She laughed—full this time, the kind that made a nearby couple glance over and then decide the joke was not for them.
"You have no idea what you're looking at."
"Neither does anyone else," Malik said. "I'm just saying it confidently."
Tessa's eyes narrowed with delight. "Are you always this annoying?"
"Only when someone interesting is listening."
There it was—the line that felt like flirtation if you wanted it to, and like banter if you needed it to. Malik felt the room tilt a degree toward warmth. He gestured lightly toward the next pedestal, toward the evening still unfolding in white and glass.
"Want to go judge expensive objects together?"
Tessa's amusement sharpened into something almost tender and almost sharp.
"Are you asking me on a date inside the date?"
Malik's face did a thing he would later replay with professional horror: shock, open and unguarded, the confidence slipping like a cufflink.
"Wait. This was already a date?"
Tessa stared at him. Stunned disbelief sat on her features like a second lighting cue. The piano kept playing as if nothing in the human world had just cracked. Around them, wine glasses chimed softly. The sculpture—Broken Refrigerator, 2017—kept its teardrop hollow and its pointed merge and offered no commentary.
For three full seconds, neither of them moved.
Then Tessa said, very carefully, "June told me Rafi was setting us up. As in—set up. As in date. She used the word. Twice."
Malik's mouth opened, closed, opened again. He could feel heat climb the back of his neck under the turtleneck. Dignity wanted him to laugh it off. Honesty wanted him to stop performing recovery.
"Rafi told me it was friendly," he said. "Networking-adjacent. Low pressure. Bring someone who wouldn't talk only about stewardship. He did not—" Malik stopped, because blaming Rafi in the first breath felt small. "I didn't hear date. I didn't assume date. I thought we were… doing this." He gestured at the room, the skyline, the soft piano. "As people who might become friends who also like judging objects."
Tessa's clutch strap creased under her fingers. "So the flirting was… what? Ambient?"
"It was me liking talking to you," Malik said. "Which is not nothing. And also not what you thought you walked into."
A server passed with a tray. Neither of them took a glass. The sculpture's metal caught a flicker of city light through the window and threw it back like a private joke.
Tessa exhaled. "I put on this dress for a date."
"You look—" Malik caught himself. "You look like you chose it on purpose. Which you did. I'm not going to stand here and pretend I don't notice that, and I'm also not going to pretend I earned the intention behind it."