"What is the sample size for Narod Guumstrop specifically partnered with Livia Chordas specifically in this specific city, in this specific apartment, in this specific version of our actual lives?" I wait. "What is the n?"
His mouth closes.
"One," I say. "The n is one. You have been running catastrophic probability models on a sample size of one, and I am the one, and I am standing in your apartment at nearly midnight having ripped your transfer request into approximately sixty pieces telling you that the model is wrong. I am the primary source. I am the data. And the data says stay."
The last wall goes. I watch it happen, which is not a dramatic external event, it is very small and very interior The careful professional expression he wears like a second set of clothes, the one designed to broadcastharmlessandsmallandnon-threateningat all times, falls away entirely, and what is underneath it is just him, just Narod, just the full and unguarded reality of him looking at me.
He lets out a breath. It is ragged and long and entirely unlike the controlled, measured breathing he normally maintains in company, and as it goes out of him his shoulders drop. Not the anxious drop, not the apologetic curvature he uses to shave centimetres off his height in doorways. They drop back and out, settling wide and heavy into their actual shape, the true geometry of him, massive and real and no longer apologising for the space they occupy.
He is enormous like this. Fully, unambiguously enormous. He takes up most of the room simply by existing at his actual scale, and it does not frighten me, it has never frightened me, and I think somewhere in him he has been quietly terrified that one day it would.
I look up at him. I do not step back.
He looks down at me, and his expression is very open and very serious, and he reaches up with one hand and touches my face, barely, the back of two knuckles against my cheekbone in the careful way he always does, like I am made of something that requires consideration.
"Are you absolutely certain, Livia?" he asks. His voice has dropped into the low register, not the formal careful politeness voice, not the professional actuary voice, but the one underneath all of them, the one that lives in his chest reverberating at a frequency I can feel in my ribcage when he uses it. "Because I need you to understand that if I believe you, if I actually allow myself to believe that you are certain, I will not be able to go back to being uncertain about this. About you. I am not built for uncertainty in one direction and certainty in the other. I would very much prefer to be fully certain or to have the transfer request reprinted and to be sad in Minneapolis."
I stare at him.
"That is the most precise and terrible thing anyone has ever said to me," I tell him.
"I am an actuary," he says, and there is something in it, something very dry and very warm simultaneously, the closest thing to a joke he makes when he is being emotionally honest.
"I am absolutely certain," I say.
He holds very still for one more second. I can see him taking the information in, processing it, running whatever final internal check he needs to run before he lets himself have it.
Then he exhales, slow, and his hand settles properly against my face, warm and enormous, and the amber of his eyes goes very dark and very soft, and he doesn't say anything else for a while.
The rain hammers the windows. The pieces of the transfer request lie scattered across the floor. I make a mental note to hoover them up in the morning, and then I stop making mental notes about anything practical at all.
CHAPTER 16
NAROD
She smiles up at me, and it is the specific smile she has that I have catalogued thoroughly over the past weeks, the one that starts at the corner of her mouth and travels upward with complete deliberateness, like she has considered the smile and decided it is warranted. It reaches her eyes. It always reaches her eyes.
"I've run the numbers," she says. "I'm certain."
I spent my entire adult life managing risk. I calculate it the way other people breathe, automatic and continuous, and the risk I have assigned to this, to her, to the specific vulnerability of being entirely believed by someone, has been classified as catastrophic since the first night she grabbed my wrist across the table at that bar and looked at me with something that was not fear. I have been hedging against this outcome for weeks. I have been building my exit with the careful, miserable architecture of someone who believes the exit is inevitable.
The transfer request is in sixty pieces on the floor.
I stop hedging.
I bring my other hand up so I am holding her face in both of them, which requires extraordinary care because my hands are as large as her face. She is worth it. She has always been worth it.
I lower my head and kiss her very slowly, giving her the full length of the movement so she can read the intention in it, and she makes a small sound against my mouth that reorganises my thinking entirely. Her hands come up and grip the front of my shirt, not gently, with real intent, pulling, and the controlled professional apparatus I maintain around my own physicality begins to come apart at significant structural points.
"Narod," she says, against my mouth.
"Yes," I say.
"Stop being careful."
The request goes through me like a current. I pull back just far enough to look at her, to make sure, because I always make sure, and her expression is perfectly clear and utterly without ambiguity, the expression of a woman who has run her numbers and is presenting her findings with full confidence.
I lift her.
