He looks at me.
"You left." I keep my hand on his. "Tonight, you left, and I understand why you left, but I need you to hear this very clearly. You leaving to protect me from my own discomfort is not something I am willing to put in the budget. You do not get to manage my emotions for me. That is not a service I've contracted."
Something shifts in his face.
"Those people are not my friends. I know that feels like I'm saying it because it's the right thing to say, but I walked out of that restaurant and I'm here, and I have not once in nine years done that before. James said something horrible three years ago about a woman I was seeing and I told myself it was a joke and I let it go, and I have been doing that for years, and I am done." My voice doesn't shake. I'm glad it doesn't shake. "James can audit himself into a better personality.. I'm not your colleague flinching on a Tuesday. I'm not some human woman tolerating you in her life. I made room for you. I gave you a drawer. I am telling you, very clearly, with full access to all available data, that I want you here."
Narod looks at me for a long time.
The rain comes against the window. The building holds its breath.
"The transfer." His voice is careful. "I had not yet submitted it."
"I know. It's sitting on your nightstand because you were still deciding." I pick it up. I hold it between us. "I need you to decide now."
He looks at the document. He looks at me.
Something in his expression does the thing I've only seen it do a few times, where the formal careful layer peels back and there's just him underneath, enormous, warm and so deeply uncertain that it cracks something open in the middle of my ribcage. He looks, in this moment, less like a fortress and more like someone who built the fortress because nobody ever told him he didn't have to.
"I don't want to go to Minneapolis," he says.
It's very quiet when he says it. It's the most unqualified sentence I've ever heard him produce.
"Good." I stand up. I cross to the small metal bin beside his desk. I tear the transfer request in half, and then in half again because I'm thorough, and I drop it in the bin. I turn back to him. "Also I'm calling your CEO tomorrow and telling him you are absolutely not available for a transfer because you are deeply critical of the infrastructure in this city."
Narod regards me with something that looks like genuine shock, which, honestly, is kind of satisfying considering how rarely I manage to surprise him.
"You would call him directly?" His voice has that careful, halting quality again, like he's testing each word before he lets it out. "You would genuinely contact the CEO of a multinational insurance conglomerate on my behalf?"
I fold my arms across my chest, partly because I mean it and partly because folding my arms makes me feel like I have a plan, which I do. Sort of. "I have his card," I say, very matter-of-fact, because I do in fact have his card and I have in fact been carrying it in my wallet for three months like some kind of weird professional talisman. "He gave it to me personally at the stairwell incident. Told me to call him if I ever needed anything. I'm choosing to interpret 'anything' as 'preventing my boyfriend from fleeing to the Midwest.'"
Narod's massive shoulders tense slightly. He shifts his weight on the bed, and I hear the frame creak in protest. "That was," he says slowly, and I can practically see him sorting through his internal database of appropriate descriptors, "a deeply irregular set of events."
"I'll say." I walk back to the bed. I stand in front of him, which puts me approximately at his eye level while he's seated, which is one of my preferred configurations. "Narod. I need you to stop running the exit model."
He looks at me. His hands find my waist, carefully, with that enormous careful restraint that I have stopped finding gentle and started finding unbearable in the most specific way. His thumbs rest against my hipbones and his eyes are very amber and very close.
"I am experiencing significant difficulty," he admits, "with the variable of you, Livia."
"Good," I say again. "That's the correct response."
The rain fills the silence. His hands don't move. I bring mine up to his face, both palms against his jaw, which is heavy, warm and real, and I feel the tension there, the thing he hasn't let go of yet.
"You are not a monster," I tell him. "You are a man who needs a bigger chair and who drinks cosmos for the colour, and I like you more than I've liked anyone in years, and I need you to stop treating that like a variable I'm about to revise."
His forehead comes down to rest against mine.
The exhale he releases is very long and very slow.
CHAPTER 14
NAROD
The tear in the bin sits there, four neat pieces of a document I had not yet submitted, and I feel the panic rise through me with the same particular quality as an actuarial anomaly, the kind where the data suddenly reveals a catastrophic liability that the initial model failed to account for.
I stand up.
It happens fast.. My body has always had a habit of moving before my brain has finished its calculations, which is deeply inconvenient for a man in my professional position, and doubly so for a man who spent thirty-one years learning to be very, very careful about the space he occupies. The bed frame, which is reinforced titanium because standard human bed frames tend to voice their structural objections quite loudly, exhales with relief as my weight leaves it, and I am standing, and Livia is standing, and the distance between us is two and a half feet and narrowing because she is looking at me with those dark eyes and her hands are still warm on my jaw from three seconds ago and I need that distance to think.
