#wtos

TW: age gap, power imbalance, class dynamics, workplace dynamic, sexual tension, panic attack, referenced civilian casualties, referenced conflict, dissociation, mild self-harm, please yell at me if I missed one

A/N: I have a political theory background so I mildly geek out about Bourdieu in the end notes. You can skip if you'd like, but it's helpful to know his basic theory of taste as capital as this chapter delves deeper into the class differences between Maekar and reader. Enjoy! :)

✧─────✧

The wind comes off the water mean tonight.

Your phone says 8:28. You open your texts—nothing—and then your emails, which, okay, you're checking your emails when you just got off work, that's who you are now, that's fine. You close it. A notification from your bank app slides down from the top of the screen and you dismiss it without looking because you already know what it says and you don't need that right now on top of everything else.

8:29.

You haven't seen him since the doorframe. Since the bruise. You've been sitting with the specific texture of that moment for three days now—not the almost at your bedroom window, not the shared cigarette, not lock the door said roughly like it got away from him. Just his thumb brushing your arm. That barely-there pressure along the edge of what Lyonel left, the gentleness of it, which you were not prepared for from that man in that moment and have not been able to put down since. You've tried. You put it down and pick it back up. The bruise has gone yellow at the edges. You are still thinking about his touch.

A cab goes past. You don't look up.

8:31.

You open Instagram. Close it. Open your texts again as if something might have arrived in the last ninety seconds. Nothing. You put your phone in your bag and leave it there and look at the middle distance like a person who is simply standing outside in December for reasons that have nothing to do with watching the end of the street.

His car turns the corner.

You look up.

His car pulls up and the door opens before you reach it.

You get in. Warm. Immediately, completely warm, the cold sealing off behind you like it was never there, and the city reframes itself through the window glass into a different city—quieter, framed, something happening to other people out there.

He pulls into traffic without looking at you.

You look at your hands in your lap. You look at the bay coming into view between the buildings, black tonight and restless, the bridge lights breaking across it in long shuddering lines, and then it's gone, the buildings closing back over it, and the city is just the city again.

“Last week—” you start.

“We don't need to.”

“I was going to say thank you.”

“You already did.”

You look at him. His pale hair. The harsh line of his jaw. The particular quality of his not-looking, which you have learned is not the same as not-seeing—he has already looked, you understand, in the two seconds between you getting in and now, he has already done whatever assessing he was going to do, had clocked it and thought it best to move on, and you are sitting here having schooled your face for nothing. 

You look out the window. A group of people outside a bar, coats open despite the cold, laughing at something. The light changes. The city contracts and expands around you the way it does when you're moving through it fast and warm.

“Where are we going?”

“You'll see.”

You hate that you don't push. You hate that you've learned that you'll see from him is not a deflection but a promise, and that his promises have—thus far—been reliable. The seat warmer. The walk to the door. The overtime landing two hours after you did well. You hate that you've built a system of trust out of a man's smallest gestures and that the system works and that part of you wants to rail against it, wants to roll the window down and let the mean December air back in, and another part of you—the part that is warm down to your bones for the first time all day—wants to burrow so far inside this warmth he offers to you that no one can find you.

The car turns off the main road onto a side street you half-recognize—old stone, the buildings close together, the kind of street that was always expensive and never pretended otherwise. He slows. Parks in one clean movement, the kind that takes most people—you—three attempts and a lot of sighing, and he does it without looking, without adjusting, just—done, the car exactly where it needs to be, because of course it is. Because he is a man who simply does not fumble things, and you find this, in this specific moment, deeply annoying.

“Here,” he says.

You look out the window at the narrow building between two others. No sign. A black door, flush with the stone, a brass handle worn smooth from years of people who knew to find it. A single light above it.

“There's no sign,” you say.

“No.”

You look at him. He's already out of the car, coming around. Your door opens.

“How do people find it,” you say, getting out.

He doesn't answer, which is the answer, and the wind comes off Blackwater and hits you both and you pull your coat closed and he puts his hand on the small of your back—not guiding exactly, more like placing, like his hand belongs there—and steers you toward the door.

It's brief. Just across the pavement. The door opens before you reach it, which means someone was watching, and you step into warmth and low light and the smell of something that makes you close your eyes for exactly one second before you catch yourself.

You open your eyes. He's watching you do it.

You lift your chin and walk in like you've been here before. You don’t see the slight quirk of his mouth.

The man who takes your coats doesn't blink at him, which means he's been here enough times that his arriving is not news. You watch the handoff happen—the small nod of recognition, mutual, brief—and file it under things you don’t quite understand but know are important about him.

You give up your coat and feel immediately slightly less armored, standing in the warm dim of somewhere you've never been in a dress that is good but is not—you do this math in one fast ruthless second—this.

