Chapter Text
i. Kiss Me
The first time they kiss is totally innocent and mostly just for fun, with just a little bit of pressure to do it because they’re at a Red Sox and Atlanta Braves game, and a Kiss Me by “Six Pence None The Richer” song is playing over the speakers, and the kiss cam has landed on them.
Cooper claps and cheers in delight when she sees Ormewood and Faith on the Jumbotron.
“Kiss!” She says. “You have to kiss her daddy!”
Faith smiles at him and shakes her head. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Michael.”
It‘s just a flicker of a second of Cooper cheering them on, and the crowd booing and yelling because they haven’t kissed yet.
There’s just a flicker of a second, and then, Ormewood leans in and kisses her. It’s friendly, perfunctory, just for the cameras. Because everyone expects it. And who is he to mess with a time-honored tradition?
The boos turn to applause as the audience is appeased, and Ormewood pulls away. He clears her throat and tries not to look at Faith to see her reaction to the kiss.
At least she kissed him back.
At least there was that, and he doesn’t have to wonder if he did something he shouldn’t have, crossed some unspoken boundary between the two of them.
Something he frets about that a lot more often than he did when he was a younger man and made reckless decisions.
He tries to ignore the new butterflies in his belly; they’ve been getting harder to disregard when he’s around her these days. But this is a new sensation, all angry and swarming. He takes a sip of beer, his mouth really dry, and then clears his throat.
Faith pushes her hair behind her ears and looks at Cooper.
“Come on! Let’s go and get some French fries and ice cream, Coop!” She says. “Do you want anything, Ormewood? Another beer, or something?”
He shakes his head, finally daring to steal a glance at her. He wants to know what she’s thinking, if she’s feeling anything. He wants to know how she can be standing there, so calm and collected, when he feels jittery, like he’s drunk too much coffee.
“No. I’m good,” he answers, clearing his throat.
“Okay. We’ll be back,” Faith says, taking Cooper’s hand and holding onto it tightly as she carefully guides her down the aisle, excusing herself to everyone in the row with them.
Ormewood takes a second to compose himself while they’re gone. If being with Joanne felt like a teenage boy with his first crush, he thinks maybe this thing he feels for Faith is like falling in love again. But not for the first time, like for a second time with more maturity to handle it.
“In love!? With Faith!? ” He thinks to himself, taking another gulp of his drink. “Get a damn grip, Ormewood! You’re not in love with anyone!”
Except, there’s no grip to be gotten, and he thinks about it the rest of the night. Faith acts the same as usual when they get home; it’s like her keen detective skills are dormant as she volunteers to help get a sleepy Cooper ready for bed.
When Cooper’s in bed, she comes back to the living room and sits down next to him on the couch, kicking her sandals off before sitting cross-legged. She sighs, and Ormewood fidgets with the remote, waiting with anxiously bated breath to see if she brings up the kiss at the baseball park.
If she’ll berate him, say she hated it, that she liked it.
Instead, she leans over and takes the remote from him and turns the TV on. “Do you want to watch Chopped? Or are you going to go to bed?”
He guesses he should be relieved that she’s not acting weird or avoiding him.
“Yeah, sure,” he agrees, congratulating himself on decidedly acting like he does have a grip.
“I saw your big kiss on TV last night,” Angie teases the next day.
“Angie,” Will says, and Ormewood cannot place the tone of his voice, whether it’s warning or annoyance.
“It wasn’t a big kiss. It was just a friendly kiss,” Ormewood replies, hoping it sounds more truthful than it is.
“Mhm. Right.” Angie smirks. “Just a friendly kiss.”
“The damn kiss cam was on us, and Cooper kept saying I had to kiss her. What else was I supposed to do? Just ignore it?” Ormewood insists, glancing at Will. “You would have done it too, right?”
“Uh, I don’t think so,” Will answers. “Maybe on the cheek. But Faith’s more like my kid sister—”
“I saw you kiss Mitchell on TV last night,” Franklin says as he comes off the elevator and leans against Angie’s desk.
Ormewood is hit with the realization that probably everyone saw them kiss, and not only does he have to live with the weight of his growing feelings for her, but he’s also suddenly struck with the realization that everyone they work with had seen them kiss.
The fretting he said he wasn’t going to do about crossing boundaries has firmly lodged itself in his brain.
Or at least all of f their colleagues who liked baseball and watched The Atlanta Braves had anyway.
Now, not only does he have to worry about how he could have potentially ruined their friendship, but he has something else to stress about.
What people are thinking about them, whether it was unprofessional. If anyone’s saying anything to her about it.
He wishes he had thought it through more before kissing her in public, with all of Atlanta, Georgia, watching. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that more than the people at the ballpark had seen them kiss.
He groans inwardly and wonders if anyone has said something to Faith about it yet. He knows Angie won’t; she’ll save most of her teasing for him. But the other people… including people they don’t know or work with might have something to say about it.
He thinks that this will be the thing that’ll ruin any chance he has to kiss her again. Not that he thought there ever was a chance to begin with in the first place. But now…
Now…
“Everything okay there, Ormewood?” Angie asks, breaking into his troubled thoughts. “You look kind of sick.”
“I told you not to say anything to him about it,” Will says under his breath.
“It’s okay if you have a crush on her, you know,” Angie tells him, ignoring Will.
“Crush?” Ormewood repeats. “I don’t have a crush! I was just thinking about how everyone probably saw us kiss.”
“Well, everyone probably didn’t see. That would have to be a far reach,” Will assures him, and Ormewood knows he’s trying to be helpful, but he’s not helping.
