It was evening, when we arrived at our kitchen — clay walls, a wooden table, two cups and a pot. The table had a gouge near the edge where Wei had dropped a blade during an indoor demonstration I had not sanctioned and that he had conducted anyway.

  He stood while I sat.

  "The Iron Lotus guy."

  The opening move of a conversation he'd been assembling on the walk home — two hours of silence used as preparation.

  I looked up. He knew I'd heard everything. And he knew that I knew he knew. The pretense of informing had been skipped, which meant this was something else. A request for permission. Permission to discuss. Permission to take it seriously.

  "His word was 'wasted,'" I said.

  "It's the word he used."

  Silence. A conversation happening in two registers — the audible one, in which information was being exchanged and the sub-audible one, in which something much larger was moving between us. Tectonic and slow.

  "They offer real training. Real masters. Not just—"

  Stolen novel; please report.

  He stopped.

  The air changed — the pressure of the unsaid, the shape of the absent syllable that existed in his mouth and that he chose, at the last possible moment, not to release.

  Guidance by you.

  Three words. One pronoun. The pronoun that was me — the acquaintance, the teacher, the whatever-I-was that had no title because titles were for relationships that had definitions and ours had none. The absence was intentional. The intention was mine. And I was now paying for it.

  "What," I said. Flat.

  He looked at the table. The gouge.

  "They offer training," he said. Quietly. "That's all I'm saying."

  I nodded without saying anything.

  He looked at me. Fourteen. Brown eyes. Reading me the way he read everything — quickly, accurately, with the instinct from months of proximity to someone whose emotions were expressed in micro-adjustments rather than statements.

  "Are you angry?"

  "No."

  "You're something."

  True. I was something. Not yet named. Not in this kitchen.

  "I'm drinking tea," I said.

  He almost smiled. He knew I was deflecting and he knew why and he was going to let me.

  "Okay," he said, sat down and poured himself tea. He drank, looked at the table, then at me, then at the table again.

  "I'm not going," he said. "I'm just — I'm telling you."

  "I know."

  "You always know."

  "Not always."

  He stood, stretched and went to his room.

  I sat in the kitchen with the table and the gouge and the tea — cold, because — and the chrysanthemum sitting unused on the counter in a paper bag.

  Not just you.

  I heard it. In the quiet. In the kitchen at night where nothing happened and everything was about to.

  I drank my tea. The cold version. The only version.