A corner table. Of course. Where else would the Anvil sit? Low light, white linen, private. The room is half-full of people who are not looking at the room because they don't need to, who have been having dinner in rooms like this since before you were worrying about what to do with your hands in rooms like this.

The menus arrive.

You open yours and it takes you a moment to understand what's wrong.

No prices.

You look at the beautiful card of it— the understated font, the smooth leather back—and there are no prices. You glance at his, just briefly, peripheral, and there are numbers on his. Small. Tucked to the right.

Not on yours.

You put the menu down. Pick it back up. They haven't appeared.

You consider saying something. You consider several things, run them quickly, discard them all. Saying there are no prices on mine marks you as someone for whom this is unusual, which is accurate, which is precisely the information you're not handing over tonight.

You read the menu. You pick something that doesn’t sound too expensive. You put the menu down.

“Well,” you say.

He looks at you over his. His gaze says you.

“This doesn't make us even,” you say. Your gaze says stop that.

“For Arvo's,” you clarify to fill his silence. You gesture, small, at the room—the candlelight, the linen, the sommelier materializing from somewhere with the specific silence of someone who has been doing this for thirty years. “You paid. So you’re not returning the favor or anything. That was just—you paying. And this—” You set the menu down. “This is just me accumulating more.”

The corner of his mouth does something and your stomach flips. “More what.”

“Debt.” You hold his gaze. “At some point I'm going to owe you something I can't pay back and we both know it.”

He considers your words for a moment—unhurried, the way he does everything. 

“You'll find a way,” he says.

Flat. Even. His voice at its most level and therefore its most dangerous. He picks his menu back up. Tilts his head slightly at something on the page. Like the conversation has concluded.

It hasn't concluded. It is going to be concluding for the rest of the evening, you understand, sitting across from him with the candlelight doing something to the sharp lines of his face and the menu without prices in your hands. Every time the sommelier appears and he orders without consulting you and somehow gets it right. It is going to be concluding in the car on the way home and in the elevator up to your flat and in the bath afterward with the water going cold.

You'll find a way.

You look at your menu. You have stopped seeing the words on it.

✧─────✧

The sommelier knows him. Of course. They exchange something brief about a vintage, a specific year, the sommelier tilting his head in that way of someone confirming a shared opinion, very good sir, and then a bottle arrives that you didn't see chosen and your glass is filled and Maekar looks at you—one eyebrow, a question—and you lift the glass. Salut.

You drink.

You’ve had wine described to you in the language of someone who has decided wine is their personality—the mineral notes, the terroir, the finish like wet stone or pencil shavings or some other bullshit you're supposed to want your drink to taste like. You have been unmoved by all of it. You drink wine. Sometimes it's nice. Sometimes it isn't. The result is the same. You get there anyway. 

You take another sip before you've decided to. You set your glass down and look at it for a moment like it's done something to you personally.

“That's,” you start.

“Mm.”

“That's actually—”

“Indeed.”

You look at him. He is not smug about it. That's the specific thing—he is not performing his own taste, not watching for your reaction, not explaining. He already knew what it tasted like and ordered it for that reason and is now drinking it and is elsewhere in his head. He doesn't need you to confirm it.

You think about the two-for-one wall at the Seven Kingdoms Express. The box wine with the little plastic tap that lives in the back of your fridge for emergencies. You drink another sip and decide you are not going to think about those things right now. They have no place here.

✧─────✧

Excuse yourself, you think, midway through the first course. Now.

The bathroom of this restaurant has cloth hand towels and a small dish of things—hand cream, perfume, breath mints. You take a towel. You look at yourself in the mirror. You look like someone who belongs here almost. The almost is doing a lot of work.

You take out your phone.

wikihow fine dining wine glass how to hold

You read it very fast with the focused efficiency of someone who has approximately ninety seconds before this becomes a thing. Stem between index finger and thumb. Never the bowl. The bowl warms the wine and you already know the wine doesn't need warming, the wine is perfect, at least the wine knows what it's doing. 

You put your phone away. Practice once. Look at yourself.

You go back to the table.

He doesn't look up immediately when you sit. You lift your glass—stem between index finger and thumb, bowl untouched—and take a sip and look out at the room with the composure of someone who has always known how to hold a wine glass in a restaurant like this.

When you look back he's watching you with that look. The one you can't fully read. The one that lives in the same register as the shared breath and the almost.

“What,” you say.

“Nothing,” he says.

You look away first.

✧─────✧

The second course arrives and it's three things on a plate arranged with the precision of someone who cares about negative space, and you eat it and it's extraordinary in the way that makes you understand, suddenly and completely, why people spend money on food. Not sustenance. Not even pleasure exactly. Something more like—being reminded that someone took time. That care went into this specifically. You eat it slowly and you don't make a sound but something in your face must do something because he's watching you again with that particular quality of his undivided attention.