“It’s not like you did anything wrong. Nobody’s in a place of authority, and you guys both work with two completely different agencies. You just happen to partner up occasionally,” Angie says. “It doesn’t go against any of the rules.”
“It’s not that. I-I just don’t want anyone giving her a hard time because we kissed,” Ormewood replies.
“That’s very sweet of you,” Angie says. “But Faith can handle herself, and it’s not like she didn’t kiss you back. I know that she did. It didn’t look unwelcome, and if anyone says anything to her about it, I’m sure she can handle herself. She does not need you to come in and rescue her like you're some damn white knight. Just don’t make a big deal out of it happening, and it’ll go away eventually. Just like these things usually do.”
It’s good advice, great advice. Advice the old Ormewood wouldn’t heed, and probably proceed to punch the lights out of the first person he heard talking about their kiss.
He still kind of wants to, though.
And Faith doesn’t say anything to him about it either.
Not the kiss, or the fact that people are talking about it all over their place of work.
He still kind of wants her to. To have it out with her, to know if she’s bothered about people talking about them. But he can’t ask, doesn’t ask.
“So, you kissed Faith last night?” Max asks as he and Jeremy unpack Chinese food for dinner that night. “I was watching the game with my friends.”
Ormewood sighs and rubs the back of his head, belatedly wondering just how far of a reach that damn kiss had. It was a damn Red Sox game, so people in Boston had probably seen it too.
But the last people he wants to talk about this with are Max and Jeremy. Having Franklin and Angie mildly rib him about it is nowhere near as mortifiying about talking about it with your own children.
Even though he knows they, more than anyone, have a right to their curiosity.
“Do we need to talk about your intentions with my mother?” Jeremy asks as he and Max both exchange looks, and then break out into raucous laughter.
“You know I’m still your father,” Ormewood says, not sure if he’s reminding Max or Max and Jeremy of this fact. Any goodwill of having a discussion man-to-man disappears.
“Sorry dad,” Max says.
“Sorry, Michael,” Jeremy echoes.
“But dad, seriously, you kissed Faith?” Max asks.
“It was for the kiss cam!” Ormewood protests again, wishing his reminder would have put an end to the discussion.
The argument is starting to sound weaker the more he says it. But he can imagine if he hadn’t kissed her, the conversations would be just a different side of the same coin. They’d probably give him a hard time for different reasons.
“Right, a kiss cam—” Max starts as Cooper and Faith come in, instantly shutting him up as he smiles at her. “Hey Faith, hi Coop.”
As soon as Faith and Cooper appear, all the joking dissipates.
Jeremy and Max respect Faith and don’t bring up the kiss to her. Ormewood wouldn’t want them to anyway, even if he knows she could handle their children and wouldn’t let them give her any crap for it. He knows well enough that she’d fix both of them with a stern look; it would shut them right up.
He’d been on the receiving end of it enough times himself to know it was absolutely withering, and it was better not to say anything at all.
Gina even knows, she texted him about it and asked if he and Faith were finally dating - and to tell him how happy she is for them, if they are.
He had quickly texted her back to tell her that no, they were not dating. Prompting Gina to actually call him and give him a lecture about getting it together, skating over his objections, it was for the camera and for Cooper.
“She’s still a kid, Michael!” Gina reminds him. “You didn’t have to do it because she wanted you to. I can tell that you like her. Don’t forget, I know you probably better than anyone else. So, are you going to do something about it since you clearly haven’t yet?”
Ormewood sighs since he can’t push her off as easily as Max or Jeremy, or even Will and Angie. “I don’t even know how she feels.”
“Well, you should ask her about it,” Gina says. “Maybe if you communicate with her, she might surprise you. Maybe she even feels the same way. The kids told me all about how she took care of you when you had cancer a couple of years ago. How do you take care of her? I know you’re braver than this. Are you… Are you afraid of rejection?”
Ormewood hesitates and then sighs. “I guess so.”
Gina laughs. “You must really like her if you’re worried that she’ll reject you. What are you waiting for? For her to say something?"
Ormewood doesn’t say anything.
“Michael!” Gina chides. “You need to go to her. Women can’t do all the work!”
“Maybe,” Ormewood says. “Who told you we kissed, anyway? You hate baseball.”
“Max showed me the clip on Instagram,” Gina answers.
“Oh. Max showed you the clip on Instagram,” Ormewood says. “Remind me to take Max’s phone away.”
Gina just laughs. “Yeah. Okay. I have to go. Say something soon, though. I mean it, Michael!”
But he doesn’t.
He can’t.
In a week, it’s all but forgotten about.
Everyone’s moved on to the next interpersonal thing that’s happened.
(Someone had an affair with someone, and the wife found out about it. There was a category 5 freak-out at the precinct.)
Faith still doesn’t mention it to him. Still doesn’t get upset at him for the kiss or say anything, and he doesn’t know what to make of it.
To know if she’s thinking about the kiss at all.
Eventually, he stops anticipating that she’ll say that they need to talk about it. But still, not knowing how she feels about it - her acting like it was just a kiss, or maybe like nothing happened makes him more anxious.
He wonders if she’s just going to pretend it didn’t happen, even though there’s probably a highlight reel of it somewhere floating around on Instagram or YouTube, and their kids know.
Because Gina’s right. He’s afraid of rejection, and he doesn’t know how he’ll face her if she does. He’s afraid that if he says something and she’s not into it, she’ll finally leave, and he doesn’t want her to leave.
So, for now, he just lets it be.