Page 11 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

“At a temperature you enforce with menace.”

“So you memorized that too.”

I had. I didn't tell her I had.

It meant something. The man who inhabited nowhere had learned one place now stood in the middle of it lying about why. She let the small answer stand. We walked the last of the block in a quiet that was not uncomfortable, and at her stoop she looked at me one beat too long. I understood she’d just done to me the thing I do to a coastline. She had looked at me the way she’d look at a place she meant to come back to.

The look stayed with me. I had spent years keeping nothing anyone could ask me to return to. My family had died while I was forty light-years out. By the time I reached the three graves, eight months had passed. I was twenty-two when I decided I would not make a home again.

And there I was on a street on Earth, owing a woman for the way she looked at me, and unable to make myself sorry about it.

“Goodnight, Azyr.” She had her key in the door.

“Goodnight.”

We went inside. The blue door shut, 4114 in brass I would be able to see with my eyes closed, and I stood in the entryway a while longer, my ridiculous perfect memory recording the exact click the latch made and filing it with the smell of her herbs, in the archive of things I keep and never use.

Then I climbed to the room where I'd been staying and lay down. I counted the steps between her door and mine, which I already knew, which I would always know. I didn't sleep. I had stopped minding the sleeplessness, which was the most alarming thing that has happened to me on this planet. A man who stops minding the sleepless nights in a place might have found a place he would want to stay.

CHAPTER 7

Astoria

By the second week I’d started rearranging my whole day around him, and the worst part was that I knew it.

I moved a dentist appointment so it wouldn’t clip the afternoon session. I stopped answering the office phone after six. After six was when he came down from the room upstairs and folded into the client chair with a book about Earth tide tables I’d lent him, reading in the last of the light like he had all the time in the world instead of the days left in the introduction window. I called it scheduling. Normally, I would have flagged it in a client.

Priya flagged it in me.

Wednesday, she held up the wall calendar like evidence. “You reordered the entire week.”

“I optimized the week.”

“You optimized it around the alien’s reading light.”

“He’s a matched party in an active window. I’m being thorough.”

“You gave him the good chair.”

“The good chair is the client chair. He’s the client.”

“He’s the match you declined.” She let that sit. I didn't respond. “I’m only saying, historically, when a person builds their whole calendar around a departure, you sit them down and use the word shrine.”

“Go answer a phone, Priya.”

She went. But she was right, which was the single most annoying thing about her. I printed a fresh agenda anyway. I gave him the good chair because it was the good chair. The evening light was an entirely separate matter.

He’d started bringing me things. A better pen, because he’d noticed mine skipped. One morning I came in to find my filing reordered, opened my mouth to be furious, saw it would save me time, and closed my mouth again.

“You touched my system.” I stood over the drawer, betrayed.

“Your system had three redundant steps. I left you the one you seemed emotionally attached to.”

“That’s very generous.”

“I’m a generous man.” He didn’t look up from the tide tables. “Also, your pen skips. That one doesn’t.”

Nobody had fixed the small broken things for me. Ever. I didn’t know what to do with a man who did it quietly and expected nothing.