“Good,” he says. Not a question.

“Shut up,” you say pleasantly, and take another bite.

Something happens at the corner of his mouth.

You keep eating.

✧─────✧

“Tell me something I don't know about you,” you say, somewhere in the third course, because the wine has been doing its work and the room is warm and you are feeling reckless in the specific way of someone who has been careful for a very long time.

He looks at you. Leans back. Tilts his head, considering. “That's a broad brief.”

“You can narrow it.”

He picks up his glass. Turns it once. “I used to fly,” he says. “Light aircraft, mostly. Had a commercial license.” A pause. “I liked it.”

The way he says it—I liked it—simple, unguarded, the three words sitting there without qualification, and you understand that this is not nothing, that from him this is practically an aria.

You think about this. Him younger, in a cockpit somewhere, the specific solitude of altitude, the city reduced to a grid of light below. It fits and it doesn't fit, and the paradox is somehow endearing. “Why’d you stop?”

“Daeron was born.” He takes a sip. “Dyanna asked me to.” He says it without inflection. No resentment, no warmth. Just—she asked, and he stopped, and that's the architecture of that.

Dyanna.

The name sits in the air between you and the candle flame doesn't move and you take a sip of your wine and think about how to make your face do nothing.

“She didn't like it?”

“She didn't like the odds.” He looks at something past your shoulder—not evasive, just going somewhere internally, a man accessing something he doesn't usually access. “Said she hadn't signed up to wait for a phone call.” There’s a movement in his jaw. 

You think about a woman making that argument. Standing somewhere in a house that must have been very large, with her husband's flight logs on the table, saying I didn't sign up for this. You think about four boys who were smaller then, who waited for their father to come home.

You think about how she had the standing to ask and he stopped.

“Did you resent it?”

He looks at you. The question has surprised him—barely, just the flicker of it. “No.”

“Just like that.”

“She was right about the odds.” He picks up his fork. “Some things aren't worth the risk when you have something to lose.”

You hear it, unspoken. The past tense of it. Had. Something to lose. The divorce papers and the boys every other weekend and the ring that left a scuff on a breakroom chair.

The realization lands somewhere below your sternum and stays there. You are jealous of a woman you have never met for a marriage that is already over.

This is not a proportionate response. You know this. You take another sip of wine and look at the room and think about how Dyanna got the version of him that stopped flying because she asked. You are getting the version that has already decided what he's willing to give up and for whom and it is a shorter list now than it was then and you are somewhere on it in a position you haven't been told.

“What,” he says, because your face did something.

“Nothing,” you shrug.

He looks at you the way he looks at things he doesn't believe. Doesn't push.

You pick up your fork.

✧─────✧

The dessert course arrives and he tells you he doesn't have a sweet tooth, which you file alongside the instant noodles and the cigarette case and the flying—the small private inventory of who he is when no one is looking. He ordered it anyway. You'll want it, he said, which is not the same as asking.

It's chocolate. Dark, rich, almost bitter, something glossy on top you can't identify and don't need to. You take a bite and your eyes close—just for a second, involuntary—and you make a sound you were absolutely not planning on making.

“Oh fuck,” you say, very quietly, to the plate. Take another bite.

You look up and he's watching you do this.

“Don't.”

“I'm not doing anything.”

“You're watching me eat.”

“You're making it difficult not to.”

You take another bite. A small amount ends up at the corner of your mouth, which you are in the process of addressing when he reaches across—unhurried, completely calm—and takes it with his thumb. Brings it to his own mouth.

You watch him do this.

You watch him do this and your brain produces absolutely nothing useful—no words, no deflection, no wry comment to slide between you and the moment like it might help. Just the candle. The white linen. His eyes on yours, steady and deliberate, the way he does everything, like he made the decision three moves ago and what you're watching now is just the execution. Your mouth is dry. You reach for your wine and miss it slightly and correct and hope he didn't see that.

He saw that.

He picks up his own glass.

“The chocolate,” he says, “is good.”

You look at your plate.

“Mhm,” is all you can get out.

You eat the rest of the dessert with great concentration. When the plate is cleared you look up at the server and say, perfectly normally, “Please send my compliments to the chef.” A beat. “Tell Dunk I said hi.”

The server smiles, nods, and goes.

Maekar looks at you.

“Dunk,” he says. A note of displeasure embedded somewhere in that single syllable.

“Tanselle's boyfriend.” You fold your napkin. “He's the pastry chef here.”

Something moves across his face. He looks at the empty dessert plate, scraped clean. Back at you. The recalculation happening quickly, privately, filed before you've finished watching it happen. “You knew,” he says.

“That you were bringing me here? No.” You meet his eyes. “That Dunk works here? Yes.”

