Kieran was beside me. He had been beside me for most of the night in the easy, gravitational way that Kieran existed inspaces , he moved toward noise and I was noise and so we had been in the same orbit for hours. He was a good person to be in orbit with. He had good instincts and a quick read and he laughed at the right moments, which was its own skill.
He leaned over at some point between stories and said, close enough to be heard over the room: "This is better."
I looked at him.
"You," he clarified. "This week. Better than last week."
"Last week I was fine."
"Last week you told Mivo his positioning was good."
"Itwasgood."
"Shay." He gave me the look. "You told him it wasgoodwith your whole mouth. Like a normal human. I've been weirded out for days."
I laughed. Genuine, easy, the kind that didn't need to be checked. "I'm fine."
"You're better than fine right now." He said it simply. Not loaded. Just , observational, the way Kieran occasionally was when he wasn't performing his own thing. "It's good to see."
I looked at him for a half,second. Kieran, who was good at rooms, who paid attention without making you feel attended to, who had given me a protein bar on a Wednesday with the energy of a man performing a small ritual he didn't know the name of.
"Yeah," I said. "It is."
I touched his arm briefly , the way you did, in a loud room, when you meant something and words were insufficient and physical was just the easiest language. A second. Nothing.
I was already turning back to the room when I felt it.
Not a sound. Not a movement. A quality , the specific, particular quality of a frequency shifting, of something in the room going a different temperature.
I turned.
Felix was across the room.
He had been across the room for most of the night. I knew this the way I always knew it , peripherally, automatically, the way you know where the walls are in a room you've lived in. He had been talking to Hartley, then to Reeves, then standing near the window with his drink doing the Felix thing of being present without being loud, the closed door in a hallway full of open windows.
He was very still.
Not tense. Not aggressive. Just , the specific stillness of a man who had stopped everything he was doing with the focused precision of someone who has seen something and is now processing it with the full attention he usually reserved for film review and defensive zone breakdowns.
He was looking at me.
Or at Kieran and me. At my hand on Kieran's arm, which I had already removed, which was already over, which had been nothing , a second, a touch, the ordinary physical language of a loud room. Nothing.
Felix knew it was nothing. Felix, who had watched me navigate rooms for four years, who understood my registers and my frequency, who had catalogued everything about me with the thoroughness of a man who noticed patterns , Felix knew.
He was still very still.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
Across the room. Through the noise and the people and the particular amber warmth of Reeves' inexplicably well,lit borrowed apartment. Across all of it.
And I thought:I am so tired.
I thought about the hotel room and the couch on a Tuesday and the equipment room and the parking lot and every version ofwe can'tand every exit I had handed him and every door I had held open for him to walk through and theokaythat still had no bottom and the weeks of careful fine and the load,bearing walls and the cracks I had been monitoring since September.
I thought about two years.
