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"I also didn't expect the hair," Max said. "I think that's just what burning out completely looks like. One day it was black."
He said it lightly, which was the only way to say it without getting into the parts he wasn't going to explain. He took another pull of his cola.
Jasmine's hand, wrapped around her iron spoon, tightened.
The spoon snapped cleanly in half.
She set both pieces down on the table with the careful precision of someone pretending that had not just happened. The restaurant owner looked over from behind the counter. Several nearby diners looked over. Jasmine did not acknowledge any of them.
Max looked at the two halves of the spoon.
"I'll cover that," he said.
"I'll cover it," she said simultaneously.
A brief pause.
"You broke it," Max said.
"You made me break it," she said.
He decided this was not a productive line of argument. He redirected. "You were about to tell me about the last eight years."
Jasmine leaned back in her chair with the ease of someone who had processed their history into something deliverable. She picked up Max's cola — his, which he'd been drinking from — and took a long pull from it without asking.
"Junior high," she said. "Had to re-take the entrance exam first — the gap was too wide to skip it. Vocational track. Worked part-time through all of it to cover costs." She set the can down. "Then the army. Five years."
"Why only five?"
"Knew after five it wasn't where I was headed long-term. My squad leader and political instructor had strong opinions about my leaving." A slight pause. "I left anyway. Took my discharge pay, came here." She glanced at him. "And then I ran into you around a corner, which is apparently how this city works."
Max looked at her across the table. Vocational high school while working. Five years of military service. Now here, in a city she'd just arrived in, already assessing neighborhoods for rental properties with the systematic calm of someone running a project.
He'd given her twenty thousand dollars and a vague wish of good luck eight years ago. She'd turned it into a foundation and built the rest herself.
"You've done well," he said.
Jasmine looked at him. Then she looked away — at the street, at nothing in particular — with an expression he couldn't quite read.
"It's something to work with," she said.
What she didn't say, and what Max had no way of knowing, was the quiet calculation running underneath the conversation.
She'd recognized him before she called out — something in the way he moved, the jaw line, the quality of attention he paid to things. The white hair had thrown her for a second. She'd hesitated. Then she'd called out anyway.
Now she was sitting across from him at a food stall, eating lunch, and she was conducting a calm and entirely practical assessment.
Height: around 5'11". Her threshold. He cleared it. Check.
Build: visible through the plain white shirt. The Monte Cristo template had done its quiet work — the kind of physique you got from having survived things rather than from gym routines. She'd spent five years around people in excellent physical condition and she knew the difference. Check.
Habits: no visible bad habits. Clean romantic history — he'd said it himself, twenty-one years, consecutively, which she believed because he'd said it with the mild bewilderment of someone who hadn't entirely processed it as remarkable. Check.
The quality coming off him — the faint coolness, the sense of something contained and unhurried — was new. She didn't have a name for it yet. She just knew it fit what she was looking for in the same way a key fit a lock: exactly, with no wiggle.
Since ancient times, there had been two ways to repay a kindness. If the recipient was the right kind of person, you offered yourself. If he wasn't — well, she was getting ahead of herself.
She was a practical person. She didn't rush things. He was clearly dealing with the aftermath of something significant. There was time.
Like fishing, she thought. You take your time. You don't spook it.
"Eat more," she said, sliding half her remaining food to his side of the table. "You look like you've been surviving on whatever was within reach."
"Delivery, mostly," Max said.
"Thought so."
She flagged the owner for another round of drinks. The afternoon stretched warm and unhurried around them, and Max ate more than he'd planned, which was probably the entire point.
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