“And you said nothing.”

“You didn't ask.”

He looks at you for a moment. The corner of his mouth. The thing that is not quite a smile and lives in the same neighbourhood. “Hm,” he says.

“He's very good,” you say. “You should tell him.”

Maekar picks up his wine. “I don't tell people they're good at their jobs.”

“You told me.”

He looks at you and says nothing and you look back and say nothing.

You did well. Three words in an empty conference room. You understand now, sitting across from him in candlelight, that you have been running on those three words for weeks. That you have been warming yourself on them the way you warm your hands on a mug. That should be a problem for you, but you find, at this moment, it isn’t.

And then the kitchen door swings open.

Dunk is still in his whites, a dish towel over his shoulder, flour on his forearm and forehead in a way that suggests the evening has been chaos for him. He's scanning the room for whoever sent the compliments and when he finds you his face does the thing it always does—that specific uncomplicated warmth, no artifice in it, just Dunk, exactly as advertised.

“No,” he says, pointing at you across the restaurant.

You smile—a genuine one—and wave.

He crosses the room with the particular movement of a very large person who has never once been self-conscious about taking up space and picks you up. Not a side hug. Not a brief professional acknowledgement. He picks you up, both arms, lifts you clear off the ground for one second the way he always does because he thinks it's funny and it is, it's always funny, and you laugh despite yourself—a real one, surprised out of you—and he sets you back down and holds you at arm's length and looks at you with that expression Tanselle calls his golden retriever face.

“What are you doing here? Elle didn’t mention anything about—” He looks delighted and confused in equal measure, and then his eyes go past your shoulder to the table, to Maekar, and the delighted confusion does something more complicated. He straightens. “Oh.”

“Dunk,” you say, with great composure, “this is—”

“Mr. Targaryen.” He extends his hand. Flour still on his forearm. “Sir.”

Maekar looks at the hand. Shakes it. “The chocolate soufflé was exceptional,” he says. Flat. Factual. The highest compliment in his register.

Dunk blinks. Looks at you. Looks back at Maekar. “Thank you,” he says, and means it, the earnestness of him filling the space between them, and Maekar looks at him for a moment with the assessing quality he brings to everything, the rapid filing, and then nods once.

“Elle's going to lose her mind,” he says, grinning back at you, which is not something you needed Maekar to hear, and then he's gone, back through the kitchen door, the whites disappearing into the light beyond it.

You turn back to the table.

Maekar is looking at you with an expression you have not seen before—not the slip of something you couldn’t quite decode from earlier, something quieter than that. He watched you get picked up by a man in kitchen whites who’s dating your best friend and calls you some silly nickname from some silly story, who exists in the same world you come from, like you belong to a whole world that has nothing to do with fourteen floors and white linen and menus without prices, and something in that look tells you he is aware, in a way he perhaps wasn't before, of the specific distance between where you came from and where you're sitting right now. It feels good that it’s not just you sitting with that awareness. 

You pick up your wine.

“He's Tanselle's,” you say. Unnecessarily.

“I know,” he says.

The bill doesn't arrive. It's simply handled—somewhere behind you, invisible, the way things are managed in his world. You put your arms into your coat when he holds it out for you and the pair of you walk out into the wind.

✧─────✧

In the car the city recomposes itself around you—Blackwater Bay ink-dark and restless beyond the embankment, the towers lit up floor by floor, the wind doing something violent to the trees along the waterfront, bending them sideways and letting them go.

Your phone buzzes.

Tanselle. Not a call—a screenshot from the King’s Landing Times. BLACKFYRE ADVANCE: EASTERN CORRIDOR CIVILIAN EVACUATIONS WIDEN. Beneath it a map, the sectors marked in red, and she's circled one in the screenshot with her finger, a rough unsteady circle.

The warmth of the evening evaporates. Just like that—the chocolate, the wine, the thumb at the corner of your mouth, you'll find a way—all of it gone, the temperature of the car dropping several degrees in the space of a breath that you don't quite finish.

You know that sector. You know exactly where that sector is in relation to your dad’s cabin. You look at the map until the red stops meaning anything and starts meaning everything.

“What,” he says. He's watching the road. He read your face from his peripheral vision.

You turn the phone so he can see the screen.

He looks. Once. His jaw does something—that specific tell, the barely-there tightening—and then nothing. The architecture of his face returning to its defaults.

“Your father,” he says.

“It’s so close.”

He says nothing. He takes the next turn and pulls into a quieter street and puts the car in park and holds out his hand.

You look at it, confused.

“Your phone.”

You give it to him, still confused. He dials. Hands it back.

Your father picks up on the second ring. Oh.

Hello, love. The specific frequency of him, the thing that lives in your chest. You all right?

