You Are My Only Variable

Chapter 4

Ivy was late.

It wasn't her fault. During the last round of mopping before the library closed, a pipe burst in the third-floor men's bathroom. She and another cleaner spent twenty minutes fighting it with mops, and by the time maintenance arrived, her sleeves were soaked to the elbows and her canvas sneakers were full of water. She didn't have time to go back to the dorm and change. She ran straight to Asher's building.

The man at the front desk recognised her now. He handed her the visitor pass without calling up. In the elevator she wrung out her sleeves. In the mirror her hair was plastered to her forehead, her face pale with cold, her lips tinged purple. The water from that burst pipe had been freezing. November cold.

Her fingers were stiff when she pressed the doorbell.

The door opened. Asher stood there in his dark blue hoodie. His eyes landed on her wet clothes and stayed there for a full three seconds—nothing for most people, but for him, three seconds of sustained eye contact was the equivalent of someone else staring for a full minute. He didn't say any of his usual opening lines.

"Your clothes are wet. Your shoes are making a squelching sound. The outside temperature is fifty-two degrees. You ran here from the library, which would have taken approximately—"

"Asher. Let me in."

He shut up. Stepped back. Ivy walked in, leaving a trail of wet footprints across the floor. She stood in the middle of the living room, arms wrapped around herself, and started shaking. She hadn't felt the cold while she was running. Now that she'd stopped, it was seeping out from her bones.

"You need dry clothes." His voice was slightly faster than usual. Faster by maybe a fraction of a second, but Ivy was too cold to notice.

"I didn't bring—"

He turned and walked through a door at the far end of the hallway. She'd always assumed it was a storage closet. He came back with a grey hoodie and a pair of sweatpants. He held them out to her—not tossed, not placed on a nearby piece of furniture for her to pick up herself. Held out. His arm extended into the space between them, waiting for her to take them.

"Bathroom's on the left."

---

When she came out in the dry clothes, Asher was standing in the kitchen. The kitchen. She had never seen him in the kitchen. That part of his apartment had always felt purely decorative, not a single water spot on the counter. But there he was, back to her, the kettle rumbling, steam rising from the spout.

"What are you doing?"

He turned around. He was holding a mug with a line of code printed on it. He saw her in his hoodie and paused. It was too big for her. The sleeves fell past her fingers.

"Hot," he said, handing her the mug. "With sugar. The data shows that warm sugar intake accelerates body temperature recovery after cold exposure."

"What data?"

"A mountaineering hypothermia first-aid guide. And a blog post about hot chocolate."

Ivy looked down at the liquid in the mug. It wasn't from a tea bag. It was hot chocolate made from powder. Dark, smelling sweet, with little unmixed granules floating on the surface. He clearly didn't know how to make hot chocolate. He'd poured the hot water straight onto the powder without making a paste first. There would be lumps of chocolate mud at the bottom.

She took a sip. There was indeed mud at the bottom. Too sweet. She burned her tongue. It was the best hot chocolate she'd ever had in her life.

"You never go into the kitchen."

"Your clothes were wet."

"Those two things aren't logically connected."

He was quiet for a second. His lips pressed together. Then he said, "I didn't like seeing you shiver."

"Why?"

"I haven't identified the name of this emotion yet. It's similar to seeing an error in code that shouldn't be there. But not in a negative way. I don't want the error to disappear. I only want to fix the environment around it."

Ivy's hands stilled around the mug.

"Asher. What you just said—"

"Was it wrong?"

"No." She lifted the mug to her mouth, hiding half her face behind it. "It was the most normal thing you've ever said."

He stood there, still holding the spoon he'd stirred the hot chocolate with. He looked down at it, then back up at her.

"I now have a set of your clothes here." He stated this fact in the same flat tone he used to read contract clauses.

"Your clothes. Not my clothes."

"My clothes that you've worn. Filed under your category. Logically, they are now your clothes."

"Your grandfather wouldn't agree with that logic."

"My grandfather's logic is not my logic."

