Page 55 of Travis
Chapter 14
Sera
“Could you pass the salt?”
Travis picked up the shaker and set it exactly between us, close enough for me to reach but far enough that our fingers wouldn’t touch. He’d been doing that for two days. Calibrating distances. Finding the precise midpoint between polite and nowhere near me.
“Thank you.”
“Sure.”
I salted my pasta. He salted his pasta. We both looked at our plates with the kind of concentration usually reserved for defusing nuclear warheads.
Two days ofthis. Of please and thank you and measured eye contact and conversations about the Kindt data that were so aggressively professional they could have been transcribed into a Bureau briefing without changing a word. Of sitting across from a man I’d kissed and pretending the kiss had happened to two other people in some other room.
It mattered. Not to him, obviously. But to me it mattered so much I could still feel the exact pressure of his mouth if I stopped actively trying to not think about it even for a second.
I’d been replaying it on a loop since the gym. Not the way a woman replays a kiss she’s happy about. I was replaying it the way I replayed data that didn’t fit a model. Examining it from every angle, stress-testing the inputs, looking for the explanation that made the pattern hold.
Proximity. That was all. I’d been standing close to him, breathing hard from the training, face flushed, body warm. His hands had been on me for an hour, adjusting my stance, correcting my form. We’d both been a little excited because I’d gotten the move right.
The human nervous system doesn’t distinguish between types of physical arousal. Elevated heart rate is elevated heart rate. The body connects the dots whether the dots belong together or not.
He’d looked at me and his brain had filled in a different face. Naomi and I shared enough similarities. In the right light, with his pulse up and his guard down, the resemblance could do the work.
He’d kissed me and seen her. I was sure of it.
And the proof was sitting across the table, eating pasta with mechanical precision while I asked him to pass the salt like we were coworkers in a break room.
Across the table, Travis cut his pasta into precise, equal lengths. He’d been doing it since I sat down, and I wasn’t sure he was aware of it. His focus was on the food in a way that suggested his focus was actually miles away.
“The southeastern corridor data from this afternoon looked promising,” he said without looking up. “I think we should run it against the fuel purchase records tomorrow.”
“Sounds good.”
“And the timing anomaly you flagged on the northern route. I want to overlay that with the communication bursts from last week.”
“I can have it ready by morning.”
“Great.”
Great. Wonderful.Two analysts discussing workflow over dinner. Nothing to see here.
“You’re both being ridiculous,” Maude said from the ceiling.
Neither of us responded. The silence that followed was the kind that even Maude didn’t try to fill, and Maude always tried to fill silence. That she didn’t now told me something I wasn’t ready to hear.
I put my fork down. “I think I’m done.”
“You’ve only eaten a third of your meal.”
“I’m not that hungry.”
He looked at me then. Actually looked, for the first time since we’d sat down. Whatever he found on my face made something shift behind his eyes, but it passed before I could catalog it.
“You should eat more,” he said. “Maude will lecture us both.”
“Maude can take it up with my appetite.”
