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For not the first time, John is grateful to Finch for giving him his space on nights like this. It may still be that Finch knows nearly every single detail of his life, but at the very least, he gives John the impression of privacy and it's a feeling John will happily take.
He isn't nervous exactly. Or he is nervous and he doesn't understand why. It's been just over two months since he and Karen kissed in that rented house where they'd been pretending to be a married couple in order to gather intel on a couple of families. Just over two months since they started dating, something real and official, something with a blessedly genuine foundation instead of being built on lies and false identities and cover stories. That's what he'd done wrong with Iris, he'd realized it only a few weeks into his relationship with Karen. It would have been impossible to give her an authentic relationship when he couldn't even tell her who he really was.
But Karen knows. She knows more than anyone else, with the exception of Finch, and so things are going well as far as he can tell. His experience since Jessica may be limited to mostly Zoe, which hadn't been this sort of relationship, but he thinks he has a relatively good grasp on when things are going wrong.
Tonight, though, he's nervous. There's no special event, nothing out of the ordinary, but he'd called Karen, asked if she was interested in dinner on Friday, and now he's here, outside her apartment, waiting for her to answer her buzzer, his palms sweating like he can't remember them having done in a long time. Not since Jessica.
He thinks he might be falling in love with Karen, if he hasn't already, and he's puzzling that out, blotting his palms carefully on a tissue from his pocket, as he waits.
He isn't nervous exactly. Or he is nervous and he doesn't understand why. It's been just over two months since he and Karen kissed in that rented house where they'd been pretending to be a married couple in order to gather intel on a couple of families. Just over two months since they started dating, something real and official, something with a blessedly genuine foundation instead of being built on lies and false identities and cover stories. That's what he'd done wrong with Iris, he'd realized it only a few weeks into his relationship with Karen. It would have been impossible to give her an authentic relationship when he couldn't even tell her who he really was.
But Karen knows. She knows more than anyone else, with the exception of Finch, and so things are going well as far as he can tell. His experience since Jessica may be limited to mostly Zoe, which hadn't been this sort of relationship, but he thinks he has a relatively good grasp on when things are going wrong.
Tonight, though, he's nervous. There's no special event, nothing out of the ordinary, but he'd called Karen, asked if she was interested in dinner on Friday, and now he's here, outside her apartment, waiting for her to answer her buzzer, his palms sweating like he can't remember them having done in a long time. Not since Jessica.
He thinks he might be falling in love with Karen, if he hasn't already, and he's puzzling that out, blotting his palms carefully on a tissue from his pocket, as he waits.
