HELLBOUND WITH THE ALPHA

CHAPTER 12 What Eli Sees

Eli brought lunch on a Wednesday, which he did once every few weeks, regardless of where Ava was working or what she was doing, because he was the kind of person who showed up without being asked and considered that the baseline of friendship rather than anything remarkable.

He arrived at the Varek Industries lobby at twelve thirty with a paper bag from the Thai place near the university that they had been going to since their second year, and he texted her from the entrance because he did not have a building pass and the reception staff had the specific polite firmness of people whose job included preventing exactly this kind of unannounced visit.

Ava came down and signed him in with the practiced ease of someone who had learned the building's protocols, and they found a bench in the small courtyard off the lobby that caught the midday sun and ate their noodles with plastic forks and talked the way they always talked, easily and without agenda.

Eli watched her talk about the job.

He did this quietly, the way he did most things, without making it obvious. He had known Ava for four years, and he had watched her talk about a great many things with a great many degrees of engagement and what he was watching now was something different. There was a quality to how she described the work, an aliveness in it, that went beyond professional satisfaction. She was interested. She was genuinely, specifically interested in the particulars of this place and how it functioned and the people inside it.

She mentioned Valdris twice.

The first time was when she was explaining the report system she had developed, an efficient process that she seemed pleased with, and she said he had noticed the change to the correspondence protocol and called it more efficient. She said it in the middle of a longer sentence and moved on before Eli could note the particular quality of her voice when she said it.

The second time was when she was describing a meeting she had sat in on, and she said he had included her at the table rather than having her observe from the side, and that she had handled a difficult question from a client in a way that she thought had gone well. She did not say she thought he had noticed. She did not need to. Eli could hear it underneath the sentence.

He ate his noodles. He did not say anything about either instance.

"You seem happy," he said instead, because it was true, and it was the thing that mattered most.

Ava looked at him. She had the expression she wore when she suspected she was being gently managed. "I am fine," she said.

"Fine is different from happy."

"I am both."

"Good," Eli said, and meant it with every part of himself, including the part that was quietly and privately heartbroken and had been for longer than he was going to tell her. "You look like you belong here. I mean that as a compliment."

She looked at the building behind them, the dark glass tower with its navy and gold logo above the entrance, and something in her expression softened slightly in a way she probably did not know it was doing.

"I think I might," she said. "I think I might actually belong here."

Eli looked at his noodles. He smiled to himself the way people smiled at things that were both good news and complicated news at the same time.

"Then stay," he said. "Build something real."

She bumped his shoulder with hers and stole a piece of his chicken and changed the subject, and he let her, and they sat in the courtyard until it was time for her to go back inside, and he watched her badge through the door and disappear into the lobby and thought about two words spoken in a tone she had not been aware she was using.

He took the long way home and did not think about it any more than was useful, which was the only mercy available to him.