I have been paying attention since the first evening. I have been paying attention more precisely and more comprehensively than I have paid attention to anything in my professional or personal life, which is saying something considerable, because I am a man whose professional attention to detail is considered exceptional even by the standardsof an industry composed primarily of people whose defining characteristic is exceptional attention to detail.
There is one tear on her face. Just one. It sits at the outer corner of her right eye and it has tracked down her cheekbone, not far, and she hasn't wiped it away, and she isn't crying in the dramatic sense, she is just standing there being entirely honest and entirely small in the way that she is, which is to say not small in any way that matters but small relative to this apartment and relative to my furniture and relative to me, and she is not frightened, she was never frightened, and the tear is just sitting there on her face like a piece of data I have absolutely no framework to process.
"My life," she says, and her voice is very steady, "does not fit in a spreadsheet, Narod."
I don't say anything. My throat has developed a problem.
"I know you have the numbers." She lifts one hand and presses it flat against her sternum, which is a gesture she makes when she's being very deliberate, I have noted it several times. "I know the literature is real. I know people have been awful to you and I know people will probably be awful again and I know you have a model that proves this." She exhales. "But the only friction I care about, the only number that means anything to me, is the one where you are in the column labellednot here." Her chin doesn't waver. "And I am telling you that number is unacceptable. I am telling you that the model is flawed because it doesn't account for the fact that I am standing in your apartment in wet jeans having abandoned my entire social infrastructure tonight specifically because none of it was worth what you are worth, and I need you to hear that as data."
The tear tracks a little further.
I cross the room.
Two strides. Possibly the least careful two strides I have taken in years, because the usual internal protocols that governmy movement in domestic human spaces, the ones that run the constant quiet background calculations about shelf proximity and breakable objects and the structural tolerance of the floor, none of them are running. I am not running anything. I am just moving, and then I am there, and Livia is looking up at me with her glasses slightly fogged from the warmth of the apartment and that single tear doing something to my chest that I do not have precise professional vocabulary for, and my hands find her face before I have consciously authorised them to do so.
She is very warm. She is always very warm, which I have noted and never commented on because commenting on the body temperature of a person you are interested in seems outside the range of acceptable early-relationship discourse, but she is warm against my palms and her cheekbones are sharp and I can feel where the tear has tracked and I am very careful, I am always trying to be very careful, but my thumbs are moving of their own conviction and the tear is gone.
She doesn't move. She lets me.
"The model," I say, and my voice sounds different to me right now, lower and rougher and stripped of its careful formal architecture in a way I don't entirely intend. "The model has a significant methodological flaw."
"Yeah?" She is looking straight up at me. Not flinching. Never flinching.
"It does not account for the variable of your opinion being correct." I swallow, which is effortful. "I weighted my own assessment above yours. This was an error. Actuarially speaking."
A very small and very specific expression crosses her face. Not a smile yet, but the preceding condition for one, the thing that happens to the corners of her mouth before she decides to let the smile out.
"Actuarially speaking," she says.
"I am also," I add, because the other thing needs saying and I have been not saying it for three weeks and the structural integrity of the wall is at zero, "profoundly unwilling to be in Minneapolis. The data on this particular variable is not ambiguous. I am unwilling at a level I find difficult to express in professional terms."
"Try," she says.
"I ran the model a fourth time." My thumbs are still against her cheekbones. I cannot seem to retrieve them. "Last Tuesday. I changed every variable I could justify changing. Regional hostility index, social integration coefficient, projected cortisol reduction over time with consistent positive environmental reinforcement." I pause. "The column labellednot herewas unacceptable in every run."
She steps forward. She covers the remaining distance, which is very little, and her hands come up to my chest and rest there, flat, over the place where my heartbeat is currently conducting itself with very little professional decorum.
"Narod," she says.
"Yes."
"Stop running the model."
My forehead comes down to meet hers. She tilts up to meet me, which she always does, which she has done since the sofa and the stairwell and every quiet morning since when I have woken beside her and immediately begun calculating the earliest plausible reason to leave before she woke, and she always tilts up to meet me, and I have never in my life had less interest in the available exit routes.
"I am," I tell her, very quietly, "experiencing significant difficulty with that instruction."
"I know." Her fingers press in slightly. "Do it anyway."
The rain continues outside. The four pieces of the transfer request sit in the bin beside the desk. My hands slide carefullyfrom her face to her shoulders, and she is warm, and the model is quiet, and the exit routes are entirely irrelevant, and I stay exactly where I am.
CHAPTER 15
LIVIA
His forehead is still resting against mine and I can feel the warmth radiating off him in waves, that deep, steady heat that I have come to understand is just the baseline operating temperature of an Orc, not a fever, not distress, just him, just the particular and specific fact of his body existing in close proximity to mine. His hands are on my shoulders, careful as always, calibrated down to some internal tolerance I can feel in the deliberate placement of each massive finger. Even now, even here, with his voice stripped of all its formal scaffolding and the transfer request sitting on the desk behind him like an indictment, he is being careful with me.
And it makes me furious.
