"Meditation?" she said.
In a single motion, fluid and unhurried as water, he was right-side up. The crystal ball rose with him, landing in his palm as if it had decided to be there. He wasn't breathing hard. She would have been breathing hard.
"Yes," he said.
"On one finger."
"The physical challenge focuses the mind."
"Right." She crossed her arms. "There's sweat on my floor."
"I will clean it."
"You will." She looked at the crystal, sitting quietly in his palm. It was the same kind of object as the one in the underground room — small, clear, slightly luminescent. A detail she filed carefully. "Is that standard equipment?"
"It assists with certain meditative practices."
"That's not a yes or no."
"No," he said. "It is not."
For the first time since she'd come out of the bedroom, he actually looked at her — not the professional assessment he gave every room and every person in it, not the cataloguing of threat and exit. Something else. His eyes moved over her once, briefly, with a quality she hadn't seen from him before, and then returned to her face with the careful neutrality he wore when he had decided something was not information he was going to share.
"You look —" he started.
He stopped. Reconsidered. The crystal sat in his open palm, doing nothing in particular.
"You are dressed differently than usual," he said finally. Precise. Contained. The word choice of someone who had elected not to say the first thing that came to mind and had landed on the safest available alternative.
She looked at him for a moment. "That's what you're going with."
Something shifted very briefly at the corner of his mouth. "It is accurate."
"It is extremely accurate," she agreed. "And entirely unhelpful."
"You look," he said, with the specific deliberateness of someone choosing each word individually, "as though you intend to be noticed."
She held his gaze. He held hers. There was something in the blue-green of it that was not the professional distance, not the careful management — something that had been there and contained and was now, briefly, less contained than usual.
"Good," she said. "That's the point."
She turned before either of them had to do anything with that.
Stars forbid he have to give her a compliment. He had sounded actively pained getting to you intend to be noticed, like the sentence had cost him something he hadn't budgeted for.
Ugh, men. Fraluma, apparently, were no different.
She wasn't looking for flattery. She wasn't. It was just — it wouldn't have hurt. She caught her reflection in the small mirror by the bedroom door, patted a strand of hair back into place, and took a breath that was entirely about composure and not at all about the expression she had just caught on his face before he put it away.
She glanced back at him.
He was watching her with the careful neutrality. Of course he was.
She looked away first.
"I have to go out," she said. "Company event. I can't get out of it without losing a professional relationship I need." She watched his face, waiting for the argument. "You're coming with me."
His expression did not change. "I had assumed so."
