Chapter 10
NAROD
The alarm is a muffled, rhythmic thing behind the door, and Livia is looking at me with an expression I am still learning to read.
Risk indicators. Stress responses. The micro-expressions that precede a client's polite rejection of my actuarial recommendations.
I am, by most measurable standards, reasonably competent at reading faces.
Livia's face defeats me.
She is amused, and she is waiting.
Waiting for what, exactly, is the question I am attempting to process while the building's alarm system continues its muffled percussion through the fire door and the emergency lighting does unfair things to the angle of her jaw.
"Narod." Her voice is gentle, but with a specific structure underneath it, the way a load-bearing beam is gentle until you test its capacity. "I want to revisit the email."
My chest does something involuntary. "The email."
"The one you were about to send me when I arrived.
" She tilts her head, and the motion shifts her glasses, and she pushes them up with two fingers, and I have catalogued that gesture now as the one she makes when she is thinking precisely.
"The one Grukka described to me as, and I'm quoting here, 'twelve paragraphs of the most unnecessarily formal apology she has ever been forced to witness being typed in real time. '"
"Grukka was not supposed to share that characterisation."
"Grukka and I have reached an understanding." A faint smile at the corner of her mouth. "She told me the subject line was 'Formal Acknowledgement of Potential Relational Harm, Reference Number LVC-001.'"
I become very interested in the concrete wall to my left. It is a well-made wall. The aggregate is consistent. "I was attempting to be thorough."
"You gave me a reference number." The smile is doing something dangerous now, softening at the edges in a way that makes the breath leave my body in a measured and entirely unplanned fashion. "Narod. You gave our night together a reference number."
"For organisational clarity," I say, and the words are absurd the moment they leave my mouth and I know it, and she knows it, and the look she gives me in response is devastating in a way that has nothing to do with cruelty and everything to do with the fact that she sees exactly what I am doing and she is not afraid of it.
She is not afraid of any of it. She never was, and I still cannot fully integrate that information without my operational capacity taking a measurable hit.
"I left," I say. The words arrive without preamble because I have been holding them for approximately four hours in a spreadsheet cell I kept minimising and reopening.
"This morning. I left because I woke up at four forty-seven in the morning and you were asleep and you looked, Livia.
You looked." I stop. Start again. "I am not a small creature.
I am not careful by nature. I spent eleven years being careful because the alternative is that I frighten people, and last night I was not careful, and when I woke up I calculated, very rapidly, that the probability of you regretting it when you had the clarity of morning was significant enough to. "
"To run."
"To remove myself before I could see it happen." I hold her gaze because I owe her that much and it costs me something, holding it. "That was cowardice packaged as consideration. I realize that now. I was attempting to avoid the experience of watching you regret me."
The stairwell is quiet beneath the alarm. Livia uncrosses her arms.
She walks toward me.
She is not a large person. I am always recalibrating around her smallness, the fact that she barely reaches my chest, the fact that her wrist last night fit between my thumb and forefinger with room remaining, the fact that she moves through my physical space like she has decided it belongs to her and is in the process of filing the paperwork.
She stops directly in front of me, which means she is looking up at a significant angle, and she puts one hand flat on the center of my chest, and I stop breathing entirely.
"I woke up," she says, "and you were gone, and I sat on my sofa in the blanket that still smelled like you and I was furious." Her fingers press slightly against my sternum. "Not because you're too much. Because you left before I could tell you that you weren't."
My hand comes up before the decision fully forms, settling over hers where it rests on my chest, and I feel the bones of her fingers under my palm and the warmth of her skin and the fact that she is not pulling away, she is pressing in, and my pulse is doing something that my cardiologist would find clinically interesting.
"You're not frightening," she says. "Or, you are, but not the way you think.
You're not frightening because you're an Orc, Narod.
You're frightening because you're the first person in two years who remembered what I said about the Henderson account without me repeating it, and you held a teacup like it was evidence and you looked at me like.
" She stops. Her jaw tightens briefly. "You looked at me like I was worth the probability calculation. "
"I want you to stop calculating the risk of being yourself," she says.
"I am explicitly, verbally, and with full informational clarity telling you that I am not fragile.
I am not going to break. I am not going to be frightened of you.
What I am is currently locked in a stairwell with you for somewhere between twelve and eighteen minutes and extremely tired of waiting for you to stop apologising and start acting like you did last night before your brain caught up with you. "
I look at her for a long moment. The amber lighting. The sound of the alarm, distant now. Her hand under mine, the steady pressure of it, the absolute certainty in her face.
The calculation I run is not about risk. It is not about probability or outcome modeling or the seventeen contingency columns I built into the draft apology email I will now never send. It is the simplest mathematics I have performed in years.
She wants this. She came here for this. She is standing in front of me telling me with her whole body and her fierce, precise, accountant's voice that she wants all of it.
I close the remaining space between us.
I do not close it carefully. I do not manage my angles or moderate my height or perform the habitual, exhausting architecture of making myself less.
I step into her and she has to tilt her head back and I cup her face in one hand, my thumb along her jaw, and her face is so small in my hand, so perfectly, specifically small, and I feel her exhale against my palm.
"Livia." My voice is not the office voice. It is not the bar voice, the careful measured tones I rehearsed on the commute. It is the other voice, the one that lives below the spreadsheets, and pupils dilate when she hears it. "Tell me again."
"Which part?" Her voice has gone slightly uneven.
"All of it."
"I want you," she says, without hesitation, holding my gaze she probably deploys on quarterly reviews. "Not the apologetic version. Not the one who holds the teacup with two fingers and looks terrified of the furniture. You. Last night, on the sofa, when you stopped being careful. That version."
I walk her backwards.
Not fast, but with complete directional commitment, my hands bracketing her hips and steering her toward the concrete wall of the landing, and she goes with the pressure of it, walking backwards with her eyes on my face, and then her shoulders meet the wall and the small sound she makes travels directly down my spine and I place my forearms against the concrete on either side of her head and lean down, and her head tilts back fully now, her glasses askew, and I feel the inadequacy of every careful, considered thing I have said to her all evening.
"I calculated," I say, very low, very close to her ear, "approximately forty-seven ways this morning that I had been too much. Too loud. Too heavy. That I had used too much of the air in your apartment."
Her hands find my shirt and grip. "You didn't."
"I know that now." I pull back just enough to look at her face, the color in her cheeks, the way her chest rises and falls with a new urgency. "I am updating the model."
She makes a sound that is almost a laugh and is entirely something else, and I close the last inch between us and kiss her, and it is not the careful, tentative thing I began with last night, the thing that had seventeen layers of restraint built into it.
It is the kiss that comes after the restraint has been audited and found unnecessary, deep and unambiguous and tasting of the terrible coffee from the building's machine that she drank in my office while she was taking my carefully constructed defences apart one precise sentence at a time.
She kisses me back with both hands in my shirt and her body arching away from the wall toward me, and the scale of the difference between us is something I feel in every point of contact, her head barely cresting my collarbone, her hands gripping fabric they cannot fully span, her whole frame fitting against the front of my body in a way that does something entirely unreasonable to my composure.
I get my hands under her thighs and lift, and she goes up easily, her legs wrapping around my hips. She levels her with mine and her glasses are completely crooked.
"Hi," she says, from her new elevation.
"Hello," I say.
The concrete wall is solid behind her and I am solid in front of her and she is held completely, her weight negligible against me, and she rolls her hips once with a very deliberate quality, a communicative quality, and the sound that leaves my throat is not professional by any measurable standard.
"There," she says, with satisfaction. "That one."
My grip tightens. "Livia."