“I do,” he said. “And how would you know if they are the right one to merge with?”
“I would… know after studying him.”
He had to grin, loving her answer. “What would this studying involve?”
“Mannerisms.”
“Mannerisms,” he said.
She nodded at the swamp, her leg swinging over the arm of the chair as she rocked.
“What kind exactly?”
She looked at him. “Like how he rocks in a rocking chair.” Her eyes lowered over him. “You don’t rock.”
“And what does this tell you about me?”
“That you keep everything in your tight fist,” she said, demonstrating with her balled up hand. A stated fact. No emotion.
“Dead on correct,” he said, needing to know how she felt about that.
“The testing required would behowcontrolling—the type, and amount.”
“And how would you test that?”
“Same way,” she airily explained. “Watching.”
“And what else do I do or don’t do that allows you to measure my control?” he tested back.
“You don’t let yourself look at the things you want to. Not properly.”
Fuck, she was good.
She added, “And the things you don’t look at the most are the ones youwantto look at the most. The real testing requires me to understand why you feel the need to not look at the thing you want to look at the most.”
“I actually know the answer to that.”
“Of course you do,” she said simply. “It’s all in your tight fist. Especially yourself. Which is admirable,” she casually surmised.
“Unless I’m a deviant.”
“Well, I wasn’t measuring the virtue in that strength, just the strength. You could surely be an admirably controlling deviant.”
He looked at her, hearing it in her tone. “And somehow you know I’m not.”
She nodded and gave a half smile, leaning on the arm of her chair near his. “It is a conundrum,” she said. “In this conundrum, two things are wrong but not in the same way and two things are right but not in the same way.”
He couldn’t remove his eyes from her.
“You want me to explain,” she said, reading him like an open book.
“I do.”
She went back to fully rocking and swinging her leg. He realized it was the accelerator on her logic. “Something is wrong to you but right to me. And something is right to you but wrong to me. And both are true but not when they’re in the same room. That’s the asymmetry of it.”
Fuck me royally.
“We’re not testing a truth here,” she informed, “we’re just expanding it. I would need to test and understand how your theory is right and should you want to expand your truth, you’d have to do the same with mine.”