Cheon looked at me for a long moment.
Then she stood up off the stool, took two steps, and kissed me.
She did it the way she did everything, like she'd budgeted the seconds in advance, and then about three seconds in the budget went out the window and her hands were fisted in my shirt and the drain opened wide and her Essentia came through the way it always did, honey over live wire, that impossible combination of order and voltage that meant Cheon Hae-Won.
She pulled back with her face flushed to the throat.
"That was not scheduled," she said.
"No."
"I don't know why I did that."
"You do."
"I'm going to note it as an outlier."
"Cheon."
"An unrepeatable outlier."
"Your ears are red."
"That's a thermal response to external stimuli and it means nothing of consequence," she said with exacting precision. She picked up her tablet, aligned the edge perfectly perpendicular to the counter, and walked directly into the doorframe on her way out of the kitchen.
