Tav walked back to the living room and Naomi followed, dropping her bag on the kitchen island and surveying the apartment with the bright attention she brought to everything.
"You two look like you either fought or did something considerably more interesting," she observed, "and the fact that neither of you is explaining which makes it considerably more interesting."
"We were having a conversation," Alistair said.
"In a bedroom."
"Conversations happen in bedrooms."
"Not usually at that temperature."
Tav sat on the arm of the couch and Naomi pointed at him immediately.
"You especially. You look like you're deciding something."
"I often look like that."
"You look like you're deciding it about him." She pointed now at Alistair, who was making coffee with the focused efficiency needing something to do with his hands. "Which is new."
"It's not—"
"I've been watching you not watch each other for weeks," Naomi said pleasantly, "and now you're watching each other in a completely different way, so forgive me if I note the change."
Alistair turned with two mugs and the expression of someone who had decided to embrace the situation rather than manage it. "She always like this?"
"Yes," Tav said.
"I find it useful."
"You would."
Naomi accepted the coffee and sat cross-legged on the couch with the proprietorial comfort she considered herself already owed an explanation. She looked between them with the methodical interest of someone assembling information.
"Campus thinks you hate each other," she said.
"Do they," Tav said.
"Based on available evidence, yes. But the available evidence didn't include." She waved her coffee mug vaguely at the air between them. "This. Whatever this is."
"There isn't a this," Alistair said.
"There's absolutely a this. You're both doing it right now. The mutual surveillance thing." She lowered her voice in a mock-confidential tone. "Divorced assassin energy."
The silence that followed was a deep type of silence — not the silence of confusion but the silence of recognition, its own variety of problem.
Naomi's eyes went slightly wider.
"...That was weirder than anticipated," she said slowly.
"She said divorced assassins," Alistair noted to the room at large, with the tone of someone registering an inconvenient truth. "We should discuss how she got there."
"I've been watching the two of you do tactically aware social theatre for weeks. The divorced part is metaphorical." Naomi pointed at Tav again. "You know where he is at all times, don't you."
"No."
"You do. You always turn when he enters rooms before looking toward the door."
"That's—"
