"You know what's funny about that?"
"You don't find it funny."
"No. I don't." He met Tav's eyes with a directness that was rare — stripped of performance, stripped of management. Just one person looking at another one. "I build cover," he said. "That's what I do. I make spaces that look like comfort and feel like safety and give nothing useful away." He glanced at the cluttered room. "You noticed."
"Yes."
"The first day?"
"Mostly."
Emotion moved across Alistair's face. Then he was closing the distance between them — slowly, without rush, the way you approached something you weren't certain of — and Tav stood still and let him.
The room's warmth was no longer metaphorical.
"You're trying to solve me," Alistair said.
"You're something to solve."
"And have you?"
Tav studied him steadily. "You want people to underestimate you. You perform approachable because it creates distance between what you actually notice and what anyone expects you to notice."
He let a beat pass. "And you're more afraid of being seen clearly than of anything physical."
The room went very quiet.
Alistair's expression was something Tav couldn't entirely name — not anger, not hurt.
Something that moved across his face like weather.
Then, quietly: "And what do I notice, Tav?"
"Everything."
The word sat there between them, honest and blunt, and Alistair looked at him with something that had stopped being performance entirely. Recognition, maybe. Or the relief of not having to pretend.
"Tav," he said, and there was something different in the name, something that came from a place below calculation. He closed another inch of distance and Tav didn't move back, and the air between them felt less like a space than a pressure.
Then both their phones buzzed simultaneously.
The interruption was sharp and complete, and they both moved back by the same instinct — conditioning reassertingitself with the blunt authority of trained reflex. They checked their respective devices in the same second. Tav's was Ablation. Alistair's — the screen glimpsed briefly across the room — was the unknown number.
"Apparently we're both popular this evening," Alistair said, and the warmth had returned to his voice with the fluency of long practice.
Tav watched his message.
Then looked up.
"Our target's schedule changed tonight."
Alistair was very still.
"Interesting," he said. For the first time since they'd met, they both meant it.
• • •
• • •
