Page 4 of Rookie Mistake
"Goodnight, Mercer."
"Goodnight, Sokolov."
He closes the guest room door. I walk to the kitchen. I stand at the counter. The apartment is quiet except for the muffled sounds of Mercer unpacking, which involves the duffel bag hitting the floor, a shoe hitting a wall, and a word in Spanish that I suspect his mother would not approve of.
The quiet is the thing I have built. Three years of it, since Alexei, since the dismantling. A second toothbrush in the bathroom cup would have been enough to ruin my week three years ago. Tonight it is only enough to make my grip tighten on the mug.
I do not think about Alexei.
I think about the corridor instead. The folder. The fingers. The fraction of a second where Mercer's skin touched mine andmy body produced a response I did not authorize. Heat, low and immediate, followed by a tightening in my shoulders that I suppressed in under a second but that Mercer saw. Because Mercer sees things.
This is the inconvenience. Not the housing arrangement. Not the duffel bag on my guest bed. The inconvenience is that Eli Mercer, who has been in my building for fewer than twelve hours, reads people. Behind the grin is an observation system operating at full capacity. He saw my shoulders tighten. He saw the fraction. He filed it.
He files things the way I file things: automatically, comprehensively, without the option of unfiling.
I do not need a person in my life who files things.
He is also, technically, my rookie. The buddy program assignment is on the team's shared coaching calendar. Onboarding mentor, in writing, with a defined scope: housing, schedule orientation, film, integration. The folder I handed him in the corridor was a professional document. The heat in my hand when our fingers brushed was not. One of those things is allowed in this apartment. The other is a problem I am required, by every reasonable standard of my position, to keep on the wrong side of the wall.
I make tea. The kettle clicks off. The mug is warm in my hands. The routine holds, the way it has held for three years, and the routine does not accommodate rookies with coffee stains and match-strike fingers.
The guest room door opens.
Mercer appears in the kitchen in sweats and a T-shirt, barefoot, hair damp, looking significantly less catastrophic than he did in the lobby and significantly more like a problem I will have to manage.
"Are you cooking?" he asks.
"No."
"Something smells like garlic."
"I was preparing tomorrow's meal."
"At ten-thirty at night?"
"I meal prep."
"Of course you do."
He leans against the counter. The leaning is casual. The casual is the performance. But underneath the performance is a young man in an unfamiliar city in an unfamiliar apartment who cannot sleep because the unfamiliarity is too loud.
I recognize this. I was twelve when my mother moved us from Moscow to Detroit. The first night in the American apartment, I lay in a bed that was not mine in a room that smelled like paint and carpet cleaner and I listened to my mother on the phone with her sister in Saint Petersburg, speaking Russian, and the Russian was the only familiar thing and I held onto it the way a drowning person holds onto anything.
"Sit down," I say.
He sits at the counter. I take out a pot. I fill it with water. I salt the water. I heat olive oil in a pan.
"You're cooking," he says.
"You need food."
"You just said you weren't cooking."
"The situation has changed."
"The situation being that I showed up looking pathetic in your kitchen?"
"The situation being that you have not eaten since the dining room and your performance tomorrow reflects on the onboarding program, which reflects on me, and I do not accept poor reflections."
