"Why are you here?" I say.
"I'm here in an oversight capacity per the review board's—"
"Recommendation. Yeah." I lean back in my chair. "I know the line.” I watch his face, which is doing nothing useful. "Why are you actually here?"
"I told you—"
"You told me the answer that's in the paperwork." I keep my voice level. "I'm asking for the other one."
He pauses..
"You’re correct," he says. "It's not the whole answer."
I wait.
He doesn't elaborate.
I let the silence sit for a few seconds. "Okay," I say.
He looks like he expected something else. "Okay?"
"You'll tell me when you tell me." I stand up. "I wanted to know if you were going to keep pretending it was the whole answer. Now I know you're not." I pick up my jacket from the back of the chair.
I head for the door.
He steps aside to let me through. Close enough that the bond pulls, immediate and loud. I have been trying to deal with this pull. I have not yet found a reliable way to deal with it.
I go through the door.
***
The problem with the bond is that it doesn't care about my schedule.
I have things to do. I have a reclassification evaluation to process and a new possible mate who says I smell like a mountain I've never been to and RJ two floors up registering as something I don't have a word for yet. I have enough going on.
The bond has one opinion about all of this and the opinion isDaltonand it has that opinion persistently, specifically, and without any regard for what I find inconvenient.
I see him in the common room two hours later.
He's on the couch with his notepad and a cup of coffee that's probably gone cold, and he looks up when I come in with the expression of a man who is not surprised.
"Just getting a book," I say.
"Sure," he says.
I get a book. I sit down at the other end of the couch. I open the book. I read the same paragraph four times.
The bond settles into the low warm hum it does when he's close. I find it annoying and also, if I'm being honest, something else.
I turn a page I didn't read.
"You're not reading that," Dalton says.
"I'm reading it very slowly."
"You haven't turned a page in ten minutes."
"It's a dense paragraph."
