None of these were operational materials.
They were the specific detritus of a person making themselves at home.
Tav had not permitted himself to note this directly until week six, because noting it directly required deciding what it meant, and deciding what it meant required deciding what to do with the decision, and that sequence of decisions had consequences.
He noted it in week six.
What it meant: the person he was living with had stopped treating the apartment as a shared workspace and had begun treating it as home. The way people treat places as home once they've stopped managing their relationship to the space and simply begun occupying it.
What to do with the decision: nothing, immediately. Note it. Observe the pattern. Allow the information to inform the assessment.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tav avoided Alistair for thirty-six hours.
Not because he was afraid of him. Not because the revelation of the keycard had changed the fundamental assessment he'd been building for weeks — if anything, it had confirmed it. No, the problem was simpler and more difficult than operational recalibration: Tav had known, somewhere below the level of strategic thought, that Alistair was not accidental. He had known it and filed it as unresolved and continued anyway, continued having morning coffee and working beside him on parallel assignments and lying awake too aware of the sound through the shared wall.
And now knowing it for certain forced him to look at what that continued knowledge had cost him.
He wanted to kiss Alistair.
He'd known it precisely for ten days, and imprecisely for longer than that, and the precise version was significantly more difficult to work around. Because now, for every ordinary moment in the apartment, Tav was aware of it: warmth in the room when Alistair was present, the way his own attention tracked him unconsciously in his peripheral vision, the inconvenient fact that Alistair's face when he wasn't performing — when he was tired or genuinely absorbed in something or surprised into real laughter — was the most interesting face Tav had ever looked at.
None of this was manageable while looking at him.
Hence: thirty-six hours.
He went to campus. He worked. He ran. He sat in the university library café with his laptop and his spreadsheets and Naomi Reyes, who arrived uninvited to the table with a coffee and the expression of a woman who had information she intended to use.
"You've been weird since Wednesday," she said.
"I'm always—"
"Weirder than normal." She settled in. "You and Alistair fought."
"We didn't—"
"Something happened."
Tav returned his attention to his screen.
"You like him," Naomi said.
"I don't—"
"I know what I said sounds like the beginning of a teenage conversation, but I'm not using it in a teenage context. You like him. As in, you have feelings of a — " " — significant nature, and they are affecting you, and the two of you are both handling it by performing extreme functionality in public and probably torturing yourselves in private." She took a drink. "Am I wrong?"
Tav said nothing.
"I'll take that as my confirmation." She studied him. "What happened?"
"Nothing operational."
"That's an interesting qualifier."
It was. Tav moved a column in his spreadsheet with unnecessary precision.
"He's not who he said he was," Tav said.
