Page 38 of Second Alarm
"Hanna." He turns a page without looking up. "You don't have to talk to me. I'm not going to talk to you. Read your book."
He's wearing a gray hoodie and reading glasses. Reading glasses. Ty Brennan is wearing reading glasses at seven-oh-five on a Wednesday morning and I'm trying to work out whether theglasses are new since the academy or whether they're some kind of retroactive attack on my nervous system.
I open my book. I read two words. I close my book.
"What are you reading."
"Hanna — "
"What are you reading, Ty."
He shows me the cover. It's a Le Carré —The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which is a book I've read twice because it's an excellent book, and also because Cal loaned it to me at twenty. The fact that Ty is reading Le Carré at seven a.m. on my day off is such a specifically Ty Brennan thing that I want to hurl his coffee across the booth and say something extremely unkind about it.
"Good book."
"Yep."
"Have you read it before."
"Three times."
"Fourth reread," I say.
"Fourth reread." He doesn't look up.
"Obsessive."
"Comforting."
"You're a forty-year-old man in a thirty-three-year-old's body."
"Mmhmm."
I open my own book. I read a full page. I don't remember any of what I just read, flip back, try again. My eyes move down the page. I couldn't tell you, in this moment, whether the book is in English.
Ty turns a page.
I close the book.
"Ty."
"Yeah."
"I want to say something, and I want you to let me say it without making a face."
"Okay." He keeps reading.
"This — " I gesture between us. " — you sitting in the booth with me with your Le Carré and your stupid little glasses isn't the same as a break room."
"Okay."
"It isn't colleagues sharing a table. It's a specific, targeted — "
"Hanna." He finally looks up over the rims of the stupid little glasses, with the particular patience I've clocked on his face approximately forty-seven times in the last six weeks. "I'm trying very hard to show you that I can just be in a room with you."
"What?"
"That's all this is."
