She is here and the room is correctly sized and I am not calculating anything.
This is a very unusual state for me. I am not certain how long it will last before my professional instincts reassert themselves.But for the present, lying in the dark with her weight against my side and the pelting rain against the glass, it simply is.
Morning happens gradually. The city light changes quality before it changes brightness, grey going to the specific yellow of early sun through cloud, and Livia sleeps through the transition with the committed stillness of someone who has decided sleep is the highest priority task and is executing it optimally. I am awake before she is, which has been true every morning, I require less sleep than humans do and I rise earlier, but this morning I do not get up. I stay on my side and look at her.
She sleeps with her mouth slightly open and her hair pushed sideways and she has pulled most of the blanket to her side of the bed through some unconscious territorial negotiation I did not observe but clearly lost, which I find entirely acceptable. Her glasses are on the bedside table beside a glass of water I put there without thinking about it, automatic, because she always needs water in the night and I have been paying attention.
I reach over, very slowly, and trace the line of her jaw with the side of my index finger. She is warm and real and here in my bed in my apartment at the correct ceiling height, and the transfer request is in pieces on the floor of the other room, and she told me she was certain.
She makes a small sound and her eyes open, unfocused first, then finding me, and her expression does the rapid processing sequence, location, context, recent events, conclusion, and then settles into something relaxed and direct.
"You're awake," she says.
"I am generally awake before you," I say. "I have not left."
Something moves through her eyes at that, quick and a little painful, and I understand it. I left before. I understand that the not-leaving requires explicit confirmation.
"Good," she says. She closes her hand around my finger, the one tracing her jaw, her whole hand barely encompassing the width of it.
I look at her for a moment, assembling the sentence I have been building since approximately three in the morning when I first had the full clarity of what I am deciding.
"If I stay," I say, "I will not hide what you are to me anymore. From anyone."
She is quiet, looking up at me, fully awake now.
"I have been operating under the assumption that minimising my visibility was the responsible approach," I say. "That if I made myself small enough, inconspicuous enough, I could reduce the social cost to you of being associated with me. The dinner party was an extreme example of a problem I was already aware of."
"Narod—"
"I am not finished." She closes her mouth. "I have run the model, and the model is flawed. The variable I omitted was what you actually want, as opposed to what I projected you should want in order to be socially optimised. I omitted it because I was afraid of the data." I look at her steadily. "If I stay, I will be myself. The full version. And what you are to me will be evident. To anyone who looks."
"You practiced that," she says.
"Since three forty-seven AM," I confirm.
She sits up and takes my face in both of her hands, which requires reaching up considerably, and she pulls it down to her level and looks at me at very close range and says, with the precise quiet firmness she uses when she has made a final determination on something and is issuing the conclusion,
"Stay."
CHAPTER 17
LIVIA
Ikiss his palm. The skin there is rough, the knuckles broad and scarred, and I press my lips against it deliberately, holding eye contact. "I wouldn't let you hide even if you tried."
His eyes do something complicated. He exhales through his nose, slow and even, like a controlled release of pressure, and then he wraps that same hand very carefully around the back of my head and pulls me forward and kisses my forehead with a gentleness that is genuinely unfair for a creature his size, and I decide the quarterly review meeting can wait approximately twenty more minutes.
It cannot, as it turns out, wait even ten, because my phone alarm goes off at seven fifteen with the sound I designated specifically for non-negotiable professional obligations, which is a very loud klaxon, because past-me knew present-me would try to reason with a gentler sound. I slap at the nightstand and find it and silence it with my face still pressed against his chest, and for a moment neither of us moves, and I become aware that I am lying against a surface roughly the size and warmth of a heated stone wall that is breathing.
"That alarm," he says carefully, "is extremely aggressive."
"That alarm," I say into his chest, "is the only reason I have ever made it to a mandatory partners meeting on time." I peel myself upright, reach for my glasses, and the full weight of Monday arrives immediately upon putting them on, the way it always does, the frames settling onto my nose and the world snapping into accountant-resolution.
I have the quarterly review at nine. Present the consolidated figures for Q3, field the questions from Martin and Dhruv and the two junior partners whose names I can never retain because they arrived after the reorganisation and both have the same energy as mild weather, and then survive the post-meeting debrief where Martin asks questions he already knows the answers to because he finds it illuminating to watch people answer under pressure. I have prepared twelve pages of supporting documentation. I have reviewed the supporting documentation. I am ready.
Narod is watching me do the rapid mental triage with the, attentive look he gets when he is observing a process he finds interesting, his chin resting on his fist, enormous elbow on the pillow, completely at ease in a way I have never once managed at seven fifteen on a Monday morning in my own body.
"You are preparing for something," he says.
