And enough people said yes that it turned into a proper, if informal, happy hour. I ended up at the bar later than most, having stayed back to finish up one last email before joining. And by the time I walked in, the initial group had already thinned out to a handful of people. Derek, a couple others from the media team, and Hannah standing near an old, slightly battered pool table in the back of the bar, Q in hand, clearly in the middle of some ongoing game against one of her co-workers. Ben, she called out when she spotted me.
Perfect timing. I just cleared the table. Winner stays on. You up for a game? I want to tell you I am a genuinely mediocre pool player.
The kind of person who can hold his own in a casual game, but has never once in my life run a table or executed anything resembling a real strategy beyond hit the ball toward the general vicinity of the pocket. But I also wasn't about to turn down an invitation from Hannah, so I grabbed a queue from the wall rack and racked up a new game. We played a genuinely competitive round. Both of us trash talking in that easy, low stakes way people do over drinks after a long week. And somewhere around the middle of the game, with Hannah lining up a genuinely difficult bank shot on the eightball, she paused, Q resting on the table and looked at me with this playful, mischievous glint in her eye.
"Okay," she said. "New stakes. If I sink this, you owe me a kiss. I want to tell you honestly what went through my head in that exact moment because it was a lot all at once. Part of me immediately assumed this was just banter.
The kind of flirty joke co-workers make after a few drinks that neither party actually expects to be taken seriously. Easily brushed off with a laugh and a counter joke. But another part of me, a quieter, more honest part, felt this immediate spike of something that had nothing to do with assuming it was just a bit. some genuine sudden awareness of Hannah standing there, cue in hand, this confident, playful energy radiating off her that I don't think I'd ever let myself fully register before that exact moment. That's a bold wager for a shot I've watched you miss twice already tonight, I said, trying to keep my voice light, buying myself a second to actually process what was happening. Confidence is part of the skill, Ben.
Are you in or not? I want to be honest, there was a version of that moment where I could have laughed it off, said something deflecting, kept things safely in the territory of harmless co-worker banter that never actually has to be tested against reality. But something in me, maybe the exhaustion of the week, maybe just genuine curiosity about whether she was serious, made me say instead, "I'm in, but if you miss, you owe me the same deal." Her eyebrows went up slightly, a flicker of surprise crossing her face, like she hadn't fully expected me actually to match the stakes instead of deflecting. "Deal," she said after a beat, this small, confident smile settling onto her face, like she just decided something.