"Statistically speaking," Narod says, and his voice has dropped, just slightly, into a register that has nothing to do with actuarial science, "the average response time for a false alarm reset in a commercial building is between twelve and eighteen minutes."
"Is that right," I say.
"It is." He holds very still. His amber eyes are warm and direct and no longer behind any of the layers he arrived at the bar with last night. "I am noting that for informational purposes only. I want to be completely clear about that."
"Completely noted," I say.
The alarm pulses through the walls.
CHAPTER 10
NAROD
The alarm is a muffled, rhythmic thing behind the door, and Livia is looking at me with an expression I am still learning to read. Risk indicators. Stress responses. The micro-expressions that precede a client's polite rejection of my actuarial recommendations. I am, by most measurable standards, reasonably competent at reading faces.
Livia's face defeats me.
She is amused, and she is waiting.
Waiting for what, exactly, is the question I am attempting to process while the building's alarm system continues its muffled percussion through the fire door and the emergency lighting does unfair things to the angle of her jaw.
"Narod." Her voice is gentle, but with a specific structure underneath it, the way a load-bearing beam is gentle until you test its capacity. "I want to revisit the email."
My chest does something involuntary. "The email."
"The one you were about to send me when I arrived." She tilts her head, and the motion shifts her glasses, and she pushes them up with two fingers, and I have catalogued that gesture now as the one she makes when she is thinking precisely. "The one Grukka described to me as, and I'm quoting here, 'twelveparagraphs of the most unnecessarily formal apology she has ever been forced to witness being typed in real time.'"
"Grukka was not supposed to share that characterisation."
"Grukka and I have reached an understanding." A faint smile at the corner of her mouth. "She told me the subject line was 'Formal Acknowledgement of Potential Relational Harm, Reference Number LVC-001.'"
I become very interested in the concrete wall to my left. It is a well-made wall. The aggregate is consistent. "I was attempting to be thorough."
"You gave me a reference number." The smile is doing something dangerous now, softening at the edges in a way that makes the breath leave my body in a measured and entirely unplanned fashion. "Narod. You gave our night together a reference number."
"For organisational clarity," I say, and the words are absurd the moment they leave my mouth and I know it, and she knows it, and the look she gives me in response is devastating in a way that has nothing to do with cruelty and everything to do with the fact that she sees exactly what I am doing and she is not afraid of it. She is not afraid of any of it. She never was, and I still cannot fully integrate that information without my operational capacity taking a measurable hit.
"I left," I say. The words arrive without preamble because I have been holding them for approximately four hours in a spreadsheet cell I kept minimising and reopening. "This morning. I left because I woke up at four forty-seven in the morning and you were asleep and you looked, Livia. You looked." I stop. Start again. "I am not a small creature. I am not careful by nature. I spent eleven years being careful because the alternative is that I frighten people, and last night I was not careful, and when I woke up I calculated, very rapidly, thatthe probability of you regretting it when you had the clarity of morning was significant enough to."
"To run."
"To remove myself before I could see it happen." I hold her gaze because I owe her that much and it costs me something, holding it. "That was cowardice packaged as consideration. I realize that now. I was attempting to avoid the experience of watching you regret me."
The stairwell is quiet beneath the alarm. Livia uncrosses her arms.
She walks toward me.
She is not a large person. I am always recalibrating around her smallness, the fact that she barely reaches my chest, the fact that her wrist last night fit between my thumb and forefinger with room remaining, the fact that she moves through my physical space like she has decided it belongs to her and is in the process of filing the paperwork. She stops directly in front of me, which means she is looking up at a significant angle, and she puts one hand flat on the center of my chest, and I stop breathing entirely.
"I woke up," she says, "and you were gone, and I sat on my sofa in the blanket that still smelled like you and I was furious." Her fingers press slightly against my sternum. "Not because you're too much. Because you left before I could tell you that you weren't."
My hand comes up before the decision fully forms, settling over hers where it rests on my chest, and I feel the bones of her fingers under my palm and the warmth of her skin and the fact that she is not pulling away, she is pressing in, and my pulse is doing something that my cardiologist would find clinically interesting.
"You're not frightening," she says. "Or, you are, but not the way you think. You're not frightening because you're an Orc,Narod. You're frightening because you're the first person in two years who remembered what I said about the Henderson account without me repeating it, and you held a teacup like it was evidence and you looked at me like." She stops. Her jaw tightens briefly. "You looked at me like I was worth the probability calculation."
"I want you to stop calculating the risk of being yourself," she says. "I am explicitly, verbally, and with full informational clarity telling you that I am not fragile. I am not going to break. I am not going to be frightened of you. What I am is currently locked in a stairwell with you for somewhere between twelve and eighteen minutes and extremely tired of waiting for you to stop apologising and start acting like you did last night before your brain caught up with you."
I look at her for a long moment. The amber lighting. The sound of the alarm, distant now. Her hand under mine, the steady pressure of it, the absolute certainty in her face.
