Akira's POV
Sena found me at the usual table. It had become the usual table without either of us deciding it would be. Third from the left, near the window, the one with the slightly uneven leg that rocked if you put weight on the wrong corner and which neither of us had mentioned to building maintenance because by this point it was simply a feature of the location.
She sat across from me and put her tray down and looked at me.
She did this sometimes… arrived with something to say and let the silence do the preliminary work before she got to it.
Sort of like the way you set a table before serving the meal. I had learned to let the silence run rather than filling it, because filling it before she was ready produced the impatient look she reserved for conversational impatience.
And that was different from her other impatience acts and marginally less comfortable to receive.
So I waited.
She stared at me for what felt like a long time.
"Kael Vixar?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
