CONFIRM
NO
THIRD-PARTY
And then, two seconds later, Alistair's phone buzzed.
They looked at each other.
"Tonight," Tav said.
"Tonight," Alistair agreed.
• • •
• • •
The first time Tav laughed in the apartment was at week nine.
He made a note of this, which was — he was aware — a slightly unusual thing to note. But he made notes about things that mattered, and the laugh mattered in the way of something unexpected that revealed information about the current state of the situation.
The situation being: him. Specifically, the version of him that was living in this apartment with this person in this arrangement, not the same version of him that had arrived ten weeks ago.
The laugh was small. The cause was Alistair's account of a conversation with Dean Voss at a university event, which had involved Voss expounding for twelve minutes on the revolutionary potential of a financial instrument that Alistair had explained to him in week six with different terminology and which Voss had now reinvented as his own insight. The retelling was precise and accurate and delivered with the warm dryness.
"He'd genuinely forgotten you'd told him," Tav said.
"He'd genuinely never registered that I'd told him," Alistair said. "Which is a different problem. The information went in and displaced whatever was already there and became his. It's a very different kind of listener."
"I've met them," Tav said.
"You make a face when you encounter them," Alistair said. "A very specific face. Microscopic, but specific."
Tav studied him. "You've studied my expressions."
"I've catalogued the ones I can identify," Alistair said. "Some of them are still unknown to me." "Which ones?"
"The one you make when you're working on something that you haven't told me about yet." He held Tav's gaze. "And the one you make sometimes in the morning when you think I'm not looking. When you're standing at the window with your coffee."
Tav was quiet.
"What does that one look like?" he said.
Alistair considered.
"Like someone who is where they want to be," he said carefully, "and is finding the fact of that surprising."
The kitchen was warm. The evening was outside. The conversation had arrived somewhere neither of them had charted precisely, and both of them were aware of it.
"You look at me," Tav said.
"Yes," Alistair said. "I do."
"I look at you too," Tav said.
"I know." He held the gaze with the way someone who has been waiting for a particular conversation and has now arrived at it and finds that all the prepared language was insufficient and the honest language is better. "I noticed."
The kitchen was quiet.
