I close the door. Lean against it. My glasses need cleaning, which is what I tell myself when I take them off and polish them on my shirt.
The truth is that removing the barrier between my eyes and the room is a decision, and right now I'm making it because she came here. She didn't go to the workspace. She didn't go to the overlook. She came to my room and sat on my bed and waited.
"Marsh was the kind of person you forget five minutes after meeting them," she says. Flat. Clinical. "Quiet. Did his work. Went home. He sat in meetings where I warned them, and he said nothing. Not because he disagreed with me. Because sayingsomething would have required him to risk something, and Neil Marsh has never risked anything in his life."
I put my glasses back on. She's watching me with an expression I can't parse, and I need the full resolution.
"When Callum died and the institution needed someone to carry the blame, Marsh didn't volunteer for the review. He didn't have to. He just didn't push back. That was enough. Silence was enough. And now he's building weapons for the Committee because the Committee is just another structure that rewards people who don't push back."
"Dar."
"He's not a monster. That's the part I keep catching on." Her fingers lift from the laptop and hover, suspended. Not tapping. Not still. Caught between states. "Monsters are simple. Marsh is a coward who defaulted to institutional compliance because resistance requires conviction, and conviction is expensive. He took the cheap option. Every time."
I push off the door. Cross the three steps to the bed. She watches me approach with the focused attention she gives to unfamiliar code, reading the variables, assessing the function.
"What do you need?" I ask.
"I need to stop thinking about Neil Marsh."
"I can work with that. Want me to start a spirited debate about tabs versus spaces? That usually occupies at least forty minutes and most of my available brain cells."
"No." She reaches up and takes my glasses off. Folds them. Sets them on the bedside table with a precision that borders on reverent, and the room goes soft at the edges because without my glasses the world loses its sharpness and the only thing in focus is what's closest.
She's closest.
"I want the version of you nobody else sees," she says. Flat. Precise. Like she's placing an order, except the faint unevennessin her breathing gives her away. "The one in the gym after midnight. The one who hides underneath the humor and the glasses and the chocolate and the man behind the screen."
My heart rate spikes. A step function, zero to sixty, the physiological equivalent of a system alert.
"That version comes with fewer jokes and more awkward silences."
"I know." She pulls her hoodie over her head. Black tank top underneath, pale arms, the silver pendant catching the light as it settles against her collarbone. "I'll take the trade."
I should say something. Something witty, something deflective, something that maintains the layer of humor between who I am and who she's asking to see.
That's the protocol. That's the operating procedure I've been running since I was a kid with a laptop who realized that being funny was easier than being known.
I don't say anything.
I pull my shirt over my head instead, and the look on her face when she sees me without it is worth every hour I've spent in that gym after midnight pretending the workouts don't matter. Her gaze drops from my eyes to my chest to my shoulders to my arms, and her lips part on an exhale she didn't authorize.
Her fingers reach toward me with a deliberateness that strips the gesture of anything casual.
Her palm lands flat against my sternum. Over my heartbeat. Her fingers spread, reading the rhythm the way she reads code, and whatever data she collects from the pattern makes her exhale through parted lips.
"You hide this," she says.
"Everyone hides something."
"You hide this on purpose." Her hand slides up, over my collarbone, along the side of my neck. Her thumb traces the tendon there, and my skin maps the contact with an accuracythat my screens would envy. "You let them see the version that's safe. The funny one. The one who eats chocolate and runs the comms and makes everyone laugh so nobody looks too close."
"You're looking close."
"I'm looking at you." She says it simply, without emphasis, and the simplicity is what undoes me because Dar doesn't waste words and the ones she chose mean exactly what they mean.
She's looking at the man underneath all of it, and the exposure is more intimate than anything she could do with her hands.
She pulls me down.
