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“You built your own system for learning this,” she said, mostly to redirect her own brain.
“Yeah, watching something on a screen doesn’t stick for me. I needed something I could touch.”
“You’re a tactile learner. It’s great that you know that and adapt for it.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Moderately.”
The teasing came out before she could think about it. It was the kind of thing she’d say to Fallon without a second thought, but Ryder wasn’t Fallon, so she braced for it to land wrong.
But instead, something shifted in his face. Not a smile, but the tension around his jaw loosened. He didn’t mind the teasing. Actually seemed like he might like it.
Then the moment was gone, and he reset the salt and pepper shakers. “How did you learn all this computer stuff? Fallon said you don’t have formal training.”
“I don’t. Computers just make sense to me. They always have. The way data moves through a system, the way the architecture fits together.” She turned her empty mug in her hands. “My brain sees it. I’ve never had to work at that part.”
“Must be nice to have a brain that cooperates with what you need it to do.”
She could have laughed. Could have told him that her brain was the least cooperative organ she owned, that it did whatever it wanted and she was just the person holding the skull as it tried to break apart sometimes.
But that wasn’t something she was prepared to discuss with him. He totally wouldn’t understand what happened to her in a crowd. He certainly hadn’t understood it during the briefing. “It has its moments. What about you? What does your brain do well?”
“People.” He said it the way someone states a fact they’ve never questioned. “I can read a room. Body language, vocal patterns, the way someone shifts their weight when they’re about to lie.” He positioned the knife at the edge of the table. “That comes easy. This computer stuff obviously doesn’t.”
Good with machines, terrible with people. Good with people, terrible with machines. Two people sitting in an empty café at two in the morning, each one wired for the exact thing the other couldn’t do.
“Let’s run it again,” she said.
He did. Clean all the way through.
“Again.”
Twice more. Solid both times. His hands were moving with a rhythm that said the sequence was settling somewhere deeper than concentration.
“Better,” she said.
“You mean you’re not going to give me your normal list of all the ways I’m going to get caught and killed?”
“Not tonight. Tonight, you’re doing everything right.”
She leaned back in her chair and looked at him. Her brain was quiet, no spiral. It was refreshing.
And a little terrifying.
“I should get back to the lab,” she said. “I want to make sure your online presence is completely situated before tomorrow.”
“And I should run through this another fifty times.” He looked at the table. “Thank you. For catching my error and helping.”
“I wasn’t going to let you practice wrong. Not when your life may be on the line because of it.”
He held her gaze for a second. “I appreciate you staying here and running me through it all.”
She didn’t have an answer for that. Or she had too many answers and none of them was appropriate for two in the morning with a man she was supposed to be working with professionally.
She stood, took her mug to the counter, and filled it from the machine. When she turned back, he was already running through the sequence again. Salt shaker. Pepper shaker. Sugar caddy. His hands moving with more certainty than when she’d first arrived.
She left the café and walked back to the lab with the fresh, dark coffee hot in her hands. Tomorrow, she was going to sit across from Ryder Sutton for another four hours.
