He notices. Of course he does. He sets his hands palm-down on the table like a person not hiding anything. The skin across the knuckles is the kind you get from work that argues back. He doesn’t apologize for them. He doesn’t tell a story. He lets me decide.
“I’m not here,” I say, “to be enrolled.” I look again at the tray because it’s easier than looking at his mouth. The fruit sits in pieces, so the inside reads like a flower. War food disguised as pretty. “I don’t need your wine.”
“You don’t,” he says. He takes a small sip and sets his glass down so carefully it looks like it weighs what it does. “You don’t need me at all. You want what I know. I want to control how you learn it.”
“There it is,” I say. “The part he hides underorientation.”
“I’m not hiding it,” he says. “I brought you into a room that does exactly what it looks like it does. It’s designed so we can say difficult things without flinching. It’s designed so you can leave whenever you want.”
He moves his knee half an inch away from mine, so I feel the absence of a touch that wasn’t there. My heartbeat trips once. I cage it in a sentence. “Tell me why the NDA says I can’t describe a room.”
“Because rooms are maps,” he says. “You paint symbols people who need us recognize. You’ve already included a staircase curve I would prefer you hadn’t seen. You included a doorway mark you couldn’t have known unless someone told you or you walked a corridor I’d rather you didn’t. You’re close. If you publish a floor plan disguised as art, someone who wants what we’re protecting will not have to hunt.”
“Who told you I saw that?” I ask, throat tight.
He smiles with half his mouth. “You did,” he says. “In the way you set a line. In the way you hesitate. In the way your eyes went to the corner of a canvas when I asked you nothing at all.” He picks up the bottle and offers to refill my untouched glass then stops because he remembers it’s untouched. “You know how to read a face. So do I.”
“I don’t want to be read,” I grit out through my teeth.
“I know,” he says softly. “You keep your rules close because you earned them. I’m asking you to write one more rule into your list.”
“What rule?” I ask.
“When you look at something you know is real and decide to paint it,” he says, “ask yourself whether showing it is the same as saving it. If the answer isno,you paint something else.”
“I paint truth,” I snap and it comes out like a dare. “I don’t paint palatable myth to make rich men feel like they’re doing good.”
“You paint truth,” he agrees, nodding once. “So do I. Mine is ugly because it lives in logistics. Yours is beautiful because you make meaning with color. I can’t let your beautiful truth get women killed. I won’t.”
It’s theI won’tthat makes the air feel thinner. I could fight the rest. I can’t fight a sentence that reads like a vow in a mouth that has never saidpleaseto me.
“Jonah’s gone,” I say, out of nowhere even to me. “Did you move him?”
“Quietly,” he says. No apology. “He’ll come back with a wall that gives a pediatric ward something better to look at than cinderblock. He’ll brag about paint under his nails and sugar on his tongue. You’ll forgive him for disappearing because the mural will be worth it.”
“And Lila,” I say, because if I leave her out of this conversation I lose the right to call myself a friend. “You’re keeping her busy.”
“I am,” he says. “Because I like her and because I don’t need her setting herself on fire in a room built to test me.”
I should be angrier than I am. Maybe I am and my body is saving it for later. I feel it in the way my fingers knot in my own sleeve. He sees that too. He doesn’t reach for me. He waits. He lets the room do the thing he built it to do.
“Explain safety review,” I say, instead of moving the conversation to the kiss that’s been breathing behind the table since I walked in. “In writing.Time-bound.That was my clause. I want to hear you say it.”
“Acute risk in writing,” he says. “Notreasonable.Notat our discretion.Acute. Defined. Someone puts their name to the reason we’re asking you to wait. We identify the risk, we put it on a clock, and we revisit. If the risk doesn’t resolve, we give you proof, and we renegotiate with the same rule: no creative control dressed as care.”
It’s my language coming back at me. It should feel like a victory. It feels like a hand closing around something I asked him to hold for a minute and realizing he’s better at holding than I am at letting go.
“Why did you bring me here?” I ask again. “The real reason. Not the donor version.”
He tips his head the smallest degree, an admission. “Because you learn by touching,” he says. “Because if I keep telling younowithout letting your hands on a surface, you’ll paint mynoas a man’s vanity instead of a wall that stood up in a storm. Because I want you to understand why we hide what we hide. Because I want to see what you do with a door when you can feel the hinges.”
He’s already moved the conversation fromyou can’ttoyou can, with me,and I should hate the grammar of it more than I do. My hands leave my knees and cross my body, elbows knitting under my ribs, palms gripping opposite sleeves like I’m holding myself in place. It’s a posture I learned at twelve when the house parent saidenoughand the boys saidlater,and I decided not to show the shaking. He sees that too.
“Don’t perform,” he says, quiet. “Not here. You don’t have to.”
“Will your cameras write that down for me?” I ask. “Or will you?”
“I don’t record you in rooms like this,” he says. “Only thresholds. Only halls. You can believe that or not. Either way, I know what you look like when you’re bracing.”