You look out the windscreen at the street. A cat crossing. A window with the light on, someone moving behind the glass. “Are you? I saw something,” you say. “On the news.”

Oh, that. The tone he uses. The one that means he's already decided not to worry and would like you to agree. They're saying a lot of things.

“Dad.”

The generator's holding. Had a thrush at the feeder again this morning—both days now, same time, I think she's nesting in the east eave—

“Dad.” Your voice does a thing. You press your fingers to your mouth and look at the cat which has stopped in the middle of the road and is looking at something you can't see.

I know, love. Softer now. Underneath the deflection, the man who knows the difference between your voices. I know. But I know this land, all right? I'll know before anyone else knows.

The cat moves on.

“Okay,” you say. Your voice is mostly right.

Are you eating?

“I just had dinner.”

Good. A pause, the warm kind. I love you. Don't work too hard.

You hang up.

The car is very quiet. Outside the wind moves through the trees on the embankment, the bare branches of them. Maekar has not said anything. He is sitting with his hands on the wheel and the engine idling and the particular quality of his stillness that is not passive—he is sitting with it, you understand. Whatever this is.

“I'll make some calls,” he says, and the spiral stops before it starts.

You turn to look at him.

“In the morning,” he says. “I have contacts in the evacuation authority. I can find out exactly which sectors, what the timeline looks like.” He says it the way he says everything—flat, factual, already decided. “It's not nothing. But it may not be as close as the article suggests.”

You look at him for a long time.

“Why?” 

He looks at you. The question has surprised him—not visibly, just the quality of the pause.

“Why would you do that?”

He doesn't answer immediately. He looks at the windscreen. Something moves across his face that is there and gone before you can name it.

“Give me your phone,” he says.

You don’t even think about it. You unlock it. Hand it over. He opens the contacts and types something and hands it back.

Maekar. His name. A number underneath it that is not the VSG switchboard, not Keyne's administrative line, not anything you've called before. A number that exists outside the building, outside the professional architecture of what you are to each other on paper.

“In case of emergency,” he says. “After last week.”

You look at the contact. At his name in your phone between your dentist and Tanselle. The most ordinary and extraordinary thing.

“Thank you,” you say and mean it.

He pulls back onto the road. The city opens up around you, the wind pushing a plastic bag up against the embankment wall, Blackwater Rush running dark and fast between the bridges. You watch it and think about your father's voice and the thrush in the eave and the sectors listed in the news article and I'll make some calls and you'll find a way and wonder how the chocolate tasted on his thumb when he brought it to his own mouth.

You are accruing debt in currencies you don't have names for.

The car is very warm.

✧─────✧

The document lands on your desk at nine-fourteen the next morning.

Not dramatically—nothing in this building announces itself dramatically, VSG does not do dramatics, VSG does distribution models and supply chain logistics and quarterly projections and the drama happens somewhere else, in a valley corridor, in a sector adjacent to where your father is watching a thrush build her nest. The document arrives in your email as an attachment to something routine, cc'd, the kind of thing that comes through forty times a day, and you almost don't open it.

You open it.

It takes you three minutes to understand what you're looking at. Then another two to be sure. Then you sit for a long moment with your hands flat on the desk and the words on the screen and the specific interior sensation of a floor giving way slowly, not all at once, just—the gradual understanding that the thing you were standing on was not solid.

Your model. Your numbers. The risk assessment you built for the eastern corridor—the one you weighted toward caution, deliberately, thinking about the valley and the river and a cabin forty miles from the nearest evacuation zone—ran through another team, reinterpreted, the caution inverted. Your conservative margin used as a ceiling instead of a floor. The contested route you flagged—the one you said ten years is too long a bet about, in a car, in November, watching his hands on the wheel—now the backbone of a deployment schedule.

And in the appendix, in a font slightly smaller than everything else, a civilian impact projection.

A number.

You look at the number. You think about how many people live inside a number. Whether they have generators. Whether anyone is tracking the thrush at their feeders.

You scroll to the authorization chain.

His name.

You read it twice. The letters don't rearrange.

You close your laptop. Open it again. The document is still there.

You pick up your bag. Walk to the elevator. Press fourteen.

✧─────✧

The stairwell.

You don't plan it—the elevator doors open on fourteen and the corridor stretches ahead of you and Keyne's desk is at the end of it and his office beyond that and you turn left instead, through the fire door, and the cold hits you and the concrete is grey and industrial and has nothing to do with white linen or candlelight or his name in your phone, and you sit down on the steps and put both hands over your mouth.

Your chest won't open.

You know what this is. Knowing doesn't give you back your breath. The specific physical treachery of it—the ringing, the walls doing something at the edges of your vision, the total override of a body that has received too much and is managing it badly. You press your back against the wall and your knees to your chest and you breathe through your nose, out through your mouth, the thing Tanselle taught you, four counts and four counts and it doesn't work and then slowly, incrementally, it works a little.

