Page 44 of Travis
I looked at his knuckles again. The split was across the top, not the flat of the fist. I'd never hit a heavy bag in my life, but even I knew the contact point for a straight punch was the front of the knuckles, not the top.
The top got damaged when you hit something at the wrong angle. Something that wasn't hanging still and waiting for you.
I reached for his hand without thinking. He pulled it back before my fingers got there, a quick, controlled movement that looked casual and wasn't.
"It's fine, Sera."
My hand hung in the air for a second before I pulled it back. Right. He didn't want me touching him. Check. I turned to the breakfast table and picked up my coffee and didn't ask again.
Two days later, his forearm had a neat bandage just below the elbow. Said he caught it on a shelf edge in the storage room. I stared at him but had learned my lesson and didn’t offer to assist in any way. He didn’t want me to touch him. No need to require him to make that known more than once.
But still, the wound itself bugged me.
This was not a man who caught himself on shelves. Not in this place where he could probably walk around blindfolded and never run into anything.
The day after that, he favored his left shoulder for most of the morning. He compensated well. I’d only caught it because I was pathetic and had been watching him for ten days straight.
I knew his baseline the way I knew my own data sets: good enough to see when something was off by a single degree. By afternoon, whatever was wrong had loosened up or he'd gotten better at hiding it. I didn't ask. He didn't explain.
But it stuck with me. I couldn’t shake it.
And tonight, I couldn't sleep. Less because of Travis’s mystery wounds and more because my brain wouldn't stop turning over a routing anomaly I'd been chasing since afternoon. I got up and padded down the hall to the kitchen.
I’d be lying if I said the anomaly was the sole reason I went out.
A few nights ago, I'd come out at two in the morning and found Travis at the kitchen table in the dark. Just sitting there with a glass of water and the kind of silence that meant he'd been up for a while.
I'd almost gone back to my room. But he'd looked up and said, "Can't sleep either?" and I'd sat down across from him.
We'd talked for an hour. Not about Kindt or the model or any of the things that justified my presence in his house. Instead, he’d told me about his life growing up. A father who’d left early a mother who’d worked doubles. He’d been a kid who taughthimself to code on a library computer because the house was too quiet and the screen was the one thing that made sense.
I just listened, soaking it all up. Wishing he’d tell me more. Wishing he’d tell me everything about himself.
At one point he'd reached across the table and adjusted the glass of water I'd set down, moving it half an inch so it aligned with the edge of the placemat. He'd done it absently, and then he'd looked up and realized, and something crossed his face that was almost embarrassment.
"Sorry," he said. "I do that. Everything has to be exactly right, or it bugs me.”
"I know. I do it too, sometimes.”
He'd looked at me then. Really looked. Not the quick, operational assessments or the careful, controlled glances across the workstation. A long, quiet look that held something neither of us was going to say out loud in a dark kitchen at two in the morning.
"Yeah," he said. "You do."
That was all.
I'd gone back to my room afterward and lain in the dark with my heart pounding and the wanting so thick in my chest I could barely breathe around it. I'd told myself it was proximity and loneliness and the particular cruelty of living in the same house as a man who I’d been half in love with for years.
Now, three nights later, I walked into the kitchen hoping for a repeat. Evidently a glutton for punishment.
But the kitchen was dark. Empty. No glass of water on the table. No Travis.
I stood there for a minute, feeling foolish. Then, knowing I wasn’t going back to sleep any time soon, I went downstairs to work.
And… in hopes he might be there.
But the room was empty too. His chair was pushed back from the desk at a slight angle, the way it looked when he stood up in a hurry rather than rolling it back with his usual precision.
He must have gone to bed. Reasonable. Normal.
