Chapter 4
Chapter four
The reclassification evaluation is in one of the smaller meeting rooms off the main corridor — a round table and its four identical chairs and its small window.
Dalton's already there, already still, the room already catalogued. The evaluator — Dr. Marsh, brought in from outside, the facility's way of performing objectivity — is setting up at the table. She gives me a professional smile. I sit down.
Dalton doesn't sit. He takes a position against the wall with his notepad and his pen, and for the next ninety minutes he writes things down.
I don't know what he's writing. That bothers me more than it should.
Dr. Marsh asks her questions. I answer them. The evaluation is methodical — not unpleasant. What I remember of the shift. What I felt before it.
I don't mean to keep looking at him. I do anyway.
He's standing against the wall with the notepad held at his side — not reading from it, writing in it, the pen moving in short economical strokes.
Dark jacket, same as yesterday. The kind of still that isn't passive — active, chosen, a man who has decided exactly where to put his body and how much of the room to take up.
His eyes move between Marsh and me at regular intervals, tracking, and every time they pass over me I feel it in the third arc before I feel it anywhere else.
I answer everything honestly. Mostly.
There are things I keep interior. The bond with Dalton, for instance, which is sitting in the room with me right now doing its level best to be a problem and which I am not going to describe to a woman with a clipboard and a camera.
Every time Marsh asks something that gets close to it, I feel Dalton's pen stop moving.
He doesn't look up. He doesn't do anything that could be described as reacting. His pen just — pauses. For exactly as long as the relevant question lasts. Then it starts again.
He's very good. I'm better at noticing things than he's accounted for.
***
Marsh wraps at ninety minutes. She thanks me, collects her materials, tells me the evaluation report will go to the review board within the week. I tell her that's great. She leaves.
Dalton starts to follow her.
"Hey," I say.
He stops.
"Close the door."
A pause. Not long. He closes it. Turns around.
"Why are you here?" I say.
"I'm here in an oversight capacity per the review board's—"
"Recommendation. Yeah." I lean back in my chair. "I know the line.” I watch his face, which is doing nothing useful. "Why are you actually here?"
"I told you—"
"You told me the answer that's in the paperwork." I keep my voice level. "I'm asking for the other one."
He pauses..
"You’re correct," he says. "It's not the whole answer."
I wait.
He doesn't elaborate.
I let the silence sit for a few seconds. "Okay," I say.
He looks like he expected something else. "Okay?"
"You'll tell me when you tell me." I stand up. "I wanted to know if you were going to keep pretending it was the whole answer. Now I know you're not." I pick up my jacket from the back of the chair.
I head for the door.
He steps aside to let me through. Close enough that the bond pulls, immediate and loud. I have been trying to deal with this pull. I have not yet found a reliable way to deal with it.
I go through the door.
***
The problem with the bond is that it doesn't care about my schedule.
I have things to do. I have a reclassification evaluation to process and a new possible mate who says I smell like a mountain I've never been to and RJ two floors up registering as something I don't have a word for yet. I have enough going on.
The bond has one opinion about all of this and the opinion is Dalton and it has that opinion persistently, specifically, and without any regard for what I find inconvenient.
I see him in the common room two hours later.
He's on the couch with his notepad and a cup of coffee that's probably gone cold, and he looks up when I come in with the expression of a man who is not surprised.
"Just getting a book," I say.
"Sure," he says.
I get a book. I sit down at the other end of the couch. I open the book. I read the same paragraph four times.
The bond settles into the low warm hum it does when he's close. I find it annoying and also, if I'm being honest, something else.
I turn a page I didn't read.
"You're not reading that," Dalton says.
"I'm reading it very slowly."
"You haven't turned a page in ten minutes."
"It's a dense paragraph."
The corner of his mouth does the thing it did in Gavin's office — not quite a smile, something drier, brief. His thumb swipes his nose.
I close the book. "Fine. I'm not reading it."
"I know."
"The bond is—" I stop. Start differently. "It's distracting. When you're close."
Silence. "Yeah," he says. "I know that too."
I hadn't expected that. It sits in my chest and I don't examine it.
"Does it bother you?" I ask.
He considers this. Actually considers it. "It complicates things," he says.
"Because of the reason you're actually here."
He looks at me. "Yes."
"Okay," I say.
I pick the book back up. He goes back to his notes. His coffee is definitely cold by now and he drinks it anyway.
We sit there for another hour. The bond runs quiet between us — not pulling, not insisting, just present the way it's always present when he's close. My shoulders drop at some point without my permission. I notice this and don't say anything about it.
***
I'm putting the book back on the shelf when it happens.
I turn from the shelf and he's there. Not across the room anymore. Close enough that I have to look up, close enough that I can feel the heat off him, and the bond goes from low hum to something that has weight and direction and I am very aware of the bookshelf at my back.
His hand comes up and finds the wall beside my head.
Neither of us moves.
His eyes are dark and the stillness is gone — not all of it, just the professional part — and what's underneath it is the same thing that was in his face for half a second in Gavin's office before he shut it down. It's not shut down now. It's right here.
My wrist is burning. One step between us. Less.
He doesn't take it.
I don't tell him to.
We stay exactly there — his hand on the wall, my back against the shelf, the bond doing what it does and both of us choosing, very deliberately, not to move — and I watch it cost him something. The jaw. The breath he takes that he needed before he took it.
He pulls back.
Not far. Enough.
His hand drops from the wall. He takes a step back and I watch the stillness reassemble — piece by piece, controlled, back into place — and I let him do it because it costs me something too and I am not going to say that out loud.
"Sorry," he says. Low.
"Don't be."
His eyes drill into me.
"I mean it," I say. "Don't apologize for that."
"I should have more control over it."
"Why?"
He doesn't answer immediately.
"I have reasons," he says.
"I know." I pick up my jacket. "You can tell me when you're ready."
I head for the door.
"Alex."
I stop.
"I'm looking for someone." From across the room. Flat. Like a decision already made.
I turn halfway. He's by the table, hands at his sides.
"Okay," I say.
I don't ask who. I don't have anything left for the answer tonight.
I go.
***
Back in my room I press my back against the door after it closes and stay there for a moment.
The third arc is warm and steady and pointing — it does this when he's in the building, which is always, which means I've been navigating a compass that only has one direction since the moment I woke up this morning.
Days of this. Days of the bond running loud every time he rounds a corner and the managed distance and the notepad and the pen that stops moving when the questions get too close.
He's looking for someone.
I lie down on the bed. The ceiling is the same as it always is.
The third arc pulses once, faint. He's somewhere in the building doing whatever he does in the building at night. Being still. Taking notes. Looking for someone who isn't me.
I don't know yet what to do with that.