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Max had no idea what was running through Jasmine's head.
He was still operating on the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of running into someone from before — the rare specific joy of a connection surviving an eight-year gap and coming out intact on the other side. It was a good feeling. He was in it.
Then the sensation hit.
A spike up the spine. Clean and cold and precise — the particular feeling of something dangerous having found him and taken its time deciding what to do about that. It was there, fully formed, and then it was gone. An instant, no more.
He didn't move. He didn't look around. He sat with the feeling for a moment and let it pass. Filed it in the back of his mind where things went when they required attention later.
The boss arrived with a platter of rice that was enormous enough to serve as a distraction for anyone.
"Boss," Max said, "another round for the table. And two colas."
"Coming right up."
"Wait — I'll get this." Jasmine was already reaching.
"I've got it." Max waved her off. "Reunion celebration."
"Hmm." She pulled her hand back, expression suggesting she was allowing this for now and had opinions about it. "Then I'm buying dinner."
"Fine."
She seemed satisfied with this outcome.
Max was, he recognized, a fairly standard-issue practical male in certain respects — the kind where paying for meals was simply a default, not something that required negotiation. He'd refused without thinking. That Jasmine had pushed back at all, and then pivoted immediately to a counter-offer rather than arguing the point, was the kind of thing he filed alongside the broken spoon as data.
Nerds, he reflected, were sometimes very slow on the uptake about certain things.
After lunch, they didn't split up. Jasmine had mentioned, over food, that she'd just arrived in the city and needed to find a place to rent — she'd been staying in a hostel since arrival, which was practical but not long-term. Max's neighborhood apparently had some availability, and proximity wasn't a disadvantage from her perspective, so she'd decided to look at his building's general vicinity.
She framed it as reconnaissance. He accepted this framing.
His apartment door, when he opened it, produced an expression on Jasmine's face that he'd seen before — on quality-control inspectors, mostly.
The place wasn't dirty. He'd maintained basic order before the development sprint, and the sprint itself had happened at the desk with everything else staying put. But a month with the windows mostly closed had left a thin even layer of dust on every flat surface, and the accumulated smell of delivery food from the weeks before the sprint had settled into the walls.
Jasmine started opening windows before he'd finished stepping inside.
"Men," she said, in the tone of a verdict.
"It's not dirty," Max said. "It's just been closed for a while."
"I can read the thickness of this dust like a timeline."
"That seems like an overstatement."
"This shelf has enough dust to write your name in. I'm about to write your name in it."
"Please don't write my name in my own dust."
She had already moved to the next window. She opened it. Turned to survey the living room with an expression that made him feel like he should have cleaned more, even though the cleaning margin was genuinely minimal.
"You have a living room you don't use."
"Having a living room makes the apartment feel complete."
She raised an eyebrow. "Are you keeping someone in here?"
"I have been continuously single for twenty-one years."
She stopped. "Consecutively?"
"Consecutively."
Something went through her expression — several things, in sequence, too fast to catalogue. She recovered smoothly. "Cat? Dog?"
"Had both. Neither worked out. The dog needed walks and the cat needed its litter changed, and it felt like we were mutually failing each other, so I rehomed them."
Jasmine's palm met her forehead with a sound that indicated genuine feeling.
"Mutually failing each other," she repeated.
"It was the most accurate description."
She stood in the middle of his living room for a moment, appearing to make decisions about how to proceed with this information. Then she walked past him toward the hallway.
He showed her the guest room.
She stood in the doorway and looked at it. A bed frame. Four walls. A window. Nothing else — not because it had been cleared out, but because nothing had ever been put in it. The room of someone who had rented a two-bedroom apartment for the specific ambient comfort of knowing the space existed and had never needed anyone to actually use it.
She was quiet for a moment.
"Leaving a room this empty isn't good for an apartment," she said. "Dead space." She turned around. "How about I move in and we split the rent?"
Max stared at her.
"Huh?"
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