I poured water over leaves that looked like they remembered rain. The mug warmed my hands, and a low fog lifted from the surface between us—two small clouds that couldn’t decide which of our faces to hide. The clinic’s algae-lit glass washed the room the color of diluted mint. Far off, through the sealed window, I heard drones scaling the air like cicadas practicing for summer court. The hurricane barrier’s arches cut the sky into gray-blue ribs; under them, the public park held its little blind pockets of shadow where cameras respect design more than intent.
We’d dragged two chairs to a narrow table that once held brochures for resilience festivals—paper confetti promising healing through street music and donation links. The brochures were gone, replaced by a corkboard of ride codes and legal clinics. I breathed and tasted tannin, iodine, and the faint sweetness of disposable cups. Elias reached for his mug and didn’t drink yet. I recognized the discipline: don’t reward a question with the ritual until the truth has a place to sit.
“We have five minutes,” I said. “Then the world knocks again.”
He nodded. The algae glow left shallow hollows under his eyes. He had taken cameras and questions and then stood between investors and conscience with his own name. His hands were steady, but the skin over his knuckles had the matte look of new scrapes. I set my forearms on the table and took responsibility like weight.
“I used you,” I said.
The steam rose like a boundary we could choose to pierce. I didn’t let myself catalogue his micro-reactions; I made myself look as if nothing could be stolen by gaze anymore.
“The first rooftop kiss was a trigger,” I said, keeping my voice level. “I had a microtransmitter in the lip balm and a tiny antenna against my molar. I needed proximity to lift badge timings and locate the panic-shaft’s secondary lock. The second kiss opened a geofence. The third one was for cameras on the adjacent high-rise. I timed them to your breathing because I knew you’d hold still for me.”
His fingers curled around porcelain. The cup’s thin ceramic clicked softly against the table. Outside, a gull barked toward the river, impatient for fries and human folly.
“I told myself it was my job,” I said. “Protection demands closeness. Closeness destroys cover. I sold the contradiction back to myself at cost.”
He lifted the mug and blew across the surface, soft, like he was cooling words he hadn’t chosen yet. We let the silence stretch until it began to feel like rope I could climb instead of a cord I might hang from.
“I knew,” he said.
Tea moved toward heat in my throat. I let my eyes do the reflex flick—shoulder, door, window, exits—and then I brought them back to his face. “How much?” I asked.
“Enough,” he said. “The mouthfeel on that balm wasn’t plain. The timing was musical. You kissed me when the cameras would drink the most. You apologized to corners but not to me.” He let a note of humor in, spent like coin. “I’m not good at board fights, but I can read a metronome.”
Shame slid through me like cold on a dock at dawn. I set the cup down because my hands had learned not to shake in public, and this was not public, so they were tempted.
“And I wanted it anyway,” he said, and the steam made a small ghost between us as if to seal the admission. “Not the theft. The part where you aimed heat at me and we both got warm.”
The words landed the way clean hits land: not painful yet, but changing the body’s math. I found an inch of smile because I’m built for problem sets and this one was solvable if I didn’t cheat.
“Then I need to say it out loud,” I said. “I crossed the line where tactic becomes wish. I kept going because I told myself I could do both—love and leverage—but the ledger starts to lie once you’re in both columns.”
He reached across the fog and rested two fingers on the table between mine. Not touching. Offering a place. The algae light made our skin look like we belonged to the same species for once.
“I want the truth to hurt less than the lie,” he said.
“We have court filings to make sure the truth hurts the right people,” I said, automatic, because my body knows the mission before my mouth. I stopped and recalibrated. “I’m sorry for using you. I am not sorry for wanting you. I am sorry for not telling you where the line moved.”
He took a sip, finally. The swallow showed in his throat, small. “I’m planning to step down,” he said, voice low. “Temporarily. I’ll testify as a citizen, not an officer. The independent board will run the governance overhaul. I’ll keep my name on the fund, but I won’t sign policy until the prosecutor finishes. I want what I say under oath to be clean.”
I looked at him and felt pride arrive without permission. “You’ll give up the levers,” I said, testing the grief in it.
“I’ll give up the levers,” he said. “I am tired of being the machine that excuses the machine.” He put the mug down and let his hand flatten, a sign I’d seen in him when he sealed a decision. “I’m not stepping down from us.”
The word us rang and reassured and scared me in ways a hallway choke never has. The tide clock in my head clicked its three-minute lie. The real tide kept doing what it does: rising in the gaps and withdrawing where the slope allows. I leaned in an inch.
“No cover,” I said. “No pretend dates for optics, no NDAs for intimacy, no surveillance games. If we’re doing this, we do it in the open with each other and closed to cameras where we can. We risk fewer assets by claiming the thing instead of hiding it.”
“And when it becomes leverage?” he asked, honest enough to be useful.
“Then I take responsibility for designing something that can’t be used,” I said. “We set our rules. We don’t give away video people can mis-edit into harm. We use the arches when we need blind sky, not to scheme but to breathe. We don’t weaponize tenderness.”
