She met his eyes. "I am not accustomed to being seen."
"No," he said quietly. "I imagine you are not."
He said it carefully, as though he could see the shape of all the years she had spent unseen and understood what it had cost her.
"I did not intend—" Verity started, then stopped. What had she not intended? To find him attractive? To stand in the courtyard cataloguing his muscles like a scholar examining artifacts? To feel her pulse quicken every time he entered a room?
She had intended none of it.
"I know." Targesh's voice was low. "You did not intend. Neither did I."
She turned his words over in her mind, examining them from different angles.
Neither did I.
"What does that mean?"
"It means," he said, "that you are not the only one who has been exposed. That you have been hiding for two days, and I have been—"
He stopped.
"You have been what?"
Targesh exhaled. "Aware of your absence," he said. "More aware than seems appropriate."
Verity swallowed against the tightness in her throat.
She should say something. Something wise, or diplomatic, or at least coherent. Something that would defuse the tension, restore the comfortable distance of their previous interactions, allow them both to pretend this conversation had never happened.
Instead she said: "Oh."
Brilliant. Truly. The Royal Archive trained you well.
"I am not certain what to do," Targesh said, "but I am certain that you hiding in the back corridors does not improve the situation for either of us."
"I was not hiding in the back corridors. I was taking a preferred route—"
"You were hiding."
"I was strategically avoiding—"
"Also hiding."
Verity pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. This was not amusing. This was a serious and mortifying situation that required serious and mortifying responses.
And yet.
"Fine," she said. "I was hiding. What do you propose as an alternative?"
Targesh considered this. "A truce," he said.
"A truce?"
"You stop hiding. I stop pretending not to notice." He held her gaze. "We acknowledge that there is—something. Between us. And we proceed with that acknowledgment, rather than around it."
"And what does proceeding look like?"
"I do not know," he admitted. "But it cannot be worse than the past two days."
