Are you?
No. But I want you to know I’m asking because I think the answer matters. Not because I’m building some sort of case against you or something.
She didn’t respond to that for a while either. Once again, he thought he’d lost her. Then the screen lit up.
The people I choose have earned it. Every single one of them.
He sat with that. It wasn’t much. But it was more than she’d given him before.
Fair enough.
Not going to push?
You’ll tell me the rest when you’re ready.
The conversation shifted after that. Not back to the morning’s flirting, but not deeper either. They found a middleground, talking about smaller things that still mattered. He didn’t leave the desk for two hours. The threat assessment sat half-finished on his screen the entire time.
The texts continued through the afternoon and into the evening, the gaps between messages shrinking until they were responding to each other within minutes.
He told her he liked the work but not always the rooms it put him in. She told him she liked the work but not what it cost her to keep moving. Neither of them unpacked those statements further. They just let them sit between messages, two people admitting to the same exhaustion from opposite sides of it.
He grabbed food at some point, locked up the office, drove back to the hotel. Changed out of his training clothes, sat on the edge of the bed, and kept texting her. The conversation had become the shape of his whole day.
But it had reached the edge of what a screen could carry. The questions he wanted to ask needed voice. Tone. The silences between words that told you more than the words themselves.
He wasn’t sure how she’d react, but he called her.
She picked up after two rings. Neither of them spoke right away. The line was open and quiet, just the sound of her breathing, steady, a little shallow. Both of them adjusting to this. Hearing each other’s voice for the first time since the hedge maze.
Different rules.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
A pause. He leaned back against the headboard and waited to see if she’d fill it.
“This is different,” she said.
“It is.”
“I can’t backspace if I decide I shouldn’t actually say something.”
“Neither can I. That’s sort of the point.”
A breath of something that might have been a laugh. “So what do you want to talk about?”
“Your shoulder.”
The silence that followed was different from the pauses in their texts. He could hear her in it. The quality of her quiet. A shift, maybe her weight moving, maybe her sitting down.
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“You didn’t ask anything. You just said my shoulder.”
“Okay. How is your shoulder? The one you ripped out of its socket to get through an iron gate four days ago. That shoulder. How’s it doing?”
