Page 39 of Second Alarm
"I don't — "
"You've been avoiding rooms with me since the moment you walked into Station 7, and I've been letting you, and that's fine, that's fair. I'm just — " He sets the book down. "Demonstrating a baseline."
"A what."
"A baseline. Of coexistence. I sit across from you at Peak Grounds, I don't say anything, I read my book, I leave. You read your book. You leave. Nothing happens. No rules broken. No accidental revelations. Just — " he lifts his coffee " — proof of concept."
"Oh my god."
"That's all."
"This isn't a proof of concept, Ty, this is a man ambushing me at a coffee shop at seven a.m. — "
"It's not ambush. It's — "
"Sit at another table."
"There aren't any."
"Go outside."
"It's thirty-seven degrees outside."
"Ty."
"I'll leave if you want me to leave." He says it evenly, no pressure on it at all.
"Yes."
"Okay."
He starts to close his book.
"Wait." It comes out before I can catch it.
He stops. He doesn't close the book, doesn't move. He just waits.
I stare at my coffee. I stare at the coffee and think about all the bad decisions I've made in my life, and I try to remember the last time one of them happened at a coffee shop, and I can't, and I think maybe this is a precedent.
"You can stay."
"Okay."
"But you don't talk. No book commentary. No — no anything."
"I wasn't going to comment on the book."
"You always comment on books. Cal loaned me a book you'd already read once, and you commented on it for thirty-five minutes at a family dinner."
Ty goes still for a beat. "You remember that."
"I remember everything, Ty."
"Yeah." Very quietly, not looking at me. "Yeah, I know you do."
And there it is. The thing.
It slides into the booth between us the way a cat slides into a lap — without anyone having invited it, nothing dramatic about the way he said it, nothing loaded, flat as he says everything — but it's a sentence with a weight on it, the way some sentences do. The weight of him knowing me. Of me knowing him. Of a decade of both of us knowing each other across a distance we built on purpose, and now the sentence is sitting on the tablebetween two mugs of Micah's coffee, and I have to respond, and I don't know how.
