He held, a half-second longer than the assessment required, and I heard myself breathe in.
Cross heard it too.
We had both heard myself breathe in, and I wanted to die.
It's the proximity,I told myself.It's the thumb. Anyone's thumb. On anyone's jaw. In a quiet room. This is just a physiological response to sustained close contact and has nothing to do with Nathan Cross specifically.
Then he stepped back.
"You passed," he said. He picked up his tablet. "You're likely presenting with a subclinical accumulation from the previous impact combined with dehydration and inadequate sleep."
"That’s a lot of fancy words."
"Don't." He made a note. Didn't look up. "Don't minimize it."
I slid forward on the table slightly, not getting off it yet, just restless, just needing to do something with my hands. "You said I passed."
"I said you passed today's assessment. That doesn't mean you're fine." He set the tablet down. Looked at me, the full-attention version. "Repeated subclinical impacts accumulate.You are twenty-three years old, and you are making decisions that will follow you to thirty."
I looked at his face and found nothing I could use there. No frustration to deflect, no visible crack I could widen into something manageable. Just this direct, factual attention, like he was telling me something he considered obvious.
"Okay," I said. "Okay."
He turned back to the counter.
I got off the table. Some reflex, some bad wiring, I got off the table and I took two steps toward him, which put me too close, closer than the situation required, close enough to see the line of his shoulders and the back of his neck, and I said:
"You always think you know better."
He turned around.
Which meant we were close. Which meant the last ten seconds were right there, not filed, not gone, and the wall was up but I could see it was a wall, could see the architecture of it, and I didn't know what I was doing, standing here with this information.
"I do," he said. Not smug. Not unkind. Certain, the same way he was certain about everything.
Something in my chest went tight and hot.
"Must be nice," I said. "Being right about everything."
"It's not."
I didn't have anything for that.
We stood there, close and stupid, and something moved across his face, barely a flicker, and then he stepped back and went to the counter and came back with something that wasn't my jersey.
My shirt. The one from the bar. Folded. Clean.
He held it out.
He washed it,some part of my brain noted.He washed your shirt and folded it and he's giving it back.
That was not asset management.
I didn't know what it was.
I took the shirt. The fabric was warm from wherever he'd stored it, and it smelled—it smelled like his laundry detergent, clean and specific, the same thing underneath the soap smell I'd been cataloguing against my will for weeks.
I stood there holding my own shirt that smelled like Nathan Cross's apartment.
