranteed but they're in a beautiful place right now.

And they are.

It's still new enough that it's hard to believe it's happening. She still thinks back to their early days riding patrol and can't believe how they've gone from that to this. They're learning more things about each other. They're having fun together. He teases her in the way that he always has, but it holds much more promise now. They're already at the point the spend very few nights apart, something she's never experienced before in any other relationship - just something she's heard happens to couples. They've already made sacrifices for each other. A lot of things are like they always were – they joke, they have each other's backs – but now it holds a promise of a future of a different kind.

She does think it's beautiful.

But now that they're out of the hot seat and it's just the two of them again, something is bugging her.

Tim scoffs, answering her question. "What? You mean comparing us to Jake and Sava just because we look something like them?" he asks. "It's a huge reach. Even twins are their own people and they actually look alike."

Lucy nods. It is. It is a reach. Just because they look like these two criminals doesn't mean anything. She knows that. She knows the interviewer is just looking for something interesting, a sound bite (the type she had so eagerly tried to provide last time), a juicy clip to use to promote the documentary. So what's this feeling of nagging?

"They asked me if we're honest with each other." The words pour out from her mouth before she can even realize they were weighing on her. "We said we'd always be honest with each other," she recalls one of the earliest conversations they had had as a couple. "And then… the whole Metro thing. Already I can't say yes, we're always honest with each other. I already blew that. I started our whole relationship off with a lie."

Tim blinks and sits up straight. He knows she's going to see his snarky comment about sitting in his office because of a secret she kept (because of course she's going to watch this documentary and make him watch it with her) and suddenly he hopes it ends up on the cutting room floor.

Later, when she's out of her spiral, he'll gently clue her in on his comment before she sees it herself, assure her it's sarcasm and nothing more. Really, it had been. He's moved past the whole Metro thing, but the comment was too easy to make.

"Lucy."

"And are we really that different from them?"

He frowns at her, confused. "We're literally the opposite of them. They're criminals. We're police officers."

"Jake cheated on her. At least twice. Remember that waitress in Vegas? And then with her friend."

He's not sure how to react to that one, blinking at her. "I…"

"No! I mean… not that I think…," she clarifies. "Of course not. I just mean- we act like we're so morally above them, but remember we almost…"

"We didn't."

"We were going to!" she exclaims louder than she intends and the people at the next table look over at her, so she lowers her voice before she continues. "We were both with other people and we were going to."

The words hang in the air and neither of them speak for a moment. It's a moment they've never discussed again, not since the hallway outside of her apartment when he insisted that she go to UC school. It's a moment they tried to hide from, and now that they're in a relationship maybe it's something they need to discuss, the immoral propriety they almost engaged in that's been hanging over them.

"I can't justify it," he admits. "It would've been the wrong thing to do. No doubt about it."

Lucy shrugs a little. "At least you tried to walk away. You tried to say no. But I… I'm the one who invited you in in the first place, I'm the one pushed it."

He remembers. He remembers he'd protested weakly, but it hadn't taken much to get him to change his mind. She hadn't even said another word before he was following her inside.

"Technically," he tries to console her with a soft smile, "you didn't push it, you never said another word about it."

She cocks her head and gives him a look, both of them knowing her deliberate stare as she stepped inside the apartment was as good as any words.

"Look," he leans forward and reaches across the table to take her hands and give them a squeeze. "Sure, it was only because it was us that we even considered it, but I know that's still not an excuse. I know that doesn't make it right. Just because it was you didn't mean I had a free pass. But it was. It was because it was you. And you didn't start our relationship with a lie," Tim counters her earlier point. "Our relationship didn't start when we started dating. It started years before that in the roll call room when Grey told me I was going to be assigned our hotshot rookie."

She snorts at that and chuckles, remembering. "Oh, man. I was so pumped when he said that. I thought it'd impress my TO and instead I got… Tim Bradford."

He chuckles at that. "I mean, maybe that was some sort of deception, trying to call yourself a hotshot on day one. You didn't even know our location when I asked you."

"First of all, I didn't call myself that, Grey did!" she says with a laugh. "And I knew exactly where we were when I saved your life the next day," she boasts.

He huffs. "Only because you remembered what I taught you." He shrugs as he takes a sip of his drink. "Actually, when I realized that you'd taken my words seriously and had applied them just a shift later - that's when I knew you would be a hotshot."

She smirks and blushes a little in pride. Even all these years later, even with where they are now, she still feels accomplished when he praises her work as a rookie. It seems like a lifetime ago, those two shifts when they barely knew each other and she had thought he was going to be literally the biggest jerk she ever met – but now look at them.

She thinks maybe that's why they felt entitled to each other that day, despite being with other people, because their relationship actually felt like the real true one, the one that had started before either of the others.

"Anyway, we're not criminals, and we're not going to live a life of crime." Tim squints and smirks. "Right?"

"What?" she's surprised by his question. "Of course not!"

"Just checking. I'm not saying no. I just want to know."

She rolls her eyes as she laughs. "Yeah, right. You'd be the last person to live a life of crime."

"What I'm saying is, maybe we look like them, maybe we almost made a mistake, maybe you hid something from me with the best of intentions and maybe we're not perfect and we're going to argue. It's normal. It doesn't mean we're going to end up like them. We're not going to become criminals, I'm sure as hell not going to cheat on you, and we're not going to do all the wild and crazy stuff they did."

She smiles at him. "Okay."

"Including making a sex tape."

She scrunches up her face. "I never said we should do that!"

He nudges her foot with his under the table. "You were thinking it, Lucy Chen."

Her face morphs into something different, playful and seductive. "Well. We'll see."

"No," he tells her and she just laughs as she goes back to her food, life returning to her as she stops pushing it around the plate and eats enthusiastically again.

"It's kind of fun to think maybe we're their alter egos in an alternative universe," she muses as she takes a bite of her food. "We can live it out the right way. With a happy ending."

"Yeah, I mean, Jake cheated on her. I was going to cheat with you. Doesn't that count for something already?"

"Shut up," she laughs with a roll of her eyes as he cracks his straight-faced facade and laughs along with her.

"Alright, Hotshot, " he teases. "Eat so we can get out of here. I want to make sure they left your place better than they found it."

She just laughs and shakes her head, feeling lighter already.