The man at the café was completely ordinary.

This was, in retrospect, what made the situation interesting. He was not dramatically handsome. He was not aggressively charming. He was simply a tall man in a navy sweater who glanced at Elowen while she was waiting for her coffee and then, because she had looked up at the wrong moment and smiled reflexively the way she did when people made eye contact, said, "Sorry, I couldn't help noticing — are you Elowen Harlow? The illustrator?"

She was.

He had read her webcomic. He was genuinely enthusiastic about it — he cited specific chapters, referenced emotional beats she was proud of, asked the kinds of questions that indicated he had paid attention rather than simply consumed. She spoke with him for ten minutes while they waited for their respective orders and then he offered, carefully and with visible uncertainty, his business card.

"No pressure," he said. "I just — if you'd ever want to have coffee and talk about it more. I'm harmless, I promise."

She took the card.

His name was James Hollis. A graphic novelist, apparently. She'd heard of his work.

She walked home feeling the particular pleasant ambivalence of someone who had been noticed in a good-faith way and didn't know what to do with it.

She did not tell Lucien about the card.

She put it in the kitchen drawer.

Twenty-four hours later she was sitting on his couch and he said, without preamble, "You met someone at the café yesterday."

She looked at him.

"Define met," she said.

His expression was perfectly composed.

"You spoke with a man for approximately ten minutes while waiting for your order. You both smiled. He gave you something. A card, I assume."

She sat very still.

"You saw," she said.

"I was passing."

"You were—" She stopped. "On which side of the street?"

A pause.

"Across," he said.

She looked at him.

He looked back.

"You watched us," she said.

"I noticed," he corrected. "I was not—" A pause. "I became attentive when I saw him speak to you."

"Lucien."

"He was leaning," Lucien said, and there was something very controlled in his voice that she had learned to read as an emotion being managed rather than absent.

"He was having a conversation," she said. "In a café."

"He was interested in you."

"He was interested in my work."

"Both." His jaw was perfectly set. "He was interested in both."

She looked at him for a long moment.

"Are you jealous?" she asked.

"I don't experience jealousy."

"You are absolutely experiencing jealousy right now."

A silence.

"I experience," he said, with careful precision, "a significant preference that other men do not position themselves as possibilities in your life."

She stared at him.

"That is," she said, "the most INTJ sentence you have ever said to me."

Something flickered in his expression.

"It's accurate," he said.

"Lucien." She turned toward him on the couch. "I put the card in a drawer and forgot about it. Immediately."

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't have to." She held his gaze. "I wanted to."

He looked at her.

"Why?" he asked, very quietly.

She held his gaze.

"Because I'm not looking for a possibility," she said. "I have very specific ideas about what I want, and they are not vague."

The room was very quiet.

His eyes were doing the thing she had named internally as the becoming unguarded — that infinitesimal softening, the controlled composure loosening just enough to let her see something underneath it that was real and vast and not quite safe.

"You're going to make me say it," she said, half to herself.

"I'm not going to make you do anything," he said.

"No, but you're going to sit there being exactly yourself, and eventually that's going to amount to the same thing."

He said nothing.

She looked at him.

"I like you," she said. "More than I was planning to. Much more than is probably sensible." She watched his face. "And I think you know that."

"Yes," he said.

"Then the café was nothing to worry about."

"I know that," he said. "Intellectually."

"And emotionally?"

He looked away briefly.

"Emotionally," he said, "I find it difficult to watch other people occupy your attention."

She leaned slightly toward him.

"Then occupy it yourself," she said.

He turned back to look at her.

She was sitting close enough that she could see the exact moment the composure stopped managing and simply stayed.

He reached over and rested his hand on top of hers on the cushion between them.

Warm. Still. There.

She turned her hand so their fingers were interlaced.

He looked down at their hands.

She looked at his face.

"Better?" she asked.

He exhaled.

"Yes," he said, and the word carried everything.