It was, he found, a more satisfying activity than he had previously given it credit for.
• • •
CHAPTER FOUR
There were three rules Alistair Keaton lived by.
The first: never get attached.
The second: never fully trust anyone.
The third — and arguably the most important, and the one he violated with reliable frequency: never underestimate quiet men.
Octavious Prescott had managed to violate all three in under two weeks, that was either impressive or catastrophic, and increasingly Alistair couldn't find the line between those two things.
• • •
The campus café on Saturday afternoon was the controlled chaos that Alistair found most useful.
Warm light, ambient noise, the constant low-level movement of people pretending to study while performing their social lives for each other. He knew three baristas by name, two of whom knew his order without asking, and he had spent long enough conducting observation from the corner booth near the back windows to understand the café's rhythms with the intimate precision, treating as an operational space rather than a coffee shop.
He sat across from Naomi Reyes and watched his iced coffee and thought about something that wasn't Tav, with thedetermined lack of success that had been characterizing most of his thinking lately.
"You vanished for three days," Naomi said.
"I live a mysterious life."
"You live twenty minutes from here and you didn't answer a single text message."
"Still mysterious." He pushed the second coffee across the table. "I brought you one."
"You're deflecting." She said it with calm certainty. She had watched him deflect often enough to recognize the mechanism regardless of packaging. Naomi Reyes was a journalism major with the instincts of a human polygraph and the social range of someone who found everyone genuinely interesting, which made her simultaneously one of the most useful and one of the most dangerous people he'd been positioned near. He liked her, its own hazard.
"You look distracted," she added.
"I'm always distracted."
"You look distracted in a new way."
Alistair drank his coffee and watched the café entrance over the rim of the glass, cataloguing arrivals with the automatic efficiency that couldn't stop doing it regardless of context. Two graduate students.
A professor. A group of undergrads with too many bags.
The problem with Tav Prescott — and it was a problem, one Alistair had been systematically cataloguing and failing to resolve for the better part of two weeks — was that he was exactly what Alistair had been told to expect, and also completely nothing like it.
The briefing had said: cold, controlled, highly trained, excellent pattern recognition, likely hostile to proximity. It had not mentioned the way he made coffee with the same methodical precision he applied to everything else, or the fact that his rareand reluctant expressions of something approaching humor hit with the disproportionate impact of things that had been earned. It had not mentioned that watching someone that controlled have to actively work to suppress feeling was — and Alistair found this professionally embarrassing — extremely compelling.
He had not expected to find Tav Prescott compelling.
He had expected to find him manageable. That had been the first miscalculation.
"You're doing the thing," Naomi said.
"What thing?"
"The staring-into-the-middle-distance thing that means either murder thoughts or romantic catastrophe."
Alistair considered his coffee. "What if it's both?"