You think about the number in the appendix.

You think about your phrase—the contested nature of the corridor infrastructure—embedded in a document that uses it to justify a deployment timeline. Your words. In someone else's argument. Like finding your handwriting on a letter you didn't send.

You think: I weighted it toward caution.

You think: it didn't matter that I weighted it toward caution.

You think: his name is on the authorization.

Your phone is already in your hand. Your father's contact already on screen. It rings twice.

Hello, love.

You open your mouth.

Nothing comes out.

A pause. The television going quieter in the background—him reaching for the remote, you know the sound of it. He knows the sound of your silences, all of them, the specific tone of this one.

He starts talking.

The thrush, he says. Back this morning. He's been leaving seed on the sill, which is probably not what you're supposed to do, probably makes them dependent, but she keeps coming back so he's going to keep doing it. Funny little thing. Cocks her head at him like she's deciding whether or not he’s a friend. 

You breathe.

Still there? he asks.

“I'm here,” you say. Mostly.

Good, he says. Good.

“I love you,” you say before you hang up. Sit for another moment with the concrete and the fluorescent light. Then your phone buzzes.

Keyne. Administrative. Crisp.

Mr. Targaryen requests your presence at your earliest convenience.

You look at this for a long time.

You stand up. You straighten your jacket. You give yourself eight more seconds in the stairwell. You breathe through your nose and out through your mouth, four counts and four counts.

Your earliest convenience is now.

Your earliest convenience is absolutely furious.

✧─────✧

You don't knock.

His office opens and you cross it and put the printed document on his desk—your copy, the authorization chain visible, his name at the bottom of it—and you step back and you wait.

He looks at it. His face does nothing. This specific blankness—the processing running somewhere behind his eyes that you don't have access to—is the thing that makes it worse, that makes the anger hotter, the fact that he is looking at what you've put in front of him with the same expression he brings to everything, like it's information and information is neutral and there is no register in him for what it costs someone else to receive it.

“You authorized this,” you demand.

He looks up. “Sit—”

“You authorized it”

“Sit down—”

You shove him.

Both hands, flat against his chest, and he's a large man and doesn't move much—half a step, maybe, the chair behind him scraping slightly—but the gesture comes out of you before you've decided to make it and the room goes absolutely still. Your hands are against his sternum. You can feel him breathing.

You look at your hands.

You step back. They're shaking.

He looks at them. Then at your face. He takes in everything—the tear tracks you don't remember making, the color high on your cheeks, the shaking you can't stop—and his expression shifts into something that is not the blankness, something that is harder to defend against because it is attention, specific and total and entirely on you.

He comes around the desk.

You step back.

He keeps coming.

Your back finds the wall and he doesn't stop—not aggressive, just not stopping, the physics of a man who has decided that the next several minutes are going to go differently—and his hands find your hips. Both of them. The pressure of it immediate and specific, a grip that is not gentle and not harsh, something more controlled than either, and you can feel through the fabric of your clothes exactly how large his hands are and how little effort this is for him and you hate how much it steadies you. You hate how instantly it works.

The city behind him through the floor-to-ceiling glass. The whole grey winter of it.

“My report,” you say. Your voice is not as steady as you want it to be. “They used my report. There's a civilian projection in the appendix—”

“I know what's in the appendix.”

The flatness of it. Undeflected. Not that's not what your report says or the contract team interpreted—just I know, clean and direct, and it's somehow worse than a defense would be because it leaves you nowhere to push.

“There's a number,” you say. “In the appendix. Someone looked at that number and signed off.”

His jaw tightens. The barely-visible tell.

“Those are my numbers,” you say. “I wrote those numbers and someone used them to—”

“I know.” Quieter. His hands on your hips shift—not loosening, changing quality, the thumbs finding the jut of bone and staying there. It takes more than you care to admit not to be distracted by this. “I know it was your analysis. And I know what the contract team did with it and I know it's not what you wrote.”

“Then why—”

“Because there are things in motion,” he says, low, the register that is the opposite of calm, “that were in motion before your brief, before you were at VSG, before—” He stops. Something crosses his face. “The authorization was for the contract framework. Not for the specific deployment. What the operational team did with your model—” He stops again.

You look at him. There is a small, treacherous bloom of something in your chest that you don't want and can't stop—the wanting to believe him, the wanting to trust him, which is its own kind of exposure.

“Is that true?”

He meets your eyes. “Yes.”

“But your name is still on it.”

“Yes.”

You look at his face—the sharp lines of it, the forty-eight years of it, the near-violet of his eyes in the flat winter light—and you are trying to find the lie and you cannot find it and you don't know if that means there isn't one or if he is simply that good.