The drones outside adjusted altitude, a new chorus pressing through glass. Somewhere in the hall, a metal cart rolled and a nurse laughed quietly, the sound of a human who had seen enough blood for the week. The clinic smelled like lemon cleaner and old coffee and rayon scrubs that had met too many bodies.
He reached for my hand. This time he didn’t stop in the space between. His palm was warm and dry, and the scar at the base of his thumb—the one he got when a lab door bit him—felt like a signature. I kept my grip light because I am used to breakaway holds, and I didn’t want to practice escape on the day I was choosing to stay.
“I need context,” he said. “Just one piece. Was any kiss only a kiss?”
“The one after the panic-shaft jam,” I said. “No transmitter. No cameras that I knew of. I was trying to stop your mouth from shaking.”
He closed his eyes and breathed once, quick. “That one carried me through two board calls,” he said, almost laughing. “That one, and your voice in the river.”
I let my thumb move—a small stroke over the ridge of bone that counts as affection in my language. The shame unhooked from my ribs. It didn’t flee; it sat, behaved, like a trained animal that knows it can’t lead anymore.
“Elias,” I said, and my own name for him, rare and daytime-clear, sounded new.
“Mara,” he said, and my name did something to the steam that no physics textbook covers.
We sat with the tea until the fog thinned to wisps that clung to the edges and then to nothing. Outside, the arches held their blind crescents for anyone who needed to exist without being decoded. Couples in Harbour Eleven date inside NDAs; our city turns intimacy into tax-deductible PR until you sign a form that says you agree. Dock workers barter favors; biotech elites barter optics. We were resigning from both markets.
“I have to read letters tonight,” I said. “Families wrote them at the clinic table. We promised a vigil that wasn’t a leak by another name.”
“I’ll carry the chairs,” he said.
“You’ll stand down,” I said, and I couldn’t help it—I reached up and touched his cheekbone with two fingers, counting the stability like a carpenter. “You’ll say no to cameras and yes to listening.”
“Yes,” he said, simple.
We laid out the rules like I lay out gear before an operation. I would keep my security work with open contracts only. He would route all direct contact with complainants through the advocates so no one could claim pressure. We would meet under Arch Seven when we needed private air, not to hide, but to anchor. We would not kiss on roofs we didn’t control. We would let the algae wall settle our breath and remember that machines can’t grade what you keep off their sensors.
“And if we argue?” he asked.
“Then we tell the tide clock,” I said. “We give it three minutes’ lie to cool us down before we answer each other.”
He glanced at the window, at the piling where the clock face was a polite circle under a flash of gull. “You trust that clock?”
“I trust knowing it lies,” I said. “Everyone plans. No one is truly ready. We honor the gap.”
He leaned across the little table, and I met him halfway. The kiss we made there didn’t unlock any doors or tug any feeds. It didn’t compensate for a lack of oxygen or erase triage lists. It felt like placing a hand on a tide map and saying here.
When we parted, he let his forehead rest against mine for a count of two. We didn’t stay in that posture long enough to make it a photograph in anyone’s head.
“I’m writing a resignation letter to the board,” he said, softer. “Temporary. Effective at the close of business. I’ll cite conflicts, good governance, and the need to testify without institutional privilege. I’ll name the independent board as acting authority.”
“Write it now,” I said. “Send it before a lawyer edits the courage out of it.”
He laughed, a quiet huff that put warmth into the algae light. “Come with me while I draft it?”
“I will,” I said. “Then we’ll go hear letters.”
The door clicked open a notch before I reached for the handle. June leaned in, eyebrows up, tablet under her arm like a baby. “Sorry to breach sanctum,” she said, reading the tea and the air. “Two things. One: investor statements keep tilting toward reform; somebody even called it ‘ethically accretive,’ which I need to bleach out of my head. Two: a ping on our liaison.”
“Where,” I said, and my voice didn’t lose warmth; it learned to stand while holding it.
“Hurricane barrier,” she said. “Under the arches. Blind zone between Seven and Eight. He’s not dumb; he’s persuaded he is. He’s got company.”
Elias set his mug down like an answer. I stood. The steam between us thinned to a curl and vanished.
“We’re good?” he asked, not to delay, but to close a loop that needed closing.
I held his gaze the way you hold a line in rough water. “We’re trying for real,” I said. “No cover.”
“Then let’s go do the part where we keep other people alive long enough to have something real to try for,” he said.
We moved toward the hall. The clinic’s hum folded around us—vent fans, quiet wheels, a distant lullaby of a volunteer strumming a guitar in a chair. I slid my hand into his for three steps, then let go before the corridor turned. The algae-lit glass changed color as a cloud crossed—green to pewter and back. Outside, the tide clock clicked its three-minute future into place, and I chose to be ready in the present.
“Arch Seven,” I told June, and the words tasted like tea and decision. “Text the steward. We’ll need the favor he said he was saving.”
“Already done,” she said.
I opened the door to the stairwell and let the iodine wind find me, clean and unashamed. Somewhere above, rotors thrummed, patient as insects and twice as persistent. I thought of the rules we’d just wrote, of letters waiting by votive light, and of a man who still thought leverage was a person you could carry. Tender hope stayed in my pocket like a stone I could hold when it got loud again. The rest would be decided under the arches.