Silence spread between them like water.
Tav stepped out from behind the curtain.
Alistair turned. Slowly, without alarm, with the ease that already resolved the encounter before it had materialized. He looked at Tav standing in the afternoon light from the balcony window, and something moved across his expression — not anger, not surprise. The particular recognition of someone who had found what they were looking for.
"Most people," he said, "take their roommate to dinner before searching their bedroom."
"You left the apartment unsecured."
"I forgot my laptop."
"You came back quickly."
"And you're disappointed." The observation was light but not casual. "Which tells me you were hoping to find something more interesting than you did."
Tav held his gaze. "You entered my room first."
The statement landed, clean and direct, and he saw it reach Alistair — not guilt, not alarm, but a rapid recalibration.
"So we're acknowledging crimes," Alistair said. "Alright. Feels like progress."
"You found almost nothing," Tav said. "I know because your entry left no trace, which means it was careful, and careful searches of rooms that contain nothing return nothing." Alistair tilted his head very slightly. "And what did you find?"
Tav let a moment pass.
"You drew me."
The room went quiet.
For the first time since Tav had come to know him — in the apartment, across café tables, in corridors lit amber at midnight — Alistair Keaton was caught entirely off-guard. Not the managed appearance of surprise, not the constructed expression of someone caught in a comfortable situation, but the actual thing: a man looking at someone who had seen him, and not having a performance ready.
It lasted perhaps two seconds.
Then: "You're visually irritating," he said. "Artistically speaking."
"You observed me carefully."
"I observe everyone carefully."
"Not like that." The words left Tav's mouth before he'd fully examined them, and he didn't retract them. Not because he was certain of what he meant, but because retracting would have been less honest than the uncertainty.
Alistair went still.
"Like what?" he asked, very quietly.
The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago. The afternoon light from the window was warm and direct, and there was perhaps four feet between them, and Tav was aware — with the clarity that came from refusing to look away from uncomfortable things — that he was standing in a space that felt charged in a way he couldn't attribute to operational context.
"You hide things in the disorder," Tav said. The deflection was not elegant but it was necessary, and Alistair's expression suggested he had recognized both the evasion and what it had deflected from.
"Thoughtful and deeply repressed," Alistair murmured. "There he is."
"You avoid the point."
"And you're avoiding what you actually said." He stepped closer, unhurried. "Not like that, you said.
What does that mean, Tav?"
The use of his name did something he didn't care to categorize.
