The deliberateness of it sends a signal straight through my professional composure and into territory that is entirely inappropriate for the morning shift in a shared workspace.
"Better?" he asks.
"Worse, actually."
He grins. The full, unguarded version that transforms him from the guy behind the screens into something my pulse has very specific opinions about. "Noted."
I turn to my laptop and start working because the alternative is climbing across two workstations and the operational benefits of that approach are questionable.
The rhythm beside me continues, steady and grounding and dangerously close to feeling like safety.
The morning becomes an exercise in peripheral awareness. I type, I analyze, I trace logic paths through the Committee weapon's outer layers, and the whole time my nervous system is running a parallel thread dedicated entirely to the man sitting beside me.
He reaches across my station for a spare cable, and his forearm passes through my field of vision, and the muscles shifting under his skin remind me of the server room and the way those arms held his weight above me. I stare at my screen and type something I'll have to delete later because my fingers are producing gibberish while my brain processes forearm data.
At one point he leans back in his chair and stretches, arms above his head, and his shirt rides up just enough to expose a strip of skin above his waistband. The glimpse lasts maybe a second. My body's response to it lasts considerably longer.
"You're typing slower," he says without looking at me.
"Complex analysis."
"Your analysis was running at full speed until I stretched."
"Correlation isn't causation."
"Sure it isn't." His voice carries the grin I refuse to look over and confirm.
Willa finds me at lunchtime.
I'm eating at my workstation because the communal area is loud and full and the social dynamics of a found family forged through shared trauma are exhausting to navigate from the outside.
Every interaction requires translation. Their shorthand, their inside jokes, the way Stryker calls Dylan "sunshine" in a tone that communicates both mockery and genuine affection. It's a language I don't speak and haven't been invited to learn.
"You're eating at your desk again," Willa says, materializing beside me with the particular authority of a woman whose medical opinion you don't argue with.
"I'm eating."
"You're eating a protein bar that expired ages ago while staring at encryption analysis. That's fueling a machine, and the machine deserves better." She plucks the wrapper from my hand and reads the date. "March. It's May."
"Preservatives exist for a reason."
"Come eat real food. Rachel made something that involves actual vegetables."
The invitation comes without expectation, without the pressure of someone who will be offended if I decline. Persistence without pressure. The medical equivalent of a packet retry.
I look at my screen. The encryption analysis will be there when I get back. The control layer mapping is ahead of schedule. And the protein bar was, admittedly, terrible.
"Fine."
The communal area is everything my loft was not. Warm and full, with evidence of a human presence accumulated in layers: a blanket draped over the back of a couch, a stack of paperbacks on the side table, a coffee mug with a cartoon dinosaur on it that I'm going to find out the owner of if it kills me. The air smells like garlic and bread and the particular warmth of food cooked by a person rather than sealed in plastic.
Rachel sets a plate in front of me. Rice, grilled chicken, roasted vegetables.
The first bite of the chicken is seasoned with something I can't identify, and the flavor registers on taste buds that have been living on takeout pad thai and expired protein bars for longer than my body deserves. The rice is warm and perfectly textured, and the roasted vegetables have the char marks of actual attention, someone standing over a pan and caring about the outcome. I eat faster than I intend to, and the hunger that surfaces isn't just caloric. It's the hunger of a person who forgot that meals could be an act of care rather than a maintenance task.
Lucas is working on homework beside me, his pencil scratching across paper with the determined rhythm of a kid who has accepted that math doesn't stop just because your houseis inside a mountain. Willa's hand rests on the back of my chair. Rachel refills my water glass without being asked.
The normalcy of it presses against something inside me that I've kept locked for a long time.
