Tidewoven Inc | Micah’s Inner Cringe

Micah had been feeling… better. Not cured. Not fixed. Just steadier. Like his thoughts had stopped ricocheting long enough for him to breathe between them. Even Jack hadn’t been getting under his skin. Nora had eased off the quiet surveillance, notebook blissfully absent. And the sun was actually out in the Pacific Northwest, which felt statistically impossible. If it lasted another hour, someone would probably ring the emergency sirens.

It was in that rare pocket of calm that Micah’s brain made a terrible executive decision.

He’d always known Tessa was attractive. That part had been filed away neatly under Do Not Engage While Mentally Unwell. Smart, capable, funny, with a presence that could cut clean through a room. The kind of woman whose attention felt like standing in the path of a focused beam.

But now that his nervous system wasn’t on fire, his brain finally had enough bandwidth to process the other part. Oh. Oh. Unfortunately, this realization did not remain internal.

“So what’s happening here,” Micah began, gesturing at the readout on the tablet between them, “is that the pressure differential is compensating for the… well, not compensating, exactly, it’s more like… adjusting preemptively, which is actually really elegant if you think about it, because the system isn’t reactive, it’s anticipatory, and that’s not something you see unless someone designed it with—”

He stopped. Mid-sentence. Mid-gesture. Mid-existence. Somewhere in the middle of that ramble, his brain caught up with his mouth and screamed, Abort mission. Heat flooded his face. He hoped for a moment that a sinkhole would appear and swallow him. His hard hat slipped forward on his suddenly damp scalp. He reached up to steady it, which somehow made everything worse.

Tessa hadn’t interrupted him. She hadn’t even looked away. She just watched him, head tilted slightly, eyes sharp and amused in a way that suggested she had clocked everything.

Micah tried to recover. Badly. “I mean,” he added quickly, attempting a casual tone that absolutely did not exist in his body, “you probably already know all that. I was just… joking. Mostly.”

She didn’t smile. She didn’t laugh. She just raised one eyebrow and said, slowly, “Uh-huh.”

Laser beams. Direct hit.

Micah’s throat went dry. He nodded too fast. “Yep. Cool. Anyway. I should—” His phone buzzed in his pocket. It might have been a notification. It might have been nothing. It might have been divine intervention. Micah pulled it out like it had personally summoned him. “I’m getting a call,” he said, already turning away. “Very important. Can’t miss it.”

Tessa’s voice followed him, dry and warm. “Of course you are.”

Micah retreated with what could generously be described as dignity-adjacent movement, slinking back toward his truck and pretending to be deeply engaged in whatever fake conversation he’d invented. Micah slid into the cab of the truck, shut the door, and exhaled hard. He dropped his forehead against the steering wheel once. Not hard. Just enough to register the full weight of what had just happened.

Thunk.

He stayed there for a beat, eyes closed, hard hat tipped askew, the faintest ghost of a smile tugging at his mouth despite himself.

Outside, the sun illuminated Tessa’s face as she stared after him, shaking her head slowly.

Inside, Micah Rowe accepted his fate… mostly. He was still praying for that sinkhole.

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