“My dad,” you say.

Something shifts in him. Minute. The most unguarded he's been in daylight.

“The sectors in the article,” you say. “The deployment timeline. If the corridor moves—”

“It won't get to your father.”

“You can't know that.”

“It won't get that far.” His voice drops further. The hands on your hips are steadier than anything in the room. “The evacuation protocols have a buffer. The corridor is contested but it's not—I have people watching the movement. It's not going to reach that far west. Not in any timeline that gives us cause for—”

“Promise me.”

You hear yourself say it. You know how it sounds. You don't take it back.

He looks at you for a long time. The city behind him. His hands on your hips and your back against his wall and something between you that is not just anger anymore, that has never been just anger, that has been building since yours at the bottom of an email and the seat warmer on before you open the door and the aspirin on the wrong bedside table.

His head tilts. A degree. Something in his eyes.

“And what do I get,” he says.

Not a joke. The room knows it's not a joke. You know—you have learned him, his registers, the specific frequencies of how he means things—and this is him naming it. The transaction. I'll make some calls. You'll find a way. What do I get. The same sentence in three different languages.

“Promise me first,” you say.

A beat. Long enough that you can hear the building around you—the distant sound of the floor below, the heating, the city beyond the glass.

“It won't reach him,” he says. “You have my word.”

You believe him.

You will spend a long time afterward thinking about why you believe him—why this man, with his name on this document, with his hands on your body like it’s an extension of his, should be the thing your body has decided to trust. You won't arrive at an answer that satisfies you. You'll believe him anyway. You're already believing him. It's already done.

His hands have loosened. Not gone—loosened, the grip becomes something else, his thumbs moving once against your hips, barely, almost involuntary, and you feel it travel. Your lips part. His eyes track the movement and stay there for one long moment and something in his jaw tightens almost imperceptibly and the air between you does something it hasn't done before, something with actual weight to it.

His phone rings.

Neither of you moves.

It rings again. He reaches into his inside pocket without stepping back—without taking his hands off you, one hand staying at your hip while the other finds his phone, and you feel the shift of it, the warmth of his palm through the fabric—and he looks at the screen.

His face does a thing.

Unguarded. Quick, involuntary, the half-second before he catches it—and in that half-second you see something you have not seen before, something that lives underneath all of it, the efficiency and the blankness and the authorization chain and what do I get—something that is just a man who loves someone and finds it difficult and is now holding his phone with his other hand still on your hip.

He answers.

“Daeron.”

You have heard him in board meetings and in breakrooms, in cars and across restaurant tables, in your doorway saying lock the door like it got away from him. You have not heard this. The specific register of a father answering—not soft exactly, more undefended, the way a face looks when it stops performing for a moment and is just a face. The architecture of him still there but something load-bearing removed, and what's left is just a man on the phone with his son, and the son is saying something you can't fully hear, and Maekar listens, and then he closes his eyes for just a moment.

His hand is still on your hip.

You should move. You don't move.

You stand against his office wall and listen to him be a father—yes, I saw it. I know. You don't need to worry about that—and the tinny shape of a boy's voice on the other end, urgent, seventeen years old and worried, and Maekar listening with the phone to his ear and his hand a steady weight at your hip and his jaw doing the thing, the barely-visible tightening, and you think about four boys whose faces you've never seen and a woman named Dyanna who asked him to stop flying and he stopped and a ring that left a scuff on a breakroom chair.

“Go back to class, Daeron.” A pause, something in it. “I'll call you tonight.”

He hangs up.

Stands with his back half-turned for a moment, phone still in his hand. And then—you're not sure he knows he's doing it—his hand moves. The one still at your hip. His thumb traces a small absentminded arc against the fabric there, once, twice, the unconscious seeking of something solid, and you go very still because you understand, without being told, that this has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the boy on the other end of that call, and that he has no idea he's doing it, and that you are not going to move or speak or do anything that might make him aware.

Then he turns.

You look at each other.

His hand drops from your hip. The absence of it arrives immediately, a specific cold where the warmth was, and you are absolutely not going to think about that.

He picks up his pen. Looks at his desk. The conversation is over—not ended badly, just over, the way his conversations end, a door that was open briefly and is now closed. What's on the other side of it is not yours to know.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

You pick up your folder and go.

✧─────✧

The envelope is on your desk when you get back from—whatever the fuck that was.

VSG letterhead. Your name in Keyne's handwriting. You stand and look at it for a moment before you touch it, the way you look at things you already know are going to cost you something.

Inside: an invitation. Thick card stock, the kind that has weight to it. A year-end gala. Government contractors, politicians, investors, the kind of room where the decisions get made—the real room, the one behind the board meetings, the one you have never been anywhere near. Last week of December. Black tie.

