Alex Reagan worked by leaps and bounds, which was one of the reasons she had been planning on asking if they wanted to share a house or an apartment so that he didn't need to end up sharing housing with anyone else. Somehow she expected that would be disastrous for him. But Alex didn't get that fair when she watched the wheels in his head turn. Alex had heard that expression loads of times, but Strand was one of the few people in this world that she could actually watch him think.

She wondered if he was overthinking this, which meant that she was probably under thinking it. After all, he was still married, he had just gotten here, and well, it wasn't like he was out dating people while Coralee was missing and presumed dead. "Okay. We don't need to call it a relationship if you're not ready for it. And when you are, you don't have to call me your girlfriend. There's things like 'partner' that work really well and aren't so heteronormative. But we don't need to rush into any of that."

She gave him a little smile, and tried to lighten the mood with a classic Alex Reagan bad joke. "Of course, if you want to call me your better half, I won't mind. I'll call you 'person who controls my level of chill' or something."