Page 43 of Travis
Chapter 11
Sera
Ten days in the compound, and I'd learned Travis's rhythms the way I learned everything: by watching.
Coffee at six, black, no sugar, poured from a pot he set on a timer the night before. Gym by six-thirty, because he was always freshly showered by the time I came out for breakfast. Eggs, toast, sometimes oatmeal. Always two plates. Always the same chair.
We worked together in the control room most days now, and the corridor analysis of Kindt’s network had progressed further in ten days than my solo work had managed in months. Three new courier waypoints, narrowed timing intervals, a communication map that was starting to look like something an agency couldn't ignore.
The partnership was the easy part. The rest of it was… not so easy for me.
Ten days of shared meals across a small table. Of working three feet apart in an enclosed room sharing the same air, the same space. Of reaching for the same coffee pot, brushing pasteach other in the hallway, existing in the kind of proximity that turned awareness into something I had to actively manage.
I was managing it pretty damned poorly.
His hand on my lower back when he guided me through the control room door had become habitual. A light touch, barely there, that he probably didn't think about and I had to force myself not to think about for hours afterward. When he reached across me to adjust something on my monitor, his arm would brush mine, and the warmth of it would stay on my skin long after he'd pulled away.
One morning he came upstairs from the pool with his hair still damp and a T-shirt that clung to his shoulders, and I had to focus on my laptop screen so intently I probably could have recited the pixels.
My sister’s boyfriend. The guilt hadn't changed shape. It had just gotten louder.
Maude, at least, was a welcome distraction.
"He didn't eat lunch again," Maude told me on the fourth afternoon while Travis was in the shower.
"I noticed."
"His caloric intake has been below baseline for six consecutive days. If you could see the spreadsheet I'm maintaining, you'd be concerned."
"I'm already concerned."
"Good. Historically, concern expressed by a human woman carries approximately four hundred percent more weight with him than concern expressed by me. I've run the numbers."
So Maude and I started a quiet campaign. Not dramatic. Not confrontational. Just the steady, relentless pressure of two people who noticed when he skipped meals and weren't willing to let it slide. I'd set a sandwich beside his keyboard when he was deep in analysis. Maude would announce his blood sugar readings at strategic moments. Travis would eat the sandwichand glare at the ceiling speaker, and we'd pretend we weren't coordinating.
"You two are ganging up on me," he said, holding the sandwich I'd made like it had personally offended him.
"Eat it, and we'll stop," I said.
"No, we won't," Maude said.
He ate it.
The morning I noticed his knuckles was day five.
He was at the stove, spatula in his right hand, and when he reached for the pepper mill the overhead light caught his hand at the wrong angle. The skin across the top two knuckles was split. Not deep, but raw. Fresh enough that it hadn't fully scabbed.
"What happened to your hand?"
He glanced down like he'd forgotten about it. “I, uh, was punching the heavy bag last night. Forgot to wrap."
"You forgot."
"It happens."
"You're the most disciplined person I've ever met. You don't forget things."
He set the pepper mill down. "I was distracted. It's nothing."