And at the top:

Mr. Maekar Targaryen and Guest.

You read it again.

And Guest.

Not your name in the capacity of junior analyst, not a VSG staff invitation, not anything that has to do with your desk on nine or your access badge or the brief open on your laptop. His guest. His specifically. The plus-one on an invitation to a room full of people who make decisions about corridors and supply lines and civilian buffers deemed acceptable over drinks, and you are going because he has decided you are going, because you are—and you are only now understanding the full weight of this—his.

You turn the invitation over. Turn it back.

This existed at dinner last night. While you were in the bathroom reading wikihow fine dining wine glass on your phone, this was already printed. While you were following his lead on everything, watching him taste the chocolate off his thumb, believing the promise in his office—while all of that was happening, this was already done. Before you had agreed to anything, before the stairwell, before his hands on your hips, before what do I get.

You never answered him, you realize. 

You think about the seat warmer on before you open the door.

You think: he decided before you even walked through the door.

You put the invitation back in the envelope. Put the envelope in your bag. Open your laptop. The Myrish brief is still there, cursor blinking, patient and indifferent, and you look at it for a moment and then you begin to type because there is nothing else to do with any of this, nowhere to put it, no register that fits.

You get on with your afternoon.

You are extremely professional about it.

✧─────✧

The bath is too hot and you get in anyway because the bite of it is something to feel that isn't the day.

Tanselle is out—gone somewhere with Dunk, the two of them together warm and uncomplicated and entirely out of reach from where you are. The flat settles into itself. You move through the dark by memory, don't turn the bathroom light on, just the water, just the steam rising and then the quiet when the taps stop.

You lie back.

The ceiling above the east corner is doing the thing—the paint lifting at the seam, the crack that follows the line of the original plaster. You've been meaning to report it since August. You look at it and think about the number in the appendix. You think about your phrase in someone else's document. You think about Daeron's voice on the phone, small and fast, and Maekar’s hand still on your hip while he answered. You think about what do I get and you have my word and the way believing him felt like stepping onto something that might hold. He decided before you even walked through the door.

The water turns tepid. You don't get out.

You think about his hands.

Not abstractly. You are done with abstractly. The specific weight of them at your hips, the controlled pressure, the way steadiness from him costs you something even as it gives you something in return. The chocolate. His thumb at your lips. The way his attention feels—heady, specific, his eyes only on you, and the shameful want for them to stay there, to never move, to have that be a thing you can keep for yourself. The wall at your back and the city behind him and the danger of him, which is nothing like Lyonel, which requires a different word entirely—something more patient, more total, the danger of a man who has already decided and is simply waiting for you to catch up.

Your hand finds your throat. Your other hand finds its place inside you.

You think about his hands and their size and what it would mean to have them there instead, and you know what you're doing. You are lucid the way you are always lucid, the self-knowledge doesn't help, it never helps, it just means you watch yourself do it. The water warm still from your own heat. Your movements fast and harsh. You add pressure to your neck, but it’s not nearly enough. The water moves. Your breath is the only sound. The ceiling. The dark. The black spots in the corner of your vision. It's too much and not enough and—

A drop of red blooms in the water.

You watch it. The way it opens, slow, spreading outward from itself, the water taking it and incorporating it until the change is invisible and the water is just slightly different and you are lying in that difference looking at the ceiling.

The hollow that comes after is its own specific texture. Not emptiness—more like a room after everyone has left, still holding the shape of what was there. You lie in the cooling water and feel the edges of yourself returning, the specific return of a body to itself after it's been somewhere else for a while.

You think: I am going to the gala.

You think about a restaurant with no sign on a side street in December. A menu without prices. A man who ordered the right thing without asking and was right.

You say his name.

Quiet. To the ceiling. To no one.

Maekar.

You say it again. The shape of it. The weight of it in your mouth.

The water is cold before you get out.

Stand at the mirror. Look at yourself for a long time—at the woman who read wikihow wine glass in a restaurant bathroom and came out and held it correctly and ate everything he ordered, who believed his promise, who brought his invitation home in her bag, who is going to do it all again.

You look at her.

You never turned the light on.

You go to bed.

You lie in the dark and think about a thrush building her nest in an eave forty miles from an evacuation zone.

You lie there a long time thinking about it.

✧─────✧

A/N: Bourdieu's argument in Distinction was simple and brutal: taste is not personal. It is inherited as a form of capital—social, cultural, economic. What you know how to order, how to hold, how to eat, how to sit in a room like this one—these are not preferences. They are coordinates. They locate you. And the cruelest part is that the people who have it don't know they have it. It lives in the body, not the mind. You cannot read your way into it. You cannot want your way into it.

You can read wikihow in a restaurant bathroom and come out holding your glass correctly.