Chapter 7
Astoria
By the second week I’d started rearranging my whole day around him, and the worst part was that I knew it.
I moved a dentist appointment so it wouldn’t clip the afternoon session.
I stopped answering the office phone after six.
After six was when he came down from the room upstairs and folded into the client chair with a book about Earth tide tables I’d lent him, reading in the last of the light like he had all the time in the world instead of the days left in the introduction window.
I called it scheduling. Normally, I would have flagged it in a client.
Priya flagged it in me.
Wednesday, she held up the wall calendar like evidence. “You reordered the entire week.”
“I optimized the week.”
“You optimized it around the alien’s reading light.”
“He’s a matched party in an active window. I’m being thorough.”
“You gave him the good chair.”
“The good chair is the client chair. He’s the client.”
“He’s the match you declined.” She let that sit. I didn't respond. “I’m only saying, historically, when a person builds their whole calendar around a departure, you sit them down and use the word shrine.”
“Go answer a phone, Priya.”
She went. But she was right, which was the single most annoying thing about her. I printed a fresh agenda anyway. I gave him the good chair because it was the good chair. The evening light was an entirely separate matter.
He’d started bringing me things. A better pen, because he’d noticed mine skipped. One morning I came in to find my filing reordered, opened my mouth to be furious, saw it would save me time, and closed my mouth again.
“You touched my system.” I stood over the drawer, betrayed.
“Your system had three redundant steps. I left you the one you seemed emotionally attached to.”
“That’s very generous.”
“I’m a generous man.” He didn’t look up from the tide tables. “Also, your pen skips. That one doesn’t.”
Nobody had fixed the small broken things for me. Ever. I didn’t know what to do with a man who did it quietly and expected nothing.
The evenings had a routine by then. He’d come down at six with the tide-tables book, I’d pretend to do paperwork, and we’d talk in the gaps. Except, the gaps kept getting wider.
“Why tide tables?” I gave up the paperwork pretense entirely. “You chart stars. That’s a book about when the water in Oregon goes up and down.”
“It was the only book you owned that I had not already read the science of.” He turned a page. “Also, the water here does a thing I find unreasonable. Two high tides a day, uneven. Most worlds have the decency to be predictable about their oceans.”
“You’re offended by our tides.”
“I have standards.”
“You’ve been on Earth for days and you’ve already got opinions on our oceans.”
“A few.” He looked up. “And they are not opinions. They are observations. There is a difference, which I could explain, but you would leave the room.”
“I would sprint from the room.”
“Yes. That is why I didn't explain it.”
“I hate that you’re funny.” I aimed it at the paperwork. “It wasn’t in your file.”
“I contain multitudes. Blame the translator.”
Later that night, I was closing up when the phone rang. “I can’t do it.” Tessa's voice was too fast. “I can’t get on a ship and leave my entire life for a stranger, that’s insane, tell me it’s insane.”
“It’s a big thing.” I slid down the filing cabinet to the floor. “It’s allowed to be terrifying. Tell me what you’d be keeping if you stayed.”
“My mom. My job. My whole...” A wet breath. “My apartment has a bathtub, Astoria. He lives on a ship.”
“The bathtub’s? Keep going. What else?”
“Everything. My whole everything.”
“And is your whole everything enough? Not is it good... is it enough? Because if it is, you sign to decline tonight and everything will stay the same except the new opportunity that awaits with your alien. I’ll respect it forever.
” Silence filled the space of my words. “If you still want to go, you can give yourself until morning before deciding. You don’t owe anyone an answer tonight. ”
A long pause. Then, small: “That’s a deeply annoying thing to be right about.”
“It’s the whole job.”
Azyr came down halfway through. I saw him in the doorway and waved him off. Whatever else was changing between us, this call was Tessa's. I kept the strain off my face and the fear out of my voice.
He left. When Tessa finally laughed, emotionally wrecked but stable, she said she'd sleep on it. I hung up and put my forehead on my knees. Azyr paused in the doorway again. This time I waved him in, and he sank down against the far wall.
“You asked me back.” His voice came from across the floor.
“I always send everyone away.”
“You did. Then you asked me back.”
There was cold takeout on the desk from a dinner neither of us had finished. He reached up, got it, and we ate it on the floor in the dark.
“I’m scared of how good I’ve gotten at this.” The words went out into the dark. “Watching people leave. It used to cost me something. Now I can do a flawless goodbye and feel almost nothing, and I don’t know when that happened, and I think it might be the actual thing that’s wrong with me.”
He didn’t tell me it wasn’t or try to reassure me. He did the harder thing and opened up to me.
“I have gotten good at the opposite.” He shifted against the wall.
“I am never anywhere long enough for anyone to watch me leave. You hold the door. I go through so many, so fast, that no one is left in any doorway to see me go.” His careful spacing had smoothed words into something almost fluent, or I’d learned to hear him under the machine.
“We have been running the same thing from opposite ends. You built a wall and stood in the doorway of it. I never built anything at all.”
“That’s the most words you’ve ever said to me at once.” I aimed it at the ceiling.
“For once, it translated exactly what I meant.”
“You’re doing fine right now.”
Quiet. Then, from the far wall: “You could send me away now. This is the part where you send people away.”
“I know.”
“You are not doing it.”
“I’m aware, Azyr. I’m right here. Don’t make it weird.”
“I would not know how. I have no procedure for weird.”
That got a laugh out of me, cracked and involuntary, the first real one in days. Across the cold floor the blue came up along his jaw in answer.
“You have a good laugh.” He offered it to the ceiling, matching my aim. “I'm glad I helped you release it.”
“Careful. That’s almost a feeling.”
“I will deny it under oath.” A pause. “Unless the translator testifies.”
Neither of us said anything about that either.
The block between us opened then… the one between managing him and wanting him near. The blue rose up his throat in the dark, and neither of us moved to end the evening.
Then the fear showed up, right on time. It’s the most reliable thing about me. I stood, gathered random items from all over my desk, and turned on the desk lamp, which flooded the room with light. Then I got brisk about tomorrow’s schedule.
And he let me.
“Tomorrow, then.” He got up and went up the stairs. I locked up an office that had him in it whether he was standing in it or not, and climbed to my own room.
The orientation window ended in two and a half weeks.
I knew which way I would steer a client standing where I stood.
I hated being right about myself almost as much as I hated being wrong.
Then I fell asleep listening to an alien breathe through a floor I’ve walked ten thousand times, slept better than I have in years.