The words left his mouth with no emphasis, but there was no pause between them either. He said them fluidly, like he had rehearsed them in his head.

Ivy set the mug down on the counter. The sleeves were so long she nearly dipped the cuff into the mug. She pushed them up, exposing half her wrists.

"You want to know why I was late," she said.

"A pipe burst in the third-floor men's bathroom at the library. You spent twenty to twenty-five minutes dealing with the flooding. Then you ran here. Approximate time: eight minutes."

Ivy stared at him. "How do you know it was the men's bathroom?"

He blinked. It was the first time Ivy had seen him blink—not the regular, physiological kind, but the kind that happened when someone asked a question he hadn't anticipated.

"The women's bathroom has more stalls. If the women's bathroom had flooded, cleanup would have taken longer. You wouldn't have had time to run here. Therefore it was the men's bathroom."

Ivy looked at him. He stood under the kitchen light, spoon still in hand, expression as serious as if he were submitting a paper. She suddenly wanted to laugh, but not at him. She wanted to laugh because in that moment she'd thought: anyone else, and she'd assume they'd been stalking her. But not Asher. Asher had just pieced the fragments together and deduced the reason for her lateness. Because to him, her lateness was a problem that needed to be solved.

"You deduced my lateness."

"I didn't deduce. I just analysed it. Arranged the available data."

"That's deduction."

"I don't really distinguish between those two. My grasp of humanities terminology is insufficient."

"You can't tell deduction from analysis, but you can work backwards from a burst pipe to a men's bathroom?"

His mouth twitched again. That curve was familiar to Ivy now. Not a smile. It was him saying: I see the contradiction, but I don't know how to respond.

"You're uncomfortable. You need to sit down."

"Are you concerned about me?"

"If 'concern' is defined as paying attention to another individual's physiological state and taking intervention measures, then yes."

"A normal person would just say: 'Yes, I'm concerned about you.'"

He paused. "Yes. I'm concerned about you."

He said it slowly, like he was checking each word for errors. Then he gave a single nod, confirming the sentence's accuracy to himself.

Ivy walked back to the living room and sat on the sofa, wearing his hoodie, curling into the same grey sofa she'd found too cold and too empty the first time she'd been here. The hoodie smelled like laundry detergent. She'd told him in the laundry room not to use too much. He'd clearly remembered. The scent was faint. Just right.

Asher didn't sit at the far end of the sofa. He sat on the floor across from the coffee table. Closer to her than the sofa was.

"You're sitting on the floor?"

"This puts my eye line below yours. Social psychology data indicates that lower eye contact reduces the other person's sense of pressure. You're in a state of physical discomfort and need a low-stress communication environment."

"You looked up social psychology?"

"While the hot chocolate was steeping."

"You don't steep hot chocolate powder. You stir it."

"I'll improve my technique next time."

Ivy looked down at him. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, long legs folded up, still holding that mug with the code printed on it—he'd made one for himself too, but hadn't taken a single sip. His hair was a bit messy, probably from rummaging through the kitchen for the cocoa powder. He didn't look like the person who stood next to the monitor with his hands in his pockets, reciting contract clauses as objective fact. He looked like someone who genuinely wanted to learn how to make hot chocolate.

"Asher."

"Yes?"

"You said you didn't like seeing me shiver."

"Yes."

"Guess what that feeling is called."

He was quiet for a moment. The kettle in the kitchen hadn't fully cooled and gave an occasional soft click of contracting metal. Outside the window, the city lights blurred together, scattered like broken glass across black velvet in the November night.

"I looked it up," he said.

"What?"

"The feeling of discomfort when you see someone else in discomfort. That emotion." He paused for half a second. "Wikipedia says it could be empathy. Or it could be—"

He didn't finish.

Ivy didn't press him on what the second half of that sentence was. She finished the hot chocolate—too sweet, full of granules, mud at the bottom. She tipped the mug back and swallowed the last mouthful, mud and all. So sweet it stung her throat. She didn't want to leave